creative writing school
Module 4: Unknown & Unexpected
structure
Introduction
Theory
Inspiration
Creative writing exercise
Share your text with us
Theory
Inspiration
Creative writing exercise
Share your text with us
introduction
Disorder is usually described as a problem.
A room is disordered when things are not in their place.
A sentence is disordered when grammar no longer controls it.
A society is disordered when bodies, desires, languages, and behaviors no longer follow the rules assigned to them.
But this already tells us something important: disorder is always named from the point of view of an existing order.
Nothing is disordered in itself. Something becomes disordered when it refuses, exceeds, interrupts, or escapes the system that was supposed to organize it.
For this final lesson of the module Unknown & Unexpected, we will approach disorder not as confusion, but as a creative condition. Disorder appears when the old structure can no longer hold what is happening. It is the moment when categories leak, hierarchies shake, voices overlap, identities multiply, logic accelerates, language becomes contaminated, and meaning no longer moves in a clean line.
This can be uncomfortable. Disorder removes the pleasure of control. It makes orientation difficult. It does not give the reader one stable path, one stable voice, one stable truth. But it can also open a field of invention, because when order breaks, other relations become possible.
The question is not how to make writing chaotic.
The question is how to compose disorder: how to build a text where interruption, overload, contradiction, fragmentation, speed, excess, and instability become part of the structure. A text that does not collapse, but refuses to behave according to inherited rules of coherence.
Post-structuralist thought helps us here because it questions the idea that meaning is fixed, stable, or guaranteed by one center. Meaning moves. It depends on relations, differences, repetitions, contexts, gaps, accidents, and the systems that try to control it. A text is never only one thing. It is crossed by other texts, voices, codes, institutions, images, technologies, bodies, and histories.
This is why disorder can become a method for writing.
It allows us to disturb the hierarchy between main idea and secondary detail, original and copy, serious and stupid, private and public, body and language, sense and nonsense, human voice and media noise. It allows the unexpected to enter not as decoration, but as pressure on the form.
Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch will accompany this lesson because their work does not simply represent contemporary disorder. It performs it. Their videos move through speed, excess, digital speech, unstable characters, social masks, artificial intimacy, fractured identity, hyperactive editing, and overlapping language. The result is not randomness. It is a world where everything speaks at once: the body, the screen, the room, the brand, the group, the camera, the costume, the voice, the system.
In this lesson, we will work with disorder as a compositional force. We will explore how to write with overload, interruption, unstable voices, broken categories, competing registers, and unexpected combinations. The aim is not to destroy meaning, but to create a different kind of meaning: one that can hold the fragmented, accelerated, absurd, excessive, and unstable texture of contemporary experience.
A room is disordered when things are not in their place.
A sentence is disordered when grammar no longer controls it.
A society is disordered when bodies, desires, languages, and behaviors no longer follow the rules assigned to them.
But this already tells us something important: disorder is always named from the point of view of an existing order.
Nothing is disordered in itself. Something becomes disordered when it refuses, exceeds, interrupts, or escapes the system that was supposed to organize it.
For this final lesson of the module Unknown & Unexpected, we will approach disorder not as confusion, but as a creative condition. Disorder appears when the old structure can no longer hold what is happening. It is the moment when categories leak, hierarchies shake, voices overlap, identities multiply, logic accelerates, language becomes contaminated, and meaning no longer moves in a clean line.
This can be uncomfortable. Disorder removes the pleasure of control. It makes orientation difficult. It does not give the reader one stable path, one stable voice, one stable truth. But it can also open a field of invention, because when order breaks, other relations become possible.
The question is not how to make writing chaotic.
The question is how to compose disorder: how to build a text where interruption, overload, contradiction, fragmentation, speed, excess, and instability become part of the structure. A text that does not collapse, but refuses to behave according to inherited rules of coherence.
Post-structuralist thought helps us here because it questions the idea that meaning is fixed, stable, or guaranteed by one center. Meaning moves. It depends on relations, differences, repetitions, contexts, gaps, accidents, and the systems that try to control it. A text is never only one thing. It is crossed by other texts, voices, codes, institutions, images, technologies, bodies, and histories.
This is why disorder can become a method for writing.
It allows us to disturb the hierarchy between main idea and secondary detail, original and copy, serious and stupid, private and public, body and language, sense and nonsense, human voice and media noise. It allows the unexpected to enter not as decoration, but as pressure on the form.
Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch will accompany this lesson because their work does not simply represent contemporary disorder. It performs it. Their videos move through speed, excess, digital speech, unstable characters, social masks, artificial intimacy, fractured identity, hyperactive editing, and overlapping language. The result is not randomness. It is a world where everything speaks at once: the body, the screen, the room, the brand, the group, the camera, the costume, the voice, the system.
In this lesson, we will work with disorder as a compositional force. We will explore how to write with overload, interruption, unstable voices, broken categories, competing registers, and unexpected combinations. The aim is not to destroy meaning, but to create a different kind of meaning: one that can hold the fragmented, accelerated, absurd, excessive, and unstable texture of contemporary experience.
theory
Disorder is always named from the point of view of an existing order.
This means that disorder is not the opposite of order. Disorder is the moment when order becomes visible. It shows us what the system expected, what it excluded, what it could not contain, what it needed to keep clean, separate, readable, functional, obedient.
For writing, this is important. A disordered text is not simply a chaotic text. Disorder, when it is precise, reveals the hidden rules of coherence. It shows us what a text usually has to obey in order to be called clear, serious, mature, literary, intelligent, finished.
Structuralism showed that meaning does not exist alone. A word, a gesture, a myth, a social role, a story, a family structure, a sentence — all of these make meaning inside systems of relation. Nothing means by itself. Meaning is produced by structure.
Post-structuralism keeps this insight, but asks a more dangerous question:
What if the structure is not stable?
What if the system that produces meaning is itself full of cracks?
What if every order depends on exclusions, hierarchies, repetitions, silences, and acts of control?
What if meaning is not fixed inside the structure, but constantly moving, escaping, contaminating itself?
This is why post-structuralism matters for a lesson on disorder. It gives us tools to understand that disorder is also epistemological and political. It changes what can be known, how meaning is produced, and who has the authority to organize reality.
Jacques Derrida shows that language is never as stable as it pretends to be.
We often write as if words were reliable containers: I choose a word, I put meaning inside it, the reader receives it. But language does not work so cleanly. A word only means because it differs from other words. It carries traces of other meanings. It points elsewhere. It never fully closes around one stable sense.
Derrida calls this movement différance: meaning is produced through difference, and it is also deferred. It arrives by not fully arriving. A word means, but not completely. It opens a chain.
It is very concrete for writing.
When a text becomes too orderly, it often pretends that language is under control. It pretends that one word has one meaning, one voice has one truth, one image has one function, one conclusion can close the whole movement.
Derrida helps us disturb this.
He invites us to notice the instability already inside the sentence: the double meanings, the slips, the echoes, the contradictions, the words that betray the intention, the terms that carry histories we did not invite, the margins that begin to speak louder than the center.
For a writer, this means disorder can begin at the smallest level: inside a word.
A word can crack.
A sentence can turn against itself.
A title can contradict the text.
A footnote can become more important than the main argument.
A repeated term can slowly change meaning each time it returns.
Derrida teaches us to stop trusting the apparent cleanliness of sense.
Michel Foucault shows that order is never only linguistic. It is institutional.
Societies produce order through classification. They decide what is normal and abnormal, sane and mad, healthy and sick, criminal and lawful, productive and useless, moral and immoral, intelligible and unintelligible. These categories do not simply describe reality. They organize bodies, behaviors, permissions, punishments, spaces, documents, schools, hospitals, prisons, families, archives.
For Foucault, what a society calls disorder often tells us what that society needs to control.
This is essential for artists and writers.
A text can appear disordered because it does not fit the authorized form of knowledge. It may be too emotional, too fragmented, too bodily, too circular, too multiple, too excessive, too intimate, too angry, too unstable, too unclear. But these judgments often protect a dominant idea of reason, taste, discipline, and authority.
Foucault helps us ask:
Who decides that this text is confused?
Who decides that this body is excessive?
Who decides that this voice is irrational?
Who decides that this knowledge is not serious?
What kind of order is being protected by that judgment?
For writing, Foucault gives us a method: look at the rules that make a text acceptable. Then decide where to disturb them.
Foucault teaches us that disorder is often the return of what order had to exclude.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offer another image of structure. Much Western thought is organized like a tree: root, trunk, branch, origin, hierarchy, development. One beginning. One direction. One central logic. One controlled growth.
Against this, they propose the rhizome.
A rhizome grows by connection, not hierarchy. It spreads sideways. It has multiple entrances and exits. It can be cut and begin again elsewhere. It does not need one origin to organize everything.
For writing, this is extremely useful because many texts are trained to behave like trees. They begin with a main idea, develop it in order, support it with examples, and arrive at a conclusion. This can be useful, but it is not the only form of intelligence.
A rhizomatic text can grow differently.
Through fragments.
Through recurring images.
Through crossings.
Through lists.
Through interruptions.
Through associations.
Through voices that do not merge into one.
Through materials that connect without becoming subordinate to one main argument.
This means the structure is not always vertical.
Instead of asking, “What is the central idea?”, a rhizomatic text asks: “What connects to what?”
Instead of asking, “Where is the beginning?”, it asks: “Where can the reader enter?”
Instead of asking, “How do I conclude?”, it asks: “What has started to spread?”
This is one of the strongest tools for writing disorder. It allows the text to remain multiple without becoming shapeless.
Mary Douglas is not usually named as a post-structuralist, but her work is very useful for this lesson. In Purity and Danger, she writes that dirt is “matter out of place.” This is one of the clearest ways to understand disorder.
Dirt is not dirty by itself. Hair is not dirty on the head, but it becomes dirty in soup. Shoes are not dirty in the street, but they become dirty on the bed. A thing becomes disturbing when it crosses the boundary of where it is supposed to belong.
This gives writers a precise tool.
Disorder can be made through displacement.
Put a bureaucratic sentence inside a love poem.
Put a shopping list inside a prayer.
Put a legal document inside a diary.
Put a body inside an abstract theory.
Put the marginal note in the center of the page.
The question becomes:
What is “out of place” in this text?
This is full full full political. Every order depends on keeping things in their assigned places: proper subjects, proper bodies, proper tones, proper emotions, proper genres, proper languages. Disorder begins when something crosses the line and refuses to go back.
For writing, contamination can be a method. Genres contaminate each other. Voices contaminate each other. Registers contaminate each other. The text becomes alive because it no longer keeps its materials hygienically separated.
Each thinker above gives a practical tool.
Derrida helps us disturb meaning from inside language.
Foucault helps us question the power that defines order and disorder.
Deleuze and Guattari help us build non-linear, multiple structures.
Mary Douglas helps us use displacement and contamination as writing methods.
Together, they help us understand that disorder is not the absence of thought. It can be a more complex thought.
A disordered text can reveal that meaning is unstable.
It can show that order is political.
It can refuse one center.
It can move through networks instead of lines.
It can contaminate genres.
It can let what was excluded return.
It can create a form for experiences that do not arrive in clean sequence.
Our aim now is to compose disorder.
To decide where the text breaks.
Where it multiplies.
Where it contaminates itself.
Where it loses hierarchy.
Where the secondary detail takes over.
Where the wrong tone enters.
Where one voice interrupts another.
This means that disorder is not the opposite of order. Disorder is the moment when order becomes visible. It shows us what the system expected, what it excluded, what it could not contain, what it needed to keep clean, separate, readable, functional, obedient.
For writing, this is important. A disordered text is not simply a chaotic text. Disorder, when it is precise, reveals the hidden rules of coherence. It shows us what a text usually has to obey in order to be called clear, serious, mature, literary, intelligent, finished.
Structuralism showed that meaning does not exist alone. A word, a gesture, a myth, a social role, a story, a family structure, a sentence — all of these make meaning inside systems of relation. Nothing means by itself. Meaning is produced by structure.
Post-structuralism keeps this insight, but asks a more dangerous question:
What if the structure is not stable?
What if the system that produces meaning is itself full of cracks?
What if every order depends on exclusions, hierarchies, repetitions, silences, and acts of control?
What if meaning is not fixed inside the structure, but constantly moving, escaping, contaminating itself?
This is why post-structuralism matters for a lesson on disorder. It gives us tools to understand that disorder is also epistemological and political. It changes what can be known, how meaning is produced, and who has the authority to organize reality.
Jacques Derrida shows that language is never as stable as it pretends to be.
We often write as if words were reliable containers: I choose a word, I put meaning inside it, the reader receives it. But language does not work so cleanly. A word only means because it differs from other words. It carries traces of other meanings. It points elsewhere. It never fully closes around one stable sense.
Derrida calls this movement différance: meaning is produced through difference, and it is also deferred. It arrives by not fully arriving. A word means, but not completely. It opens a chain.
It is very concrete for writing.
When a text becomes too orderly, it often pretends that language is under control. It pretends that one word has one meaning, one voice has one truth, one image has one function, one conclusion can close the whole movement.
Derrida helps us disturb this.
He invites us to notice the instability already inside the sentence: the double meanings, the slips, the echoes, the contradictions, the words that betray the intention, the terms that carry histories we did not invite, the margins that begin to speak louder than the center.
For a writer, this means disorder can begin at the smallest level: inside a word.
A word can crack.
A sentence can turn against itself.
A title can contradict the text.
A footnote can become more important than the main argument.
A repeated term can slowly change meaning each time it returns.
Derrida teaches us to stop trusting the apparent cleanliness of sense.
Michel Foucault shows that order is never only linguistic. It is institutional.
Societies produce order through classification. They decide what is normal and abnormal, sane and mad, healthy and sick, criminal and lawful, productive and useless, moral and immoral, intelligible and unintelligible. These categories do not simply describe reality. They organize bodies, behaviors, permissions, punishments, spaces, documents, schools, hospitals, prisons, families, archives.
For Foucault, what a society calls disorder often tells us what that society needs to control.
This is essential for artists and writers.
A text can appear disordered because it does not fit the authorized form of knowledge. It may be too emotional, too fragmented, too bodily, too circular, too multiple, too excessive, too intimate, too angry, too unstable, too unclear. But these judgments often protect a dominant idea of reason, taste, discipline, and authority.
Foucault helps us ask:
Who decides that this text is confused?
Who decides that this body is excessive?
Who decides that this voice is irrational?
Who decides that this knowledge is not serious?
What kind of order is being protected by that judgment?
For writing, Foucault gives us a method: look at the rules that make a text acceptable. Then decide where to disturb them.
Foucault teaches us that disorder is often the return of what order had to exclude.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offer another image of structure. Much Western thought is organized like a tree: root, trunk, branch, origin, hierarchy, development. One beginning. One direction. One central logic. One controlled growth.
Against this, they propose the rhizome.
A rhizome grows by connection, not hierarchy. It spreads sideways. It has multiple entrances and exits. It can be cut and begin again elsewhere. It does not need one origin to organize everything.
For writing, this is extremely useful because many texts are trained to behave like trees. They begin with a main idea, develop it in order, support it with examples, and arrive at a conclusion. This can be useful, but it is not the only form of intelligence.
A rhizomatic text can grow differently.
Through fragments.
Through recurring images.
Through crossings.
Through lists.
Through interruptions.
Through associations.
Through voices that do not merge into one.
Through materials that connect without becoming subordinate to one main argument.
This means the structure is not always vertical.
Instead of asking, “What is the central idea?”, a rhizomatic text asks: “What connects to what?”
Instead of asking, “Where is the beginning?”, it asks: “Where can the reader enter?”
Instead of asking, “How do I conclude?”, it asks: “What has started to spread?”
This is one of the strongest tools for writing disorder. It allows the text to remain multiple without becoming shapeless.
Mary Douglas is not usually named as a post-structuralist, but her work is very useful for this lesson. In Purity and Danger, she writes that dirt is “matter out of place.” This is one of the clearest ways to understand disorder.
Dirt is not dirty by itself. Hair is not dirty on the head, but it becomes dirty in soup. Shoes are not dirty in the street, but they become dirty on the bed. A thing becomes disturbing when it crosses the boundary of where it is supposed to belong.
This gives writers a precise tool.
Disorder can be made through displacement.
Put a bureaucratic sentence inside a love poem.
Put a shopping list inside a prayer.
Put a legal document inside a diary.
Put a body inside an abstract theory.
Put the marginal note in the center of the page.
The question becomes:
What is “out of place” in this text?
This is full full full political. Every order depends on keeping things in their assigned places: proper subjects, proper bodies, proper tones, proper emotions, proper genres, proper languages. Disorder begins when something crosses the line and refuses to go back.
For writing, contamination can be a method. Genres contaminate each other. Voices contaminate each other. Registers contaminate each other. The text becomes alive because it no longer keeps its materials hygienically separated.
Each thinker above gives a practical tool.
Derrida helps us disturb meaning from inside language.
Foucault helps us question the power that defines order and disorder.
Deleuze and Guattari help us build non-linear, multiple structures.
Mary Douglas helps us use displacement and contamination as writing methods.
Together, they help us understand that disorder is not the absence of thought. It can be a more complex thought.
A disordered text can reveal that meaning is unstable.
It can show that order is political.
It can refuse one center.
It can move through networks instead of lines.
It can contaminate genres.
It can let what was excluded return.
It can create a form for experiences that do not arrive in clean sequence.
Our aim now is to compose disorder.
To decide where the text breaks.
Where it multiplies.
Where it contaminates itself.
Where it loses hierarchy.
Where the secondary detail takes over.
Where the wrong tone enters.
Where one voice interrupts another.
inspiration
Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch build ordered disorder: entire worlds from overload, fragmentation, unstable identity, accelerated speech, and the collapse of boundaries between private life, performance, media, branding, group behavior, and self-invention.
Their practice moves across video, sculpture, sound, installation, set design, and performance. The videos often appear inside environments, as if the world of the video has leaked into the room. Objects, furniture, colors, screens, characters, voices, costumes, architecture, and language all participate in the same disorder. Nothing stays in its assigned place.
This is important.
In their work, disorder is not the absence of structure. It is too much structure at once.
Too many roles.
Too many identities.
Too many voices.
Too many codes.
Too many performances of the self.
Too many systems speaking through the body at the same time.
Their videos often feel difficult to follow because they do not obey the older logic of narrative. A character does not remain one stable psychological person. A scene does not necessarily lead calmly to the next. Dialogue does not only communicate information. Speech becomes speed, pressure, branding, panic, joke, instruction, confession, slogan, glitch, social performance. Language behaves like something already contaminated by television, internet culture, corporate training, therapy language, teenage speech, reality show drama, advertising, and private breakdown.
This is why their work belongs to a lesson on disorder.
They show a world where meaning is produced too fast, through too many systems, until the subject can no longer remain intact. The self becomes editable. The voice becomes synthetic. The group becomes a machine. The room becomes a media environment. The body speaks, but it is never clear who owns the speech.
This gives writers a very precise lesson.
A disordered text can be built from too many orders colliding: bureaucratic order, emotional order, digital order, family order, capitalist order, bodily order, childish order, institutional order, aesthetic order. The text becomes disordered because these systems are all trying to organize the same material at once.
For example, a character may speak in the language of a job interview while describing a childhood memory. A love letter may slowly become a customer service form. A diary may be interrupted by motivational slogans. A philosophical reflection may be contaminated by emojis, product descriptions, legal phrases, family commands, beauty routines, apology scripts, or notifications.
Trecartin and Fitch also help us understand identity as something performed, edited, exaggerated, duplicated, and socially produced. Their characters often seem hyper-individual, but they are also strangely interchangeable. They perform uniqueness through shared codes. They speak as if they are branding themselves, defending themselves, auditioning, confessing, attacking, entertaining, and disappearing at the same time.
Fitch and Trecartin show that disorder can be built. It can have rhythm, pressure, architecture, and social diagnosis. It can reveal the systems that polite coherence hides. It can create a form for a world where speech is already fragmented, identity is already performed, attention is already interrupted, and meaning is already crowded.
For this lesson, Fitch and Trecartin offer disorder as a world-building strategy, a compositional intelligence.
Their practice moves across video, sculpture, sound, installation, set design, and performance. The videos often appear inside environments, as if the world of the video has leaked into the room. Objects, furniture, colors, screens, characters, voices, costumes, architecture, and language all participate in the same disorder. Nothing stays in its assigned place.
This is important.
In their work, disorder is not the absence of structure. It is too much structure at once.
Too many roles.
Too many identities.
Too many voices.
Too many codes.
Too many performances of the self.
Too many systems speaking through the body at the same time.
Their videos often feel difficult to follow because they do not obey the older logic of narrative. A character does not remain one stable psychological person. A scene does not necessarily lead calmly to the next. Dialogue does not only communicate information. Speech becomes speed, pressure, branding, panic, joke, instruction, confession, slogan, glitch, social performance. Language behaves like something already contaminated by television, internet culture, corporate training, therapy language, teenage speech, reality show drama, advertising, and private breakdown.
This is why their work belongs to a lesson on disorder.
They show a world where meaning is produced too fast, through too many systems, until the subject can no longer remain intact. The self becomes editable. The voice becomes synthetic. The group becomes a machine. The room becomes a media environment. The body speaks, but it is never clear who owns the speech.
This gives writers a very precise lesson.
A disordered text can be built from too many orders colliding: bureaucratic order, emotional order, digital order, family order, capitalist order, bodily order, childish order, institutional order, aesthetic order. The text becomes disordered because these systems are all trying to organize the same material at once.
For example, a character may speak in the language of a job interview while describing a childhood memory. A love letter may slowly become a customer service form. A diary may be interrupted by motivational slogans. A philosophical reflection may be contaminated by emojis, product descriptions, legal phrases, family commands, beauty routines, apology scripts, or notifications.
Trecartin and Fitch also help us understand identity as something performed, edited, exaggerated, duplicated, and socially produced. Their characters often seem hyper-individual, but they are also strangely interchangeable. They perform uniqueness through shared codes. They speak as if they are branding themselves, defending themselves, auditioning, confessing, attacking, entertaining, and disappearing at the same time.
Fitch and Trecartin show that disorder can be built. It can have rhythm, pressure, architecture, and social diagnosis. It can reveal the systems that polite coherence hides. It can create a form for a world where speech is already fragmented, identity is already performed, attention is already interrupted, and meaning is already crowded.
For this lesson, Fitch and Trecartin offer disorder as a world-building strategy, a compositional intelligence.
creative exercise
For this exercise, do not confuse disorder with chaos.
Chaos is when nothing holds.
Disorder is when another logic starts to appear.
Choose one text you have already written. It can be a memory, a scene, a reflection, a poem, a statement, a dialogue, a diary entry, or an unfinished text.
First, identify the order that currently organizes the text.
Ask:
What keeps this text coherent?
Is it chronology?
A stable voice?
A beginning-middle-end structure?
A genre it obeys?
A hierarchy between important and secondary details?
Then disturb that order.
Do not destroy the text. Reorganize it through disorder.
Choose three operations:
1. Contamination
Insert a language that does not belong there: a form, an advertisement, a notification, a bureaucratic sentence, a prayer, a shopping list, a diagnosis, a tutorial, a legal phrase, a family command, a slogan, a receipt, a horoscope, a group chat...
Let this foreign language infect the original text.
2. Multiplication
Break the stable voice. Let several voices enter: the initial voice, the body’s voice, the angry voice, the conformist voice, the exhausted voice, your lover's voice, your childhood voice, your mother's voice, your bed's voice, your notebook's voice...
Do not explain who speaks each time. Let the reader feel the crowd inside the text.
3. Displacement
Move something from the margin to the center. Let a small detail take over. Let the footnote become the main text. Let the secondary character interrupt. Let the object speak. Let the background become more important than the event.
4. Overload
Increase one element until it becomes too much: too many repetitions, too much politeness, too much information, too much intimacy, too much speed, too much explanation, too many corrections, too many interruptions.
Push it until the text starts revealing what it was trying to hide.
5. Broken sequence
Cut the chronology. Rearrange the text so that cause and effect no longer behave correctly. Let the ending arrive too early. Let the beginning repeat. Let the middle interrupt itself. Let the text move like a network rather than a line.
6. Wrong genre
Force the text into a form that does not fit it. Turn a love text into a customer service exchange. Turn grief into a weather report. Turn a childhood memory into an instruction manual. Turn an artistic statement into a confession booth. Turn a political thought into a beauty routine.
The wrong form should reveal something the original form was protecting.
Constraints:
The aim is not to make the text incoherent.
The aim is to create another meaning for coherence. Optionally:
a coherence of contamination,
a coherence of overload,
a coherence of interruption,
a coherence of displaced details,
a coherence of voices that refuse to become one.
Chaos is when nothing holds.
Disorder is when another logic starts to appear.
Choose one text you have already written. It can be a memory, a scene, a reflection, a poem, a statement, a dialogue, a diary entry, or an unfinished text.
First, identify the order that currently organizes the text.
Ask:
What keeps this text coherent?
Is it chronology?
A stable voice?
A beginning-middle-end structure?
A genre it obeys?
A hierarchy between important and secondary details?
Then disturb that order.
Do not destroy the text. Reorganize it through disorder.
Choose three operations:
1. Contamination
Insert a language that does not belong there: a form, an advertisement, a notification, a bureaucratic sentence, a prayer, a shopping list, a diagnosis, a tutorial, a legal phrase, a family command, a slogan, a receipt, a horoscope, a group chat...
Let this foreign language infect the original text.
2. Multiplication
Break the stable voice. Let several voices enter: the initial voice, the body’s voice, the angry voice, the conformist voice, the exhausted voice, your lover's voice, your childhood voice, your mother's voice, your bed's voice, your notebook's voice...
Do not explain who speaks each time. Let the reader feel the crowd inside the text.
3. Displacement
Move something from the margin to the center. Let a small detail take over. Let the footnote become the main text. Let the secondary character interrupt. Let the object speak. Let the background become more important than the event.
4. Overload
Increase one element until it becomes too much: too many repetitions, too much politeness, too much information, too much intimacy, too much speed, too much explanation, too many corrections, too many interruptions.
Push it until the text starts revealing what it was trying to hide.
5. Broken sequence
Cut the chronology. Rearrange the text so that cause and effect no longer behave correctly. Let the ending arrive too early. Let the beginning repeat. Let the middle interrupt itself. Let the text move like a network rather than a line.
6. Wrong genre
Force the text into a form that does not fit it. Turn a love text into a customer service exchange. Turn grief into a weather report. Turn a childhood memory into an instruction manual. Turn an artistic statement into a confession booth. Turn a political thought into a beauty routine.
The wrong form should reveal something the original form was protecting.
Constraints:
The aim is not to make the text incoherent.
The aim is to create another meaning for coherence. Optionally:
a coherence of contamination,
a coherence of overload,
a coherence of interruption,
a coherence of displaced details,
a coherence of voices that refuse to become one.
Photo: Ryan Trecartin Lizzie Fitch