a range of possibilities, and there is no right or wrong way to design the
collage. If you want to explore alternatives, you can always photocopy
the pieces and try a number of alternative arrangements.
6. The paste-up may turn out to be a complete work in itself and you may
want to stop there. Or it may seem to you to be somewhat preliminary.
Whichever, try next rewriting your collage as prose or poetry (Exercise 1b).
You may find you can follow the order of the texts as they appear in the
collage, or you may have to radically rearrange them. The spatial design may
suggest a structure for the page: texts at the edges of the collage, for example,
might be used to frame the beginning or end of a poem or narrative. Don’t
be afraid to transform the piece, editing out or adding in words, or even
whole sections. In some cases you may work close to the original material;
in other cases you may move a considerable distance from it. On occasion,
you may even return to texts that you excluded from the original paste-up!
When you are writing up the collage, you can play various ‘tricks’ with
it. Try, for example, reading and writing horizontally across two separate
pieces of text which are placed side by side, and see what happens, or
try doing this through the whole collage. Overall, remain open to new
possibilities. Do not worry if the rewritten collage does not always make
‘sense’ in the normal way. This may be productive, because it means you
are opening yourself to new directions and types of meaning.
At the end of this exercise you should have two collages—the original
and the rewritten one—and you can decide which one is more striking.
One kind of approach to collage is not better than the other, but may be
more effective for you.
You may want to use collage techniques strictly in your writing. But you
may also decide to use them loosely or partially, so that, for example, only
a fraction of a text is conceived in this way. Or you may activate a collage
technique to start off a text and then deviate from it very substantially, so
that the original sources are largely discarded. While some writers do
employ a ‘pure’ collage technique, others approach collage much more
loosely: we might call this ‘applied’ collage. In fact, when you hear or read
phrases and then draw them into your writing, you are using an applied
collage technique, without being fully aware of it.
SHAKING THE (FOUND)ATIONS
Another mode of recycling is to create a text from ‘found’ material
(Exercise 2). A found text is a pre-existent piece of writing with a non-
74 The Writing Experiment