Writing Process

This project has been one of the first times that I've made the content that I'm responding too. It was quite a daunting feat, especially putting my writing out which felt like quite a vulnerable and scary task. But I'm so glad I did. Its been a really rewarding experience watching these stories evolve in my head and through my sketchbooks and knowing the research that took place in order for them to be born.

The original idea to write folk inspired tales about the weather, came from a sketch about someone holding the wind, and the whole thing unravelled from there, through drawing and thinking and drawing as thinking.

I settled on writing 4 stories each about different types of weather, and how they came to be.
 (Folk tales are often used as vehicles to explain / make sense of a phenomena, a lot of the time something natural : eg, how did that hill get there? ah yes because a giant threw a lump of Wales)
My 4 stories all existed within the same world, and each led onto the next - happening in layers
Rain (underground)
Wind (on land and in the sky)
Thunder (on the clouds)
Sun (at the top of the sky)

I decided to make each story be limited to being told in 10 parts (originally 10 sentences - but this evolved into 10 poems).


Writing my stories happened in 4 phases:

1. Figured out the timeline of stories through sketchbooking - story forming happens in the first 3 sketchbook - link

2. Started making poems using technique of cut outs

3. Moulded together by cut poems and my own words to fit to my story ideas

4. Made sense of the final words


Poems:

Following on from reading Vladimir Propp's Theory & History of Folklore, and Morphology of Folklore - it was increasingly apparent that folk tales are a culmination of many voices - you cannot trace them back to one single individual - they exist as a product of oral history of the community. When creating my own folktale inspired stories I wanted to echo this tradition and importance by making some poems using the dadaist cut up technique popularised by William Burroughs. I chopped up interesting words and phrases from a few different magazines and constructed new poems by stitching them together - they were made with the ideas and themes of the stories in mind, but not constrained by them - more of an exercise with words - words as creation.
 Hopefully echoing the idea that the words of the stories can't be traced back to a single individual, but rather multiple untraceable voices mixed together





Mixing and stitching my own words in too:

After I had both the framework of the timeline of my stories, and the cut up poems - I started to weave sections of the poems into the lines of the stories - extracting and adding and knitting in my own voice. Each page of the book had what was happening in that line of the story written at the top and then acted like a brain dump for me to pop in different poems and ideas and words, collaging my own voice with the voices of others



Working out the final words:

This is where I started to be decisive and form what I wanted the final poems and stories to be. I was keeping in mind my idea about the rhythm and cadence of the poems echoing the weather they were explaining - but this was quite difficult - I think it was most successful in the thunder poem.
It took a while for me to commit to taking the leap of faith and actually writing down what I wanted the final words to be , leaving the comfort of the brain dump story making sketchbook.




LINK TO BLOG POST WITH FINAL POEMS / STORY WRITTEN AND SPOKEN