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The main idea here is very simple: don't start cold. Don't start with a blank sheet of paper. Build up some materials to begin with.
As long as it doesn't breach copyright (and I leave to you the responsibility of researching copyright at your leisure - it's a subject this website doesn't deal with) a little judicious sampling (a word here or there) is legitimate, and there are some files on this website which you are free to sample, borrowing a word here or a word there as you see fit, starting with: lucky dip sheet 1 Don't start cold. That's the main idea. Now let's elaborate it. To start where we are going to finish, here is the full set of rules:- 1. Don't start cold. Gather materials first. 2. If you're still stuck, gather more materials. 3. Try juxtaposing disparate materials and see what happens. 4. Don't worry if the result doesn't quite work. This won't compromise your chances of winning the Nobel Peace Prize. The piece may function better when you rework it tomorrow (or rework it ten years down the track, as the case may be.) 5. Try opposites and contrasts. The first rule is very simple. First get some words. When I taught a writing lesson at an junior high school in Japan, the first thing I did was get the kids to come up with some words. The topic was going to be a trip into the wilderness (the kids had recently made just such a trip to a forested mountain area) so I started by handing out photocopies of appropriate scenery and getting the kids to come up with words, which I wrote up on the chalkboard as the kids produced them. One kid promptly came up with the word "UFO". When I looked at the photocopy he was working from, sure enough, the process of enlarging a tiny original to make the large photocopy version had resulted in the production of a flaw which looked like a very convincing UFO high over the mountains. The photo method is one way of starting to build up a word base, and I recommend it for educational purposes. If you use photos you took yourself then you don't have any copyright problems, and if you hand out expendable photocopies then you don't have to be worried about the fact that the first thing some of these kids are going to do is scribble on the pictures they've been given. (Some of the kids I taught were, in fact, in the habit of scribbling on the classroom walls themselves, if that's what they felt like.) You might like to keep the picture method in mind. If you want to use it yourself, you might like to take a notebook along on your next trip to a museum, an art gallery, a trade show or wherever else it is that your eyes get feasted. That's all I'm going to say here about the use of visual inputs. The method outlined below is based on exploiting existing texts produced by someone else, and to use the method legitimately it's necessary to understand the difference between sampling a couple of random words and stealing a chunk of coherent text. As a teacher (a teacher, at times, of kids who draw not just on their desks but on the classroom walls) I wouldn't introduce my students to the risky notion of sampling other people's texts. Rather, if I wanted some word samples to work with in the classroom, I'd sample the words myself, for example "fruit and vegetables" (taken from a corporate handout containing health information), "for a prompt replacement" (taken from the label on a honey container) and "reproduced with the" (taken from a poster showing the family tree of the British royal family). Then I'd give the kids the broken words, not the original texts. In summary, then, thinking safety first, in an educational context don't, as a teacher, run the risk of getting your students to sample other people's texts, because there's no telling what kind of radioactive territory they're going to end up in. That said, it's legitimate for a writer (a disciplined writer who knows what he or she is doing) to be open to inputs from the world outside the sealed container of the self. Let's introduce, now, Robert Lowell. Because I'm going to quote from him. And, because I had only a vague idea of who he was, and wasn't even sure if he was still alive, it's reasonable to assume that there are other people in the same situation. The individual in question is Robert Traill Spence Jr., born in 1917 and dead, it seems, in 1977, a noted American poet (noted enough for me to have been aware of his existence, in an ignorant way, for decades), and the author of a number of books, including Lord Weary's Castle and a book of poetry published with the title Notebook. With the introduction done, I'll quote here from Robert Lowell, from the "Afterthought" to "Notebook". The quote is from page 263 of the edition reprinted in 1971 by Faber & Faber, and says: |
I have taken from many books, used the throwaway conversational inspirations of my friends, and much more that I idly spoke to myself. I have no wish to sleuth down my plagiarisms, but want to say that 'Hell' is taken from two paragraphs of Glenn Gray's 'The Warrior'; ideas and expressions in 'Half a Century Gone' come from Simone Weil; ideas and expressions in 'Obit' and another poem, from Herbert Marcuse. |
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Obviously, Robert Lowell's high standing as a writer flows from the "much more" of his own autonomous input, rather than from his borrowings. Equally obviously, however, like most writers he uses a magpie method: collecting the occasional conversational trinket and the like.
A possible way of reading Lowell's statement "I have no wish to sleuth down my plagiarisms" would be to say that it means something like this:- "I freely admit that I'm influenced, at times, by other people, and I'd be a lesser writer if I wasn't up to the challenge of responding to influence and of expanding my work to accomodate it, and, being conscious of the essential strength and originality of my work, I feel no need to go and nail myself to a crucifix on account of my borrowings." In submitting to influence, central or peripheral, the trick is to be inspired and influenced into the construction of the genuinely new. And, as indicated above, I wouldn't risk having a bunch of my students (of whatever age or level of maturity) fooling around in this territory, just as I wouldn't have them making bombs. (I make this point because I get e-mail and search term hits which demonstrate that this website interacts with the educational world, and I can pretty sure that at least some of the visitors to this website are going to be teachers, some of them perhaps as inexperienced as I was when I first started teaching in Japan.) Being clear, then, that the method outlined on this page is intended for private experiment, and is most definitely not intended for educational use, let's elaborate. Let's take a line of poetry:- The geometry of alcohol. (Problem! No first line of poetry! How do you start if you can't get started? Well, you could always try dipping into one of the word lists on this site, choosing five or six words at random, then shoving them around, adding whatever you can find by way of glue and cement and expanders, until they make some kind of sense.) As noted above, the first of the word list files is:- lucky dip sheet 1 So, we have a line of poetry to start with. Now, what we can do with it? Well, we can add an additional word, a trigger word to be used to inspire further inputs. A word, for example, likie "moon". And then see what words we can add to the added word. Hint: if the explosion of a trigger word is followed by consequences which are too obvious, then the result tends to be boredom. For example, if the trigger word is "moon" then the obvious following words include night, wind, cold, white, star, comet, frail, shadow, condom, sploogleezy, axlegrease, esophagus, astrabatus and methotrexate. Resulting in boring, predictable, overstereotyped poetry, like the following:- Moon, white as baking soda, Cold as a scorpion's vomit, Silent in fourth gear. We take no photographs. As the chicken's opera outruns the coyote, We kiss. Defying the breathalyzer, The frail shadow Drinks white wine In the shadow of the comet's wind Thereby breaching the penguin's parole. I will love her forever, Or at least until the paper bag wears out. This poem would become less predictable (and so more interesting) if we added in some non-obvious words, which we could get by the simple process of scanning the front page of today's newspaper, which gives us (actually, I've chosen the WORLD section rather than the front page):-
I don't think anyone's lawyers are going to worry about me borrowing either "Syria quits Lebanon" or "injured her legs". My basis for being confident in thinking this is that I believe that I know a reasonable amount (as much as I need to for the purposes of pursuing my activities as a writer) about the law of copyright. If by chance you haven't yet researched the subject of copyright then now would be a good time to start, but, because copyright is a complex area which is subject to changes, I'm not going to take on the responsibility of trying to explain it. Just to restate what has already been stated above:-
If you're squeamish about this process - if you're worried that you might get thrown into jail for stealing the first word from a newspaper headline, a word like "ex-commissioner" or "why" or "couple's" or "surrogate" - then you can sidestep danger by dipping into the word list files which are on this site, five of them, starting with "luck dip sheet 1". lucky dip sheet 1 Anyway, by now the procedure should be clear. If you have a line of poetry to start with, of if you haven't even got that far yet, then move the process on by making a list of words. If you're suitably sensitive to copyright issues, proprietary claims to bits and pieces of language and, also, to privacy issues (these are relevant when you're dealing with "the throwaway conversational inspirations", and I've been bearing such issues in mind when I've been lying in bed in a cancer ward, listening, notebook in hand, to the uncensored conversations that other patients have been having with their families) then you can benefit from the process of being a real live human being living in a real live world, as opposed to being an inert ballpoint pen squatting on the silence of a blank piece of paper, waiting for somethikng to happen. Use whatever resources come to hand. Advertizing hoardings, dollar bills, children's arguments, televized terror alert warnings - there are plenty of sources once you start looking around. Making that list of words is going to be more productive than sitting staring at a blank sheet of paper. Don't start with a blank sheet of paper! Don't let yourself get caught in that position! Hint: stop today at a point when you know what the next step in the construction of your work of the moment is going to be. Then, tomorrow, you already have a starting point. You start the working day with momentum. So, we have some words. We have a list. In fact, at this stage we have something in the way of a poem, which, to reprise, is as follows: Moon, white as baking soda, Cold as a scorpion's vomit, Silent in fourth gear. We take no photographs. As the chicken's opera outruns the coyote, We kiss. Defying the breathalyzer, The frail shadow Drinks white wine In the shadow of the comet's wind Thereby breaching the penguin's parole. I will love her forever, Or at least until the paper bag wears out. Now, opening the Holy Bible at random and putting my finger down on the page without looking, I find I have landed on Leviticus Chapter 15 verse 8, which reads: "And if he that hath the issue spit upon him that is clean; then he shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even." (This section of the Holy Bible looks as it has potential. Chapter 14 is about leprosy, or, to use the politically correct term of the modern age, Hansen's disease, while chapter 15 gets into the subject of copulation, saying - verse 18 - "The woman with whom man shall lie with seed of copulation, they shall both bathe themselves in water, and be unclean until the even.") If you don't have a copy of the Holy Bible then you can, for the purposes of this exercise, substitute a cookery book, a novel by Charles Dickens or a guide to computer hacking. Warning: taking a word or two isn't likely to lead anyone into the sinful slough of plagiarism, but if you end up with stolen sentences in your work (or even stolen half sentences) then you need aesthetic counseling. (And maybe electroshock therapy, too. And, in the worst case, a lawyer.) Let's be clear about this. Suppose I take a chunk from the Ian McEwan novel "Saturday" and plug it into my own work, as follows, then that's plagiarism. Example of plagiarism, assuming that I steal the following and plug it into my own novel:- |
To go in right through the face, remove the tumour through the nose, to deliver the patient back into her life, without pain or infection, with her vision restored was a miracle of human ingenuity. Almost a century of failure and partial success lay behind this one procedure, of other routes tried and rejected, and decades of fresh invention to make it possible, including the microscope and fibre optic lighting.
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Under the doctrine of fair use, I could reasonably quote that much (properly acknowledged - it comes from pages 43-45 of the 2005 Jonathan Cape edition of the novel) in the process of reviewing the book (as a novel it's a bit slow, if you ask me, with nobody killed on the first page, but it does do an interesting job of weaving together a number of contemporary concerns, for example Alzheimer's and terrorism, against the nuanced background of the dynamics of a family.)
Respectfully quoting is one thing. However, if I stole that passage and plugged it into one of my own novels, and tried to pass it off as my own work, then I'd get caught, disgraced and maybe penalized (boiled in oil, sent to the galleys, exiled to Iraq - who knows?) But I could get away with borrowing "human ingenuity" (with all respect to the source, it's a generic combination) and I don't think anyone could complain if I took "back into her life", combining these with something I've written to make, for example:- Escaping from the methotrexate ward She limps back into her life, Her hair defoliating, Her pearls unstrung. Moon, white as baking soda, Cold as a scorpion's vomit, Silent in fourth gear, We push for the baklava moment, Our mute endeavor Defiant of the vampire, Proof of human ingenuity. We take no photographs. Rather, As the chicken's opera outruns the coyote, We kiss. Defying the breathalyzer, The frail shadow Drinks white wine In the shadow of the comet's wind Thereby breaching the penguin's parole. I will love her forever, Or at least until the paper bag wears out. It's a sin to copy but it's not a sin to be inspired. If you flagrantly copy, say, a line from Shakespeare, like "Mistress, what's your opinion of your sister?" then everyone is going to pick up on the fact that you don't have the talent to originate anything so remarkable, and you can expect to get caught and humiliated. But if you're staring at a blank sheet of paper and can't get started, then feel free to be inspired by Shakespeare and write down the word "opinion". And if you then added, from McEwan's text, the word "procedure", then you'd have two words, and the basis for an original start, for example:- The doctor's opinion of the procedure Is that it is necessary to save her life. However, she experiences it as living death. Escaping from the methotrexate ward She limps back into her life, Her hair defoliating, [etc] Hint (aimed at helping the writer to avoid very expensive lawsuits): be particularly careful not to risk any identifiable "taking a few words" exercise with song lyrics, unless they're definitely out of copyright, like the works of Stephen Foster (1826-1864, “Camptown Races” and so forth.) Song lyrics are commercially sensitive properties, and your borrowings are likely to be painfully obvious. By contrast, nobody is likely to notice where I got "and evenly toothed", "at any time of the year", "to commence flowering", "Latinized form", "result from multiple plantings" and "space to develop" - all, as it happens, from the 1990 edition of Palmers Manual of Trees, Shrubs & Climbers. Having put together a reservoir of language, we can now do something with our poem, which so far (having been revised a bit) looks like this:- The geometry of alcohol. ... moon ... Perhaps: The unclean princess Bruised by multiple plantings, Cannot commence flowering. Not yet. She is too sober. But is working on it. The geometry of alcohol Reshaping her world to its own. Later, The jeep chase of the drunken moon Distorts her. She bathes in the seed of copulation, Basted by harps; And evenly toothed and evenly paced The torturer's fork Punishes her disappointment: The man who fails. A theme is emerging: contamination, pollution, the impure, the unclean, the corrupt, the infected. With a little tinkering, this could become a poem about the ethics of product placement or the perils of an inadequately financed retirement. What else can we do with the poem? Tip: work with opposites, e.g. night/day, black/white, rich/poor. Tip: work with contrasts, e.g. cancer/icecream (a sad/happy contrast), beetroot/spaghetti (a "moral rectitude"/"polymorphous perversity" contrast), kangaroo/CEO (a "low Lear jet use"/"high Lear jet use" contrast). Think of opposites. What is the opposite of "alcohol"? Well, it doesn't have an opposite as such. So think of a contrast. Think of the line "The geometry of alcohol". Think of a contrast between "geometry" and "alcohol". The word "alcohol" suggests drunkenness, instability, fist fights, broken condoms. By contrast, the word "geometry" suggests the stability of the triangle and the nuanced accuracy of the bombardier's mathematics. Adding in some of the ideas above, plus the word "lecithin" (which I got off the back of a packet of chocolate - coincidentally, "lecithin" turns out to be a substance which can be dissolved in alcohol) we might get:- The explosion of thoughts Is not charged on the bill. It's a freebie. Deformed by a world without Lear jets The unclean princess, Bruised by multiple plantings, Her ethics Dissolving in lecithin, Cannot commence flowering. Not yet. She is too sober. But is working on it. The geometry of alcohol Warps her triangle open, Reshaping her world to its own. Skating down the asymptote She shrills with high use rapture. Her Syria spills from her Lebanon But she won't say sorry. "I wish it were a nightmare," says P.C. Plod. But it's not. It's his job. She proves to have diplomatic immunity. Later, Back at the embassy, The jeep chase of the drunken moon Washed from her shampooed hair, She leisures back in her tony blair, Its grin on high. She bathes in the seed of copulation, And evenly toothed and evenly paced The torturer's fork Punishes her disappointment: The man who fails. And what did I do to write the piece of poetry above, to pull together everything I know about grammar, vocabulary and poetic technique? Why, I went in for some heavy duty sleep deprivation. Some people, and I am one of them, find that creativity sometimes peaks during periods of sleep deprivation, during which the mind is bubbling with thoughts and ideas, more and more of the hard disk's contents having been activated and crammed into RAM with the passing of the sleepless hours. To write the poetry in this "How to write" file, I personally went to work on the task when lightheaded with fatigue in the aftermath of an experience which involved being incarcerated in a concrete building for five days by a group of people who, amongst other things, stabbed me with needles, interrogated me (I lost track of the number of times I got asked my date of birth) and systematically poisoned me. Yes, sleep deprivation works for some of us. But - warning! Sleep deprivation can kill! Driving while tired, like driving while drunk, is potentially fatal. Experiments with sleep deprivation are not recommended for people who are involved (either professionally or recreationally) in any of the following activities: driving, sky diving, tight rope walking, bomb making, brain surgery and computer programming. (This list is not exhaustive.) A. Have you gathered materials? If not, then start with that. Rule 1: Don't start cold. Gather materials first. Remember that on this site there are the lucky dip sheets. If you can't find anywhere else to start then you can start there. B. Are you still stuck? Rule 2: If you're still stuck, gather more materials. Tune the radio to a talkback show and write down the first three words you hear. C. Do you want to expand what you have? Rule 3: Try juxtaposing disparate materials and see what happens. Look at yesterday's materials and try combining half of those with half of today's. Look at some stuff you were working on seven years ago and see if you have a new perspective on it now. (If you don't have any stuff that's seven years old, don't worry. Time will cure this deficit, as long as you hang in there and keep plugging away.) D. Are you feeling unsatisfied with your workproduct? Rule 4: Don't worry if the result doesn't quite work. (This is an important rule!) Writing something that doesn't ring the bells of heaven won't compromise your chances of winning the Nobel Peace Prize. The piece may function better when you rework it tomorrow (or rework it ten years down the track, as the case may be.) Don't paralyze yourself thinking that everything you write has to be as good as Shakespeare. (Here's, while we're on the subject, coming up for the second time on this web page, is a Shakespeare sample: "Mistress, what's your opinion of your sister?" Source: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, Act 3, Scene 2, line 243 ... I don't think Shakespeare was overwhelmed by the strain of holding himself to the "genius" standard when he wrote it. Rather, he just slapped it down to fill in a hole, then pressed on with the next step.) 5. Try opposites and contrasts. And don't worry if nothing comes from the effort. Hard work pays off. Believe me. The intellectual equivalent of hammering your head against a brick wall results (eventually) in the ability to walk through the wall. If steps 1 through 5 didn't work for you, then go back to the beginning and repeat the process. If you want to try your hand at creative word sampling right now, below are the links to the five word sample files on this website. |
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