The title reminds readers well-versed in the Bible of Isaiah 2:4, "swords into plowshares," and this was my problem during the recent ZOOM meeting of the Freiburg Writers' Group.
Indeed, the topic of the evening was "Revision as an act of violence,"
i.e., in the worse case, breaking an existing oeuvre into pieces and using
these as building blocks for a new creation.
How do you "break" a text? The possibilities of "breaking" a text are endless.
Here are a few examples proposed by our master of ceremonies:
cut it up à la Burroughs
delete every xth word
n+7 (replace every noun with the noun that comes seven places after the original noun in the dictionary)
retype the whole text/single sentences/single lines backward
switch perspectives
change the setting
change the tense
insert new words, new sentences, new paragraphs, new pages, non-sequiturs footnotes endnotes bifurcations, interpolations endlessly nested parentheticals
anagram it
again mart
Maria gnat
Most participants took one of their poems, omitted words, starting from the end, or even took the existing words, mixing them into a new text and eventually worrying about what to do with the remaining unused words.
While all others worked hard, Red Baron desperately browsed through his 787 blogs, looking for a short contribution that lent itself to be "broken."
When the time was up, I was astonished by what I had written in the past but concluded that non-fiction does not allow modifications, or should I try to transform non-fiction into fake?
During the following discussion, the idea was born to revise a non-fiction text into fiction or, as proposed, "switch perspectives."
Here is a short section that I took from one of my blogs in 2015: Deutscher Wald. There I made some excursion into the reoccurring plots of German fairy tales concerning German woods and then started a new paragraph: :
Enough of those atavistic reflections. Instead, let me dig into the BZ article: The trees and we. I learned that German attachment to their woods dates back to the Middle Ages when arable farmland was scarce and generally insufficient to feed families with many children, given the poor agricultural yield in those times. There was no room for pastureland; thus, farmers drove horses, cows, and pigs into the woods to look for their food. Those pigs were particularly happy. They ate acorns and beechnuts for lunch, dug for cockchafer grubs for dinner, and closed their meals with truffles.
While the Grimm brothers had left Hansel and Gretel hungry in the woods, my "stroppy" fiction goes like this:
Hansel and Gretel's stomachs growled as they marched in the woods. The boy started to weep. "Get hold of yourself," Gretel snarled at her brother, "The pebbles you took from home we cannot eat, but there is plenty of food in the woods."
She gave a pig digging for truffles a beating with her stick. Squeaking, the saw took to her heels. Gretel bent for the black tuber, and her eyes started to glow, weighing it in one hand.
"I can't eat this, " whined Hansel. "You fool," retorted his sister, "We will become rich selling truffles. Let those pigs work for us," and ordered poor Hansel to run after them.
And he ran happily after the pigs, ever after.
cut it up à la Burroughs
delete every xth word
n+7 (replace every noun with the noun that comes seven places after the original noun in the dictionary)
retype the whole text/single sentences/single lines backward
switch perspectives
change the setting
change the tense
insert new words, new sentences, new paragraphs, new pages, non-sequiturs footnotes endnotes bifurcations, interpolations endlessly nested parentheticals
anagram it
again mart
Maria gnat
Most participants took one of their poems, omitted words, starting from the end, or even took the existing words, mixing them into a new text and eventually worrying about what to do with the remaining unused words.
While all others worked hard, Red Baron desperately browsed through his 787 blogs, looking for a short contribution that lent itself to be "broken."
When the time was up, I was astonished by what I had written in the past but concluded that non-fiction does not allow modifications, or should I try to transform non-fiction into fake?
During the following discussion, the idea was born to revise a non-fiction text into fiction or, as proposed, "switch perspectives."
Here is a short section that I took from one of my blogs in 2015: Deutscher Wald. There I made some excursion into the reoccurring plots of German fairy tales concerning German woods and then started a new paragraph: :
Enough of those atavistic reflections. Instead, let me dig into the BZ article: The trees and we. I learned that German attachment to their woods dates back to the Middle Ages when arable farmland was scarce and generally insufficient to feed families with many children, given the poor agricultural yield in those times. There was no room for pastureland; thus, farmers drove horses, cows, and pigs into the woods to look for their food. Those pigs were particularly happy. They ate acorns and beechnuts for lunch, dug for cockchafer grubs for dinner, and closed their meals with truffles.
While the Grimm brothers had left Hansel and Gretel hungry in the woods, my "stroppy" fiction goes like this:
Hansel and Gretel's stomachs growled as they marched in the woods. The boy started to weep. "Get hold of yourself," Gretel snarled at her brother, "The pebbles you took from home we cannot eat, but there is plenty of food in the woods."
She gave a pig digging for truffles a beating with her stick. Squeaking, the saw took to her heels. Gretel bent for the black tuber, and her eyes started to glow, weighing it in one hand.
"I can't eat this, " whined Hansel. "You fool," retorted his sister, "We will become rich selling truffles. Let those pigs work for us," and ordered poor Hansel to run after them.
And he ran happily after the pigs, ever after.
*
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