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| The Collage |
| A collage consists not of a single perfectly connected train of explicit thinking or narrative but rather of fragments: arranged how shall we say? -- poetically? intuitively? randomly? Without transitions or connectives. (On rare occasions the joints can be invisible.) When it works it is terrific. Indeed, there is often a deeper impact on readers because the collage invites them to create actively out of their own consciousness the vision which organizes those fragments-the sparks which cross those gaps. But when a collage doesn't work it seems merely opaque or annoying -- a lazy cop-out. Simple collage stories or poems or plays don't feel very odd to many readers now. Perhaps we get a glimpse of the main character in the subway in the morning; then a picture of his daydream as he takes part in a meeting at an oval table; then a dialogue with his wife over the dinner coffee; then an evocation of him brushing his teeth; then a piece of childhood experience as he is falling asleep. Much poetry and some fiction go farther. They don't just leave gaps in chronology, they abandon it. They arrange scenes, images, scraps of dialogue or meditation in an intuitive or associative order rather than logically or chronologically. Many writers and readers seem to have agreed that the goals which are served by clearly explained conventional narratives -- perhaps to convey a complex experience, a vision of the world, a sense of a person's life -- can also be achieved with fragments or pieces arranged differently. T. S. Eliot The Wasteland, to name a cultural landmark, is a collage. So too, obviously, is much modern poetry. Collage writing can be produced by careful planning from the start, but there's a much simpler way which is not out of place since the organization of a collage seems by its nature to invite intuition. First, do lots of raw writing; then look through it all to find the good bits; tighten and polish them to make them even better; and, finally, lay them out on the table or floor where you can see them all at once and find the best order for them. The heart of the matter is that instead of emphasizing unity and coherence and singleness as your principle of revising, your only rule is this: get rid of everything dead, keep everything alive. It's a great relief to stop trying for coherence and connectedness. So often you have these good pieces of writing and somehow they trick you into bad writing: you need a way to lead up to one of them, then ways to get from one to another, and finally a way to end the whole thing, and before you know it your whole piece of writing is weak and soggy. Some professional writers have learned to finesse this problem. Just stick with what is already good. Period. No faltering beginnings or sagging ends, no dead spots where you keep trying to make something work but it doesn't. It's a good way to write a biography, autobiography, or novel: a succession of live moments. It's surprising how much can be left out, how much need not be said. If your final piece has nothing in it but strong writing, much organizational weakness can be forgiven. But the odd thing is that when you stop trying for unity and connectedness and put all your effort into just getting rid of what doesn't work, you often discover a surprising coherence lurking in your pile of good pieces. Many of the worst problems of organization really come from trying to organize pieces when some are weak. Hasn't it often happened to you that you struggle and struggle unsuccessfully to get from P to Q and then suddenly realize you can junk Q and end up with a lovely transition from P to R? And Q wasn't that good to start with. |
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