My collage-writing process

#thought #seedling

My collage-writing process begins with collecting. I collect phrases and quotes from everywhere (books, articles, newsletters, or conversations). Quotes I found from a book or article are kept in that material's literature notes under a subsection called "Quotes." Quotes I find elsewhere go to the quotes section of my daily note. To help with retrieval, I tag each quote with its species and themes.

To use these quotes later for a work I'm developing, I do any of the following retrieval processes:

  1. I type the relevant tags (e.g., the tag "quote" and the specific tag for a theme I'm looking for).
  2. I do the above but browse until something surprising jumps to me.
  3. I set a constraints (e.g., only quotes from a certain book or images). Again, tags are helpful here.

Collage-writing strategies

Once I've retrieved the quotes I want to use, here are some strategies for collage writing.

  1. Using digital algorithms, I mashup the texts together.
  2. Hybrid drafting: I use quotes as skeleton or scaffolding for original writing.
  3. Build poems by pulling 3-5 random quotes and writing between them.
  4. Use quotes as titles, last lines, or stanza breaks.
  5. Use a quote as a constraint: only use words from it (erasure style).
  6. Let quotes “speak” to each other—curate a back-and-forth conversation across time and authors.
  7. Grab one quote from a childhood book.
  8. Find a line with a color in it.
  9. Use a quote with a contradiction.
  10. Use two quotes and write a response.
  11. Use a quote from someone you disagree with.
  12. Erase all but 7 words from a quote—use those.

Writers who use collage