structure

[note #33]

Friends,

This is a collage I made a few years ago. Its title is They Are Falling All Around Me.

With collage, I give myself a few rules when making them. One is the structure—I allow myself three images, overlapping, either rotating clockwise or counter-clockwise (this one is clockwise, so it’s moving forward in time). Sometimes I break my rules, as in this one, where a fourth image jumps in. I find this idea of structure translates to my writing as well. The rule of three. Three creates tension, five creates chaos. If I want to mirror chaos I might go with five. More than five, you might lose me.

I ran a writing workshop last week with some amazing writers. For our last exercise I had them try to imagine a possible structure for their project, to break it down into a few sections (I suggested three, but no more than five). I did this because many of us get overwhelmed by the amount of material we have produced…even over the course of this past week we each generated another twenty pages or so…