William S Burroughs on writing and cut-ups
Chance and random elements often jog our creativity. That’s why many writers who have writer’s block Google ‘story generators’ or ‘writing prompts’. The American author William S. Burroughs would take a text and cut it into strips of individual words and phrases, then rearrange them at random to create new sentences.
Aleatory (using chance and random elements to find new ideas) techniques have yielded interesting results throughout literary history. The French group of writers, OuLiPo, used made up constraints to write inventive novels. For example, Georges Perec wrote his novel La Disparation without using the letter ‘e’ (the most common in the French language). This constraint forced the author to find ideas and phrases beyond habit.
Task:
Get an old, battered second-hand book. Cut up a few pages into strips of words and phrases with a pair of scissors. Jumble these up and place some at random on a page (or choose your options more carefully). Does a line or phrase (or strange pairing) spark a story idea? Do a load.
Bring in your stuck down lines of inspiration and evidence of at least one that has been developed into an interesting story idea.
Use the 5W's to help develop your ideas fully.
Deadline: Start of the lesson, Tuesday 11th December
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