creative writing school
Module 3: Tension & Release
structure
Introduction
Theory:
Share your text with us
Theory:
- Hannah Arendt
- Judith Butler
- Jean-Luc Godard: I Salute You, Sarajevo (1993)
Share your text with us
introduction
A text can be violent without showing violence.
It can interrupt. It can dominate. It can corner the reader. It can refuse air. It can repeat until there is no space left. It can cut a sentence before it lands. It can make a body disappear by never naming it. It can make someone speak only to be unheard.
This lesson begins from that precision.
Violence is not only the extreme event: war, assault, explosion, physical force, visible destruction. These are real, but they are not the whole field. Violence also lives in quieter structures: in the way a conversation closes, in the way a room distributes authority, in the way a voice is interrupted before it becomes language, in the way a social order decides whose pain counts and whose pain remains background noise.
Aggression is different. It is not always violence yet. It can be pressure, drive, charge, refusal, friction, impulse, defense, attack, hunger, survival. It can move outward or inward. It can be acted, repressed, displaced, sublimated, formalized. In creation, aggression is not automatically destructive. It can cut through politeness. It can give force to a sentence. It can break an inherited form. It can refuse the smoothness that often hides domination.
The question is where aggression becomes violence, and where violence is already present before any visible act takes place.
Hannah Arendt gives us an important distinction: violence is not the same as power. Power depends on relation, collective support, and the capacity to act together. Violence appears when that relation breaks or is replaced by force. It is instrumental; it imposes, threatens, accelerates, interrupts. This distinction helps us move away from spectacular images of violence and look at the conditions that produce it. When relation fails, when authority cannot hold, when domination needs tools, violence enters.
Judith Butler brings the question to the body and to the unequal distribution of vulnerability. All bodies are vulnerable, but they are not exposed in the same way. Some lives are protected, named, mourned, defended. Others are made less visible, less credible, less grievable. Violence begins there too: in the political organization of whose life can be injured without scandal, whose disappearance can be normalized, whose suffering can be explained away.
For writing, this changes the task.
We are not here to produce violent scenes for intensity. We are not here to aestheticize damage, turn brutality into atmosphere, or use suffering as material without responsibility. The work is more difficult: to understand where violence operates in language, structure, rhythm, silence, framing, and relation.
This is why we will look at Jean-Luc Godard’s Je vous salue, Sarajevo / I Salute You, Sarajevo. The piece is built from a single image and a voice. There is almost no movement, no narrative expansion, no dramatic reconstruction. The violence is not multiplied. It is held. The image is not consumed quickly. The voice does not explain everything. The form creates tension through restriction.
This matters.
Violence does not need amplification to be present. Sometimes expansion weakens it. Too much explanation can neutralize it. Too much image can make it consumable. Too much drama can turn violence into spectacle.
Precision may come from containment.
A single gesture.
A repeated sentence.
A missing body.
A door that does not open.
A voice that never receives an answer.
A detail held longer than comfort allows.
In writing, violence can appear in what the text does, not only in what it describes. It can appear through cuts, pressure, refusal, saturation, absence, broken syntax, repetition, withheld information, or a structure that traps the reader inside a relation they cannot easily exit.
The lesson belongs to the module Tension & Release because aggression and violence both deal with force: how force accumulates, where it is directed, when it is contained, when it breaks, when it becomes form, when it becomes harm.
The work is not to make violence visible at any cost.
The work is to avoid neutralizing it.
To recognize the difference between force and spectacle.
To understand how tension can be built without exploitation.
To write aggression without automatically converting it into destruction.
To hold violence at the level of structure, gesture, rhythm, and frame.
This is where the writing becomes precise: when it stops asking how to shock, and begins asking what kind of force is already, dramaturgically, structurally, organizing the scene.
It can interrupt. It can dominate. It can corner the reader. It can refuse air. It can repeat until there is no space left. It can cut a sentence before it lands. It can make a body disappear by never naming it. It can make someone speak only to be unheard.
This lesson begins from that precision.
Violence is not only the extreme event: war, assault, explosion, physical force, visible destruction. These are real, but they are not the whole field. Violence also lives in quieter structures: in the way a conversation closes, in the way a room distributes authority, in the way a voice is interrupted before it becomes language, in the way a social order decides whose pain counts and whose pain remains background noise.
Aggression is different. It is not always violence yet. It can be pressure, drive, charge, refusal, friction, impulse, defense, attack, hunger, survival. It can move outward or inward. It can be acted, repressed, displaced, sublimated, formalized. In creation, aggression is not automatically destructive. It can cut through politeness. It can give force to a sentence. It can break an inherited form. It can refuse the smoothness that often hides domination.
The question is where aggression becomes violence, and where violence is already present before any visible act takes place.
Hannah Arendt gives us an important distinction: violence is not the same as power. Power depends on relation, collective support, and the capacity to act together. Violence appears when that relation breaks or is replaced by force. It is instrumental; it imposes, threatens, accelerates, interrupts. This distinction helps us move away from spectacular images of violence and look at the conditions that produce it. When relation fails, when authority cannot hold, when domination needs tools, violence enters.
Judith Butler brings the question to the body and to the unequal distribution of vulnerability. All bodies are vulnerable, but they are not exposed in the same way. Some lives are protected, named, mourned, defended. Others are made less visible, less credible, less grievable. Violence begins there too: in the political organization of whose life can be injured without scandal, whose disappearance can be normalized, whose suffering can be explained away.
For writing, this changes the task.
We are not here to produce violent scenes for intensity. We are not here to aestheticize damage, turn brutality into atmosphere, or use suffering as material without responsibility. The work is more difficult: to understand where violence operates in language, structure, rhythm, silence, framing, and relation.
This is why we will look at Jean-Luc Godard’s Je vous salue, Sarajevo / I Salute You, Sarajevo. The piece is built from a single image and a voice. There is almost no movement, no narrative expansion, no dramatic reconstruction. The violence is not multiplied. It is held. The image is not consumed quickly. The voice does not explain everything. The form creates tension through restriction.
This matters.
Violence does not need amplification to be present. Sometimes expansion weakens it. Too much explanation can neutralize it. Too much image can make it consumable. Too much drama can turn violence into spectacle.
Precision may come from containment.
A single gesture.
A repeated sentence.
A missing body.
A door that does not open.
A voice that never receives an answer.
A detail held longer than comfort allows.
In writing, violence can appear in what the text does, not only in what it describes. It can appear through cuts, pressure, refusal, saturation, absence, broken syntax, repetition, withheld information, or a structure that traps the reader inside a relation they cannot easily exit.
The lesson belongs to the module Tension & Release because aggression and violence both deal with force: how force accumulates, where it is directed, when it is contained, when it breaks, when it becomes form, when it becomes harm.
The work is not to make violence visible at any cost.
The work is to avoid neutralizing it.
To recognize the difference between force and spectacle.
To understand how tension can be built without exploitation.
To write aggression without automatically converting it into destruction.
To hold violence at the level of structure, gesture, rhythm, and frame.
This is where the writing becomes precise: when it stops asking how to shock, and begins asking what kind of force is already, dramaturgically, structurally, organizing the scene.
theory
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt gives us a distinction that is essential for this lesson: power and violence are not the same.
Power, for Arendt, is not brute force. It is not domination. It is not the capacity of one person to crush another. Power exists between people. It depends on relation, recognition, agreement, shared space, and the possibility of acting together. Power holds because something circulates: speech, consent, presence, attention, responsibility, participation.
Violence enters when that circulation breaks.
It does not appear as the highest form of power, but as a sign that power can no longer hold through relation. When language no longer mediates, when conflict can no longer be contained, when the shared space collapses, force enters as shortcut. It imposes an effect. It produces an immediate result. It can silence, interrupt, destroy, threaten, accelerate. But it does not build relation. It replaces it.
This is why violence can look like strength while actually revealing fragility.
It gives the impression of control because something happens quickly. Someone is stopped. Someone is made silent. A body is moved. A door is closed. A decision is imposed. But underneath that visible force, something has already failed: the capacity to hold tension without domination.
For writing, this distinction is extremely useful.
A text also has relations inside it. Between voices. Between sentences. Between what is said and what is withheld. Between rhythm and silence. Between the reader and the page. Between the force of the material and the form that tries to contain it.
When these relations hold, tension can exist without becoming flat. Contradiction can remain alive. Several forces can press against each other. The text does not need to resolve everything immediately, because its structure is strong enough to sustain pressure.
Violence begins when this relation breaks.
A sentence cuts before something can arrive.
A voice overrides another voice.
A structure traps the reader without giving air.
A repetition returns until it becomes coercive.
A silence excludes instead of opening.
A paragraph refuses transition and produces rupture.
A text stops listening to its own material and begins forcing it into shape.
Arendt helps us understand violence as a formal movement: the moment where relation is replaced by force.
This can happen at the level of a scene, but also at the level of syntax. A sentence can dominate. A cut can attack. A rhythm can impose. An absence can erase. A structure can close the possibility of reply.
So, when working with aggression and violence in writing, do not begin with the spectacular event. Begin earlier.
Look for the fracture.
Where does something stop circulating?
Where does a voice lose access?
Where does a relation become impossible?
Where does pressure accumulate without release?
Where does the text shift from holding tension to imposing force?
This is where violence begins to operate as structure.
Power, for Arendt, is not brute force. It is not domination. It is not the capacity of one person to crush another. Power exists between people. It depends on relation, recognition, agreement, shared space, and the possibility of acting together. Power holds because something circulates: speech, consent, presence, attention, responsibility, participation.
Violence enters when that circulation breaks.
It does not appear as the highest form of power, but as a sign that power can no longer hold through relation. When language no longer mediates, when conflict can no longer be contained, when the shared space collapses, force enters as shortcut. It imposes an effect. It produces an immediate result. It can silence, interrupt, destroy, threaten, accelerate. But it does not build relation. It replaces it.
This is why violence can look like strength while actually revealing fragility.
It gives the impression of control because something happens quickly. Someone is stopped. Someone is made silent. A body is moved. A door is closed. A decision is imposed. But underneath that visible force, something has already failed: the capacity to hold tension without domination.
For writing, this distinction is extremely useful.
A text also has relations inside it. Between voices. Between sentences. Between what is said and what is withheld. Between rhythm and silence. Between the reader and the page. Between the force of the material and the form that tries to contain it.
When these relations hold, tension can exist without becoming flat. Contradiction can remain alive. Several forces can press against each other. The text does not need to resolve everything immediately, because its structure is strong enough to sustain pressure.
Violence begins when this relation breaks.
A sentence cuts before something can arrive.
A voice overrides another voice.
A structure traps the reader without giving air.
A repetition returns until it becomes coercive.
A silence excludes instead of opening.
A paragraph refuses transition and produces rupture.
A text stops listening to its own material and begins forcing it into shape.
Arendt helps us understand violence as a formal movement: the moment where relation is replaced by force.
This can happen at the level of a scene, but also at the level of syntax. A sentence can dominate. A cut can attack. A rhythm can impose. An absence can erase. A structure can close the possibility of reply.
So, when working with aggression and violence in writing, do not begin with the spectacular event. Begin earlier.
Look for the fracture.
Where does something stop circulating?
Where does a voice lose access?
Where does a relation become impossible?
Where does pressure accumulate without release?
Where does the text shift from holding tension to imposing force?
This is where violence begins to operate as structure.
Judith Butler
With Judith Butler, violence is not approached only through the act that wounds the body, but through the frame that decides how that body appears.
This is an essential shift for writing.
A body can be harmed before the scene of harm begins. It can be prepared for violence by the way it is named, reduced, exposed, generalized, made distant, made suspicious, made disposable, made unreal. Violence begins earlier than the event. It begins in the conditions that make certain lives easier to injure, easier to ignore, easier not to mourn.
In Precarious Life, Butler insists that vulnerability is shared, but not equally distributed. All bodies depend on others. All bodies can be wounded. No life is completely self-sufficient. But societies do not protect all lives in the same way. Some lives are surrounded by recognition, language, law, attention, grief.
Others appear only as numbers, threats, background, collateral damage, anonymous masses, distant figures, bodies without biography.
This difference is not accidental. It is produced.
Through media, political language, institutions, borders, racial categories, gender norms, class structures, military narratives, colonial histories, and cultural habits of looking, some bodies are made fully human, while others are kept at the edge of recognition. Butler’s question is therefore not simply: who is harmed? Her question is also: whose harm becomes visible as harm?
For writing, this changes everything.
A text is never neutral in the way it distributes attention. It frames. It chooses distance. It gives or withholds detail. It grants interiority to some and keeps others flat. It names some bodies and leaves others unnamed. It allows some voices to speak, while others appear only through description, rumor, statistics, memory, accusation, or silence.
The violence of a text may not be in what it describes. It may be in what it refuses to recognize.
Who receives a name?
Who receives a history?
Who receives a body?
Who receives contradiction?
Who is allowed to be complex?
Who remains only function, symbol, example, threat, victim, witness, obstacle?
A writer working with violence must look at the frame before looking at the event. The frame decides what the reader can see, what remains outside, and how much life is allowed to enter the field.
This does not mean that every text must give equal attention to everyone. Writing is made of choices. But those choices carry responsibility. To leave a body outside the frame can be a precise artistic decision. To erase it without knowing is another thing. To keep someone silent can create tension. To keep someone silent because the writer never noticed their silence repeats the violence of the frame.
Butler helps us understand that violence often works through unequal visibility.
Some bodies are overexposed but not heard.
Some are shown only at the moment of damage.
Some are made visible only as suffering.
Some are made invisible precisely because their suffering would disturb the story being told.
For writing, the question becomes: how does the text organize exposure?
Does it turn pain into spectacle?
Does it use a body as proof?
Does it give the reader too much access?
Does it protect the reader from what should disturb them?
Does it individualize one life and generalize another?
Does it make violence feel exceptional when it is structural?
Does it make violence feel natural when it is produced?
This is where Butler becomes directly useful to the structure of the text.
Violence can appear through framing, not through description. Through distance, omission, reduction, repetition, naming, anonymity, scale. Through the decision to hold a face close, or keep it far away. Through the decision to let a voice enter, or keep it outside the sentence. Through the decision to make someone grievable, or to let them disappear without rupture.
To write with this awareness is not to explain vulnerability. It is to compose the conditions under which vulnerability becomes perceptible.
This is an essential shift for writing.
A body can be harmed before the scene of harm begins. It can be prepared for violence by the way it is named, reduced, exposed, generalized, made distant, made suspicious, made disposable, made unreal. Violence begins earlier than the event. It begins in the conditions that make certain lives easier to injure, easier to ignore, easier not to mourn.
In Precarious Life, Butler insists that vulnerability is shared, but not equally distributed. All bodies depend on others. All bodies can be wounded. No life is completely self-sufficient. But societies do not protect all lives in the same way. Some lives are surrounded by recognition, language, law, attention, grief.
Others appear only as numbers, threats, background, collateral damage, anonymous masses, distant figures, bodies without biography.
This difference is not accidental. It is produced.
Through media, political language, institutions, borders, racial categories, gender norms, class structures, military narratives, colonial histories, and cultural habits of looking, some bodies are made fully human, while others are kept at the edge of recognition. Butler’s question is therefore not simply: who is harmed? Her question is also: whose harm becomes visible as harm?
For writing, this changes everything.
A text is never neutral in the way it distributes attention. It frames. It chooses distance. It gives or withholds detail. It grants interiority to some and keeps others flat. It names some bodies and leaves others unnamed. It allows some voices to speak, while others appear only through description, rumor, statistics, memory, accusation, or silence.
The violence of a text may not be in what it describes. It may be in what it refuses to recognize.
Who receives a name?
Who receives a history?
Who receives a body?
Who receives contradiction?
Who is allowed to be complex?
Who remains only function, symbol, example, threat, victim, witness, obstacle?
A writer working with violence must look at the frame before looking at the event. The frame decides what the reader can see, what remains outside, and how much life is allowed to enter the field.
This does not mean that every text must give equal attention to everyone. Writing is made of choices. But those choices carry responsibility. To leave a body outside the frame can be a precise artistic decision. To erase it without knowing is another thing. To keep someone silent can create tension. To keep someone silent because the writer never noticed their silence repeats the violence of the frame.
Butler helps us understand that violence often works through unequal visibility.
Some bodies are overexposed but not heard.
Some are shown only at the moment of damage.
Some are made visible only as suffering.
Some are made invisible precisely because their suffering would disturb the story being told.
For writing, the question becomes: how does the text organize exposure?
Does it turn pain into spectacle?
Does it use a body as proof?
Does it give the reader too much access?
Does it protect the reader from what should disturb them?
Does it individualize one life and generalize another?
Does it make violence feel exceptional when it is structural?
Does it make violence feel natural when it is produced?
This is where Butler becomes directly useful to the structure of the text.
Violence can appear through framing, not through description. Through distance, omission, reduction, repetition, naming, anonymity, scale. Through the decision to hold a face close, or keep it far away. Through the decision to let a voice enter, or keep it outside the sentence. Through the decision to make someone grievable, or to let them disappear without rupture.
To write with this awareness is not to explain vulnerability. It is to compose the conditions under which vulnerability becomes perceptible.
inspiration
In a sense, you see, fear is still the daughter of God. Redeemed on the night of Good Friday, she is not a sight to behold, sometimes ridiculed, sometimes cursed, abandoned by all.
And yet, do not be mistaken, she is at the bedside of every agony. She intercedes for man because there is the rule and there is the exception. There is culture which is of the rule. There is the exception which is of art. All speak of the rule: cigarettes, computers, t-shirts, television, tourism, war. No one speaks of the exception. That is not said, it is written: Flaubert, Dostoevsky; it is composed: Gershwin, Mozart; it is painted: Cezanne, Vermeer; it is recorded: Antonioni, Vigo or it is lived and then it is the art of living: Sbrenica, Mostar, Sarajevo. It is the rule to want the death of the exception. It will therefore be the rule of the Europe of culture to organize the death of the art of living which still flourishes at our feet.
When it is time to close the book, it will be without regret: I have seen so many people live so badly, and so many people die so well.
Jean-Luc Godard: "I Salute You, Sarajevo" (1993)
Jean-Luc Godard’s Je vous salue, Sarajevo / I Salute You, Sarajevo is very short, but compositionally extremely dense.
The work is built primarily from a photograph by Ron Haviv, taken in Bijeljina on March 31, 1992, during the first days of the Bosnian war. But Godard does not treat the photograph as a single fixed document. He does not simply show it and ask us to understand.
He enters the image.
He decomposes it into fragments. He moves through details before giving access to the whole. A body. A hand. A weapon. A shoe. A face. A posture. A distance between figures. A direction of looking. A direction of not looking.
What we experience is not the photograph as information, but the photograph as dramaturgy.
This is essential for writers.
Godard shows that one material can contain many movements if the attention is precise enough. A text does not always need more content, more scenes, more explanation, more background. It may need a stronger way of entering what is already there.
The photograph becomes almost a territory. Godard does not cross it randomly. He composes a route through it. Each fragment appears before the whole can be fully understood. The viewer receives the image in pieces, and this delay creates tension. Meaning does not arrive immediately. It is assembled.
For writing, this is a powerful method.
You can take one situation, one memory, one object, one sentence, one image, one gesture, and move through it as Godard moves through the photograph. Start with a detail. Stay close. Change scale. Delay the whole. Let the reader build the situation slowly, through fragments that carry pressure.
The work also teaches the power of cropping.
To crop is not only to reduce. It is to decide where attention begins. It is to decide what becomes central and what remains outside. It is to create force through selection. In writing, a sentence can crop. A paragraph can crop. A silence can crop. A missing context can crop.
What is excluded from the frame is not empty. It produces pressure.
Godard’s voice does not simply describe the image. It does not behave like a neutral caption. It creates another layer beside the photograph. The voice thinks, interrupts, judges, mourns, frames, displaces. It changes the image without closing it. It does not allow the photograph to remain only visual evidence.
This relation between image and voice is one of the strongest tools for writers.
A text can be built from two layers that do not fully merge: one layer that shows, one layer that speaks; one layer that remembers, one layer that interrupts; one layer that looks, one layer that refuses what is seen; one layer that stays concrete, one layer that opens political or philosophical pressure.
The tension is born between the layers.
Godard also uses delay. The full image is withheld. We do not immediately know the whole relation between the bodies, the violence, the posture, the scene. The work makes us look before we can organize what we see. It prevents the quick consumption of the image.
For writing, delay is not decoration. Delay is structure.
You can delay the event. Delay the name. Delay the relation between two people. Delay the reason for a gesture. Delay the whole sentence. Delay the context until the reader has already entered the pressure of the detail.
This is not suspense in the classical sense. It is attention under pressure.
The piece also uses stillness against violence. Nothing “happens” in the ordinary narrative sense. The photograph does not move, but Godard’s composition makes looking move. The violence is not performed again. It is not expanded into action. It is held, cut, framed, voiced, delayed.
This is why the work is so important for this lesson.
It does not teach us how to represent violence. It teaches us how to compose force.
Through fragmentation.
Through scale.
Through cropping.
Through delay.
Through the relation between image and voice.
Through what is shown and what is withheld.
Through the movement from detail to whole.
Through the refusal to give the viewer easy release.
For writers, the lesson is concrete: do not rush toward the violent event. Look at the compositional field around it. The text begins when looking is no longer passive. When the writer decides where attention enters, how it moves, what it withholds, what it repeats, what it cuts, and when the whole is finally allowed to appear.
creative writing exercise
Aggression and violence are not your topic. They are your method, your compositional force. You will not describe them. You will let them act on the text.
Instructions
Work directly on the material of writing:
– break words, interrupt sentences, destabilize syntax
– repeat a word or a phrase until it loses stability, shifts, or dissolves
– weaken the text progressively (remove clarity, remove structure, remove support...)
– cut before completion
– displace meaning instead of building it
Do not construct.
Do not develop.
Do not repair.
Let the text hold tension without resolving it.
Constraints
– no explicit description of violence
– no moral commentary
– no attempt to “make sense” of what happens
Final note
Aggression here is not something you show. It is something you do to language. Stay precise.
Instructions
Work directly on the material of writing:
– break words, interrupt sentences, destabilize syntax
– repeat a word or a phrase until it loses stability, shifts, or dissolves
– weaken the text progressively (remove clarity, remove structure, remove support...)
– cut before completion
– displace meaning instead of building it
Do not construct.
Do not develop.
Do not repair.
Let the text hold tension without resolving it.
Constraints
– no explicit description of violence
– no moral commentary
– no attempt to “make sense” of what happens
Final note
Aggression here is not something you show. It is something you do to language. Stay precise.
Photo: Jean-Luc Godard: "I Salute You, Sarajevo" (1993)