66 The Writing Experiment
through newspapers, articles or novels and use them as a springboard,
jotting down striking phrases here or there. In fact this happens to most
writers, both consciously and unconsciously: while they are reading a
book, a striking phrase stimulates them to write, either at that moment or
subsequently. However, when you are recycling texts you need to fully
acknowledge your sources so that it is clear you are not plagiarising the
work of others.
There are a number of strategies for recycling texts, including making
collages, discovering found texts, and rewriting classic fictions from
another point of view. There are also numerous extensions of, and varia-
tions upon, these techniques. For example, there is a process known as
‘writing through’ which has been explored extensively by the American
poet Jackson Mac Low. It involves using one text as a ‘core’, and taking
words from it on a systematic basis (say every fifth word) to form another
piece of writing: Mac Low uses this kind of approach in The Virgina Woolf
Poems (1985). This volume is a ‘writing through’ of Woolf ’s novel The
Wav e s (though the original novel is hardly recognisable from Mac Low’s
text). Another intriguing example is A Humument : A Treated Victorian
Novel by British artist Tom Phillips (1980), which is a makeover of a
Victorian novel by William Mallock called A Human Document. Phillips
transformed the novel by painting over large sections of each page. But he
allowed rivulets of words to remain: these convey very different meanings
from the ones they would produce in their original context. In the process
Phillips creates another novel which is superimposed on Mallock’s. The
central character is Bill Toge (the name Toge is made out of the words
‘together’ and ‘altogether’ when they appear in Mallock’s novel).
All these techniques, to a greater or lesser extent, overlap. We will
concentrate on three: collage, found texts and the rewriting of a classic
text.
exercises
- a) Make a collage by cutting and pasting texts with scissors and
glue.
b) Rewrite the collage as a poem or other kind of creative
text. - Create a found text.
- Rewrite a classic text, fairytale or myth from a contemporary
point of view.