creative writing school
Module 2: Slowness
structure
Introduction
Theory
Inspiration
Creative writing exercises
Share your text with us
Theory
Inspiration
Creative writing exercises
Share your text with us
introduction
In writing, the other is a structure of relation.
It appears wherever the self meets a limit. Wherever something resists being absorbed, understood, possessed, or reduced to sameness. The other is what interrupts the illusion of self-sufficiency. It reminds us that identity is not built alone, in isolation, but through encounter: through distance, friction, projection, fascination, misunderstanding, desire, fear.
We often imagine the self as something interior, private, coherent. But the self is always shaped in relation to what it is not. We learn who we are through what looks back at us, contradicts us, refuses us, attracts us, unsettles us. The other is not simply outside. It enters us. It organizes our perception, our language, our fantasies, our defenses.
This is why writing about the other is ethically delicate.
The other can easily become a surface for projection. We fill them with our fears, our desires, our fantasies, our wounds. We turn difference into symbol, mystery, threat, exoticism, salvation. We believe we are writing the other, while in fact we are often writing the part of ourselves we cannot yet recognize.
The other is never simply there.
The other is perceived, imagined, constructed, feared, desired, interpreted. At the same time, the other also exceeds every construction we make. They remain partly inaccessible. This distance matters. Without it, relation collapses into appropriation.
In this lesson, we will approach the other as a writing situation. We will look at how alterity enters language through voice, address, distance, silence, projection, and misrecognition. We will ask how writing can create relation without erasing difference.
It appears wherever the self meets a limit. Wherever something resists being absorbed, understood, possessed, or reduced to sameness. The other is what interrupts the illusion of self-sufficiency. It reminds us that identity is not built alone, in isolation, but through encounter: through distance, friction, projection, fascination, misunderstanding, desire, fear.
We often imagine the self as something interior, private, coherent. But the self is always shaped in relation to what it is not. We learn who we are through what looks back at us, contradicts us, refuses us, attracts us, unsettles us. The other is not simply outside. It enters us. It organizes our perception, our language, our fantasies, our defenses.
This is why writing about the other is ethically delicate.
The other can easily become a surface for projection. We fill them with our fears, our desires, our fantasies, our wounds. We turn difference into symbol, mystery, threat, exoticism, salvation. We believe we are writing the other, while in fact we are often writing the part of ourselves we cannot yet recognize.
The other is never simply there.
The other is perceived, imagined, constructed, feared, desired, interpreted. At the same time, the other also exceeds every construction we make. They remain partly inaccessible. This distance matters. Without it, relation collapses into appropriation.
In this lesson, we will approach the other as a writing situation. We will look at how alterity enters language through voice, address, distance, silence, projection, and misrecognition. We will ask how writing can create relation without erasing difference.
theory
We often imagine the other as someone external to us. Another person. Another body. Another voice. Another life. Psychology suggests something far more unsettling: the other is not only outside us. The other is also inside us.
The self is never as unified as it appears.
We are composed of contradictions, internal conflicts, competing desires, forgotten memories, inherited narratives, social expectations, imagined futures. Much of what we call identity is an ongoing negotiation between different forces that do not necessarily agree with one another.
From this perspective, encountering the other is never simply a meeting between two separate individuals.
It is also a confrontation with what remains unfamiliar within ourselves.
This is why certain people fascinate us.
Why others provoke irritation.
Why some encounters leave us indifferent while others remain with us for years.
The other often becomes a screen onto which we project what we cannot yet recognize, accept, or integrate. Psychoanalysis has long been interested in this mechanism.
Freud observed that what disturbs us most is often not radical difference, but uncomfortable proximity. What appears foreign may contain something strangely familiar. Something we recognize while simultaneously refusing to recognize. His concept of the uncanny emerges precisely from this tension: the moment when the unfamiliar reveals itself as unexpectedly close.
The other therefore does not only confront us with difference. The other confronts us with ourselves.
This idea becomes even more complex with Jacques Lacan. Lacan's famous theory of the mirror stage is often reduced to a story about self-recognition. In reality, it is a theory about misrecognition.
The child sees an image in the mirror and identifies with it. Yet the image is not the self. It is a representation of the self. A coherent, unified figure that conceals the fragmented and unstable nature of lived experience.
Identity therefore begins with an illusion.
We become ourselves through identification with something outside ourselves.
From the very beginning, the self depends upon an other.
For Lacan, this dependency never disappears. Throughout life we continue seeking ourselves through external images, social recognition, relationships, institutions, ideologies, and cultural narratives. We search for coherence in mirrors of different kinds.
This is particularly relevant for artists and writers.
Writing is full of doubles.
Narrators. Characters. Personas. Autobiographical figures. Voices that appear fictional but contain intimate truths. Voices that appear personal but are constructed. The page becomes a space where the self continuously encounters its own others.
Donald Winnicott approaches the question from another direction.
What interests me in Winnicott is not his distinction between the true self and the false self as psychological categories, but the tension they reveal.
Human beings are relational creatures. We adapt. We negotiate. We perform. We learn how to become recognizable to others.
This adaptation is necessary.
But it also raises an important question:
What parts of ourselves emerge from genuine desire?
And what parts emerge from the need to be loved, accepted, or understood?
The other therefore participates in the construction of identity from the very beginning.
Not only through conflict.
Through care. Through recognition. Through expectation. Through language itself.
For writers, this has important consequences.
It suggests that writing about the other is never simply writing about somebody else.
Every description contains projection.
Every portrait contains self-portraiture.
Every encounter reveals something about both sides.
The challenge is therefore not to eliminate projection, which is impossible.
The challenge is to become aware of it.
To ask:
What belongs to the other?
What belongs to me?
And where do these boundaries become impossible to draw?
Perhaps this is why the other remains such a powerful territory for writing.
Because alterity is not merely a social question.
It is a psychological one.
The other is not only the person standing in front of us. The other is also the stranger we continue encountering within ourselves.
The self is never as unified as it appears.
We are composed of contradictions, internal conflicts, competing desires, forgotten memories, inherited narratives, social expectations, imagined futures. Much of what we call identity is an ongoing negotiation between different forces that do not necessarily agree with one another.
From this perspective, encountering the other is never simply a meeting between two separate individuals.
It is also a confrontation with what remains unfamiliar within ourselves.
This is why certain people fascinate us.
Why others provoke irritation.
Why some encounters leave us indifferent while others remain with us for years.
The other often becomes a screen onto which we project what we cannot yet recognize, accept, or integrate. Psychoanalysis has long been interested in this mechanism.
Freud observed that what disturbs us most is often not radical difference, but uncomfortable proximity. What appears foreign may contain something strangely familiar. Something we recognize while simultaneously refusing to recognize. His concept of the uncanny emerges precisely from this tension: the moment when the unfamiliar reveals itself as unexpectedly close.
The other therefore does not only confront us with difference. The other confronts us with ourselves.
This idea becomes even more complex with Jacques Lacan. Lacan's famous theory of the mirror stage is often reduced to a story about self-recognition. In reality, it is a theory about misrecognition.
The child sees an image in the mirror and identifies with it. Yet the image is not the self. It is a representation of the self. A coherent, unified figure that conceals the fragmented and unstable nature of lived experience.
Identity therefore begins with an illusion.
We become ourselves through identification with something outside ourselves.
From the very beginning, the self depends upon an other.
For Lacan, this dependency never disappears. Throughout life we continue seeking ourselves through external images, social recognition, relationships, institutions, ideologies, and cultural narratives. We search for coherence in mirrors of different kinds.
This is particularly relevant for artists and writers.
Writing is full of doubles.
Narrators. Characters. Personas. Autobiographical figures. Voices that appear fictional but contain intimate truths. Voices that appear personal but are constructed. The page becomes a space where the self continuously encounters its own others.
Donald Winnicott approaches the question from another direction.
What interests me in Winnicott is not his distinction between the true self and the false self as psychological categories, but the tension they reveal.
Human beings are relational creatures. We adapt. We negotiate. We perform. We learn how to become recognizable to others.
This adaptation is necessary.
But it also raises an important question:
What parts of ourselves emerge from genuine desire?
And what parts emerge from the need to be loved, accepted, or understood?
The other therefore participates in the construction of identity from the very beginning.
Not only through conflict.
Through care. Through recognition. Through expectation. Through language itself.
For writers, this has important consequences.
It suggests that writing about the other is never simply writing about somebody else.
Every description contains projection.
Every portrait contains self-portraiture.
Every encounter reveals something about both sides.
The challenge is therefore not to eliminate projection, which is impossible.
The challenge is to become aware of it.
To ask:
What belongs to the other?
What belongs to me?
And where do these boundaries become impossible to draw?
Perhaps this is why the other remains such a powerful territory for writing.
Because alterity is not merely a social question.
It is a psychological one.
The other is not only the person standing in front of us. The other is also the stranger we continue encountering within ourselves.
inspiration
Martin Scorsese: Taxi Driver, 1976
Douglas Gordon: Through a Looking Glass, 1999
What interests me in Douglas Gordon's Through a Looking Glass is that it stages one of the most familiar human experiences: speaking to another person while, in reality, speaking to oneself.
The installation takes as its point of departure the famous mirror scene from Taxi Driver. Alone in front of a mirror, Travis Bickle rehearses a confrontation with an imagined opponent. "You talkin' to me?" he asks repeatedly.
The scene appears simple.
Yet the more one watches it, the stranger it becomes.
There is no other person present.
The threat is imaginary.
The dialogue is fictional.
And yet the entire scene depends on the existence of an other.
An enemy. A witness. A recipient.
Someone onto whom the self can project its fantasies, fears, aggression, and desire for recognition.
Gordon amplifies this instability by projecting the scene simultaneously onto two opposing screens. Initially synchronized, the images gradually drift apart. What begins as a reflection becomes a delay. What begins as sameness becomes difference.
The work therefore refuses the reassuring logic of the mirror.
We often imagine mirrors as instruments of recognition. We look into them to confirm who we are. Gordon proposes the opposite. The mirror becomes a site of estrangement. A place where identity begins to fracture.
The more closely the two images resemble one another, the more visible their differences become. This is why the installation resonates so strongly with psychoanalytic thought, particularly Lacan's notion of the mirror stage.
For Lacan, the mirror is not the place where the self discovers itself. It is the place where the self misrecognizes itself. The reflected image appears coherent, unified, stable. Yet lived experience is fragmented, contradictory, and constantly changing. The image offers an illusion of wholeness that we spend our lives trying to inhabit.
Gordon's work quietly dismantles this illusion. The double never fully coincides with itself. The reflection refuses perfect synchronization. Identity appears not as something stable, but as something continuously negotiated. What interests me most, however, is the role of projection.
In psychology, projection refers to the process through which we attribute our own desires, fears, conflicts, or impulses to somebody else. We imagine they belong to the other when, in fact, they originate within ourselves.
The installation functions in a similar way.
Travis speaks to an imagined adversary, yet everything he says reveals something about his own internal world. The absent other becomes a screen for his fantasies and frustrations. Perhaps all encounters with the other contain something of this structure.
We rarely encounter others directly.
We encounter our interpretation of them.
Our expectations. Our fears. Our desires. Our projections. The other arrives already covered by meanings we have placed upon them.
This is what makes alterity so difficult. The challenge is not simply to recognize the other. The challenge is to recognize where our own projections end and where the other's irreducible difference begins.
For writers, this question is fundamental.
Every character is, to some degree, a projection.
Every narrator constructs an image of others.
Every act of description reveals not only what is being observed, but also the perspective from which observation occurs.
Through a Looking Glass therefore offers a useful reminder: the other is never simply outside us.
The other is also a mirror.
A distortion. A projection surface. A double.
And sometimes the most difficult thing to recognize in the other is the part of ourselves we find reflected there.
The installation takes as its point of departure the famous mirror scene from Taxi Driver. Alone in front of a mirror, Travis Bickle rehearses a confrontation with an imagined opponent. "You talkin' to me?" he asks repeatedly.
The scene appears simple.
Yet the more one watches it, the stranger it becomes.
There is no other person present.
The threat is imaginary.
The dialogue is fictional.
And yet the entire scene depends on the existence of an other.
An enemy. A witness. A recipient.
Someone onto whom the self can project its fantasies, fears, aggression, and desire for recognition.
Gordon amplifies this instability by projecting the scene simultaneously onto two opposing screens. Initially synchronized, the images gradually drift apart. What begins as a reflection becomes a delay. What begins as sameness becomes difference.
The work therefore refuses the reassuring logic of the mirror.
We often imagine mirrors as instruments of recognition. We look into them to confirm who we are. Gordon proposes the opposite. The mirror becomes a site of estrangement. A place where identity begins to fracture.
The more closely the two images resemble one another, the more visible their differences become. This is why the installation resonates so strongly with psychoanalytic thought, particularly Lacan's notion of the mirror stage.
For Lacan, the mirror is not the place where the self discovers itself. It is the place where the self misrecognizes itself. The reflected image appears coherent, unified, stable. Yet lived experience is fragmented, contradictory, and constantly changing. The image offers an illusion of wholeness that we spend our lives trying to inhabit.
Gordon's work quietly dismantles this illusion. The double never fully coincides with itself. The reflection refuses perfect synchronization. Identity appears not as something stable, but as something continuously negotiated. What interests me most, however, is the role of projection.
In psychology, projection refers to the process through which we attribute our own desires, fears, conflicts, or impulses to somebody else. We imagine they belong to the other when, in fact, they originate within ourselves.
The installation functions in a similar way.
Travis speaks to an imagined adversary, yet everything he says reveals something about his own internal world. The absent other becomes a screen for his fantasies and frustrations. Perhaps all encounters with the other contain something of this structure.
We rarely encounter others directly.
We encounter our interpretation of them.
Our expectations. Our fears. Our desires. Our projections. The other arrives already covered by meanings we have placed upon them.
This is what makes alterity so difficult. The challenge is not simply to recognize the other. The challenge is to recognize where our own projections end and where the other's irreducible difference begins.
For writers, this question is fundamental.
Every character is, to some degree, a projection.
Every narrator constructs an image of others.
Every act of description reveals not only what is being observed, but also the perspective from which observation occurs.
Through a Looking Glass therefore offers a useful reminder: the other is never simply outside us.
The other is also a mirror.
A distortion. A projection surface. A double.
And sometimes the most difficult thing to recognize in the other is the part of ourselves we find reflected there.
creative writing exercises
THE DISTANCE
Choose a person.
Do not choose someone you know well.
Choose someone you have observed from a distance: a neighbour, a stranger, a colleague, someone seen repeatedly but never truly known.
Write a portrait of this person.
After every statement, ask yourself:
How do I know this?
If the answer is "I don't," keep the sentence.
The objective is not accuracy.
The objective is to make visible the border between observation, interpretation, projection, fantasy, memory, and assumption.
Gradually allow the text to reveal as much about the narrator as about the observed person.
Do not resolve the ambiguity.
By the end of the text, the reader should no longer be certain who is being described:
the other,
or the self looking at them.
Choose a person.
Do not choose someone you know well.
Choose someone you have observed from a distance: a neighbour, a stranger, a colleague, someone seen repeatedly but never truly known.
Write a portrait of this person.
After every statement, ask yourself:
How do I know this?
If the answer is "I don't," keep the sentence.
The objective is not accuracy.
The objective is to make visible the border between observation, interpretation, projection, fantasy, memory, and assumption.
Gradually allow the text to reveal as much about the narrator as about the observed person.
Do not resolve the ambiguity.
By the end of the text, the reader should no longer be certain who is being described:
the other,
or the self looking at them.
Photo:Fortepan / Korenchy László