creative writing school
Module 6: Worlds Beyond
structure
Introduction
Theory
Inspirations
Creative exercise
Stay grounded & motivated
Share your text with us
Theory
Inspirations
Creative exercise
Stay grounded & motivated
Share your text with us
introduction
This week, we plunge into the thick, stormy fog of chaos—a term often avoided, feared, or reduced to cliché. But chaos is not merely disorder or noise. It’s not the enemy of form. It is a force. A condition. A territory. A necessary groundless ground. It’s what births the beginning and undoes the end. We won’t try to tame it or make it serve us. We’ll enter it, observe it, write from within it. Let it flood. Let it disorient. And then, maybe, we’ll learn how to move through its trembling textures without losing our voice.
theory
Philosophically, chaos has always been both the origin and the threat. In ancient Greek cosmogony, Chaos was the primordial void from which everything emerged. Not destruction—but pre-structure. A gap. A potential. As Giorgio Agamben writes, “Chaos is not the absence of order, but a different kind of order that escapes capture.” Chaos resists the taxonomies of the State, the grids of academia, the routines of productivity. It refuses representation.
Nietzsche dances with chaos too. He famously said, “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” But he doesn’t suggest glorifying chaos. He means holding it. Not letting it drown you, but letting it inform you. To feel the instability and still create something fierce, something clear, something glowing.
Chaos, philosophically, isn’t a moment of failure. It’s the undoing of imposed meaning. It’s the space before naming. That trembling, awkward, painful moment where everything might shift—or collapse. And from that, something raw and new might emerge.
In psychological terms, chaos often appears as the breakdown of inner coherence—moments of panic, rupture, disorientation. Jung referred to it as “the shadow,” the unconscious forces that erupt when repressed for too long. Chaos emerges when the psyche can no longer sustain its own architecture. But these are not failures. These are signs of transition.
Psychologist and trauma theorist Bessel van der Kolk describes how chaos lives in trauma—how time collapses, the body dissociates, and language breaks. Yet healing, he says, comes not from eliminating chaos, but learning to stay present in it. To not run. To not fix too quickly.
In creative work, we often avoid these states. We want resolution, coherence, clarity. But sometimes, art must speak from the threshold, from the shaking hand, from the blur. Especially now—in a time where rationality and order are often violent in disguise—chaos can be a portal. Not to the old stable, but to something yet unimagined.
Nietzsche dances with chaos too. He famously said, “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” But he doesn’t suggest glorifying chaos. He means holding it. Not letting it drown you, but letting it inform you. To feel the instability and still create something fierce, something clear, something glowing.
Chaos, philosophically, isn’t a moment of failure. It’s the undoing of imposed meaning. It’s the space before naming. That trembling, awkward, painful moment where everything might shift—or collapse. And from that, something raw and new might emerge.
In psychological terms, chaos often appears as the breakdown of inner coherence—moments of panic, rupture, disorientation. Jung referred to it as “the shadow,” the unconscious forces that erupt when repressed for too long. Chaos emerges when the psyche can no longer sustain its own architecture. But these are not failures. These are signs of transition.
Psychologist and trauma theorist Bessel van der Kolk describes how chaos lives in trauma—how time collapses, the body dissociates, and language breaks. Yet healing, he says, comes not from eliminating chaos, but learning to stay present in it. To not run. To not fix too quickly.
In creative work, we often avoid these states. We want resolution, coherence, clarity. But sometimes, art must speak from the threshold, from the shaking hand, from the blur. Especially now—in a time where rationality and order are often violent in disguise—chaos can be a portal. Not to the old stable, but to something yet unimagined.
inspiration
Anne Imhof, Faust, German Pavilion, Venice Art Biennale 2017
Anne Imhof’s Faust was not just a performance. It was a haunting system of disjointed rituals, gestures, silences, and stares—unfolding simultaneously in multiple directions. Dancers, performers, bodies in hoodies, bodies texting, bodies colliding. Glass floors. Trapped spaces. Dogs outside. Sound bleeding into stillness. An atmosphere of threat and intimacy. Control and collapse.
Imhof choreographs chaos without ever naming it. The viewer is implicated. You don’t just watch Faust, you are inside it—moving, standing, complicit. You feel the architecture. You feel the surveillance. You feel the fragility of the performers’ bodies. Their disconnection. Their hyper-presence. Their exhaustion.
Critic Hito Steyerl wrote about Faust as a work that “deals with death and performance, affect and aggression, vulnerability and the automation of bodies.” But it never delivers a clear narrative. It resists legibility. Like chaos itself.
What makes Faust so urgent is not just its aesthetic—it’s the structure beneath the chaos. The repetitions. The almost invisible score. The unspoken rules. Imhof shows us that chaos, too, is choreographed. That disarray can be deeply intentional. That silence can scream. That fragility can be weaponized.
Anne Imhof’s Faust was not just a performance. It was a haunting system of disjointed rituals, gestures, silences, and stares—unfolding simultaneously in multiple directions. Dancers, performers, bodies in hoodies, bodies texting, bodies colliding. Glass floors. Trapped spaces. Dogs outside. Sound bleeding into stillness. An atmosphere of threat and intimacy. Control and collapse.
Imhof choreographs chaos without ever naming it. The viewer is implicated. You don’t just watch Faust, you are inside it—moving, standing, complicit. You feel the architecture. You feel the surveillance. You feel the fragility of the performers’ bodies. Their disconnection. Their hyper-presence. Their exhaustion.
Critic Hito Steyerl wrote about Faust as a work that “deals with death and performance, affect and aggression, vulnerability and the automation of bodies.” But it never delivers a clear narrative. It resists legibility. Like chaos itself.
What makes Faust so urgent is not just its aesthetic—it’s the structure beneath the chaos. The repetitions. The almost invisible score. The unspoken rules. Imhof shows us that chaos, too, is choreographed. That disarray can be deeply intentional. That silence can scream. That fragility can be weaponized.
creative exercise
Use chaos not as theme, but as method. Write in fragments. Use glitch. Use repetition. Interrupt yourself.
Choose a text you’ve previously written. Now destroy its structure. Cut it up. Rearrange it. Take out all verbs. Keep only the adjectives. Or repeat one phrase over and over until it begins to rot.
Build disorder. Create tension. Push coherence to its edge—until something cracks open. Until a new kind of rhythm appears. Let what doesn’t fit stay. Let the meaning leak through the gaps. Let form fall apart. And from the rubble, begin again.
Choose a text you’ve previously written. Now destroy its structure. Cut it up. Rearrange it. Take out all verbs. Keep only the adjectives. Or repeat one phrase over and over until it begins to rot.
Build disorder. Create tension. Push coherence to its edge—until something cracks open. Until a new kind of rhythm appears. Let what doesn’t fit stay. Let the meaning leak through the gaps. Let form fall apart. And from the rubble, begin again.
stay grounded and motivated!
"I don’t crave chaos. I don’t perform my wounds. I don’t want to lose myself in the storm just to call it art.
But I’ve learned to walk through it. Not to fix it. Not to solve it. But to feel where it leads me.
Chaos isn’t where I stay. But it’s where I listen.
It speaks in trembling tones. In gasps.
In silence after the scream.
It offers a different kind of clarity—not the polished one. The visceral one.
The one that lives in the body.
The one that interrupts.
Offers questions.
Leads to growth.
Don’t try to organize chaos. Don’t explain it away too early.
Write from it, not about it.
Transform it.
Sublimate it.
And when the calm returns, let it return. Let it hold you.
Let it give shape to what you wrote in the blur.
Not every piece needs to be understood.
But every piece needs to be felt."
—Anna Ádám
Founder of the School of Disobedience
But I’ve learned to walk through it. Not to fix it. Not to solve it. But to feel where it leads me.
Chaos isn’t where I stay. But it’s where I listen.
It speaks in trembling tones. In gasps.
In silence after the scream.
It offers a different kind of clarity—not the polished one. The visceral one.
The one that lives in the body.
The one that interrupts.
Offers questions.
Leads to growth.
Don’t try to organize chaos. Don’t explain it away too early.
Write from it, not about it.
Transform it.
Sublimate it.
And when the calm returns, let it return. Let it hold you.
Let it give shape to what you wrote in the blur.
Not every piece needs to be understood.
But every piece needs to be felt."
—Anna Ádám
Founder of the School of Disobedience
Photo: Franziska Aigner and Emma Daniel in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, German Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Image: Nadine Fraczkowski