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INTRODUCTION
USING RECYCLED writing goes against the very ethos of the Blank Page. But sometimes you’ve got to do it. We all have pieces of writing - fragments we love, failed poetry and prose that we know could succeed, if only.
Here are some suggestions for recycling the work that you just can’t throw away. But before I get down to specifics, I want to make my position perfectly clear: I am uneasy.
I really believe in trusting the blank page. So advising writers to recycle old poetry and prose, in a column dedicated to starting from scratch, pains me. The whole idea of the blank page is that it is blank. The first words you put on the blank page are like magic, because they make something happen. It is like choosing a particular fork in the road. All of a sudden, there is movement. Something becomes possible. Something else becomes impossible. One word, line, sentence, verse, paragraph suggests the next. This strikes me as both beautiful and inevitable. Why look elsewhere?
And it seems generally unwise to use already problematic poetry or prose as the starting point for a new piece. Think yoghurt or sourdough bread. The starter is critical. Filling the tender blank page with old work (that isn’t working) can be downright dangerous.
Still want to go ahead? Okay. You’ve been warned.
Admittedly I, too, have a drawer full of interesting writing that I don’t know what to do with. A few years ago I taught an experimental workshop with the poet Gillian Allnutt. The class was a luxurious three hours in length, which meant that the women who attended had at least an hour in which to write.
Based on developing accidents and using risk-taking techniques, the idea was to get loose and produce the kind of pieces we wouldn’t normally come up with. It worked wonderfully well and the class is still running to this day.
One of the outcomes was that many of us evolved gorgeous fragments of poetry and prose that fit nowhere, led nowhere, and grieved us because we didn’t know what to do with them. Of course lots of pieces did develop naturally into finished poems and sustained prose. But there were always some that resisted - startling verses, crazy bright pages, like shells and shards. They drove me mad. I don’t know how the poets coped.
The prose writers, like me, attempted to shoehorn this writing into novels and short stories in progress. In most cases the results were a bit disastrous: prose hijacked, pace slowed.
Maybe you have old pieces like this, that are risky, stylish but directionless. Or maybe you’re trying to write something at the moment that just isn’t working; that seems dull or unfocussed. However, you remain stubbornly convinced of its value.
This conviction is a little like love.
For all of you hopelessly in love with a miserable (and divine) piece of writing, here are my recommendations. It’s an ecological approach to sharpen, excite, and reactivate waste. But remember: handle with care.
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EXERCISES
Waste not, want not
Start with a page of prose, or a single poem. Choose one of these re-cycling ideas. Only try one at a time.
#1
Write backwards
This means beginning a new piece with the last line of a poem, or the last paragraph of prose, and proceeding backwards: line by line, or paragraph by paragraph. Do not backtrack slavishly. It is only a starting point. The idea is to make good accidents happen. If the last prose paragraph makes a great opening paragraph, but working backwards from the rest is unsatisfactory, use your judgement and amend the technique as necessary.
#2
Take out every adjective and adverb
Another editing technique that can make the piece less lyrical, more concrete. The problem with adjectives and adverbs is that they fool the writer into thinking she is adequately describing something. Try putting the weight of your description on nouns and verbs instead.
#3
Switch adjectives around
This is fun to try. After you’ve removed your adjectives, put them back in front of different nouns. You can really liven up your work in this way. Predictable descriptions such as gnarled hands or silvery
moonlight, become intriguing and exciting as silvery hands and gnarled moonlight. Make accidents happen.
#4
Change viewpoint
Changing from I to he or she, or vice versa, can significantly change the tone of a piece, making it more intimate, or more distant; more intimate when the subject matter is distant, or more distant when the subject matter is intimate. (Viewpoint is an incredibly rich, often-neglected, element in writing. There will be a whole Blank Page devoted to the subject soon.) Changing viewpoint gives old writing new energy and often suggests a direction forward.
#5
Rewrite paradoxically
This final recommendation resulted in real excitement when I tried it in a Short Story Weekend Workshop recently. Change everything in your piece of writing to it’s approximate opposite. Fair-haired with a long pale face, she was a young woman who didn’t feel well, would become: Hairless, with a short dark face, he was an old man who felt fine. This technique helped prose writers re-envision, and in some cases create plot. It transformed nice bits of writing into viable pieces that could be sustained. It made us laugh too.
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