creative writing school
Module 8: Identity
structure
Introduction
Theory
Inspiration
Creative writing exercises
Share your text with us
Theory
Inspiration
Creative writing exercises
Share your text with us
introduction
Mirrors are never just mirrors.
They are thresholds. Traps. Openings.
They reflect, yes — but they also distort, double, fracture, and translate. A mirror doesn’t simply give you back your image; it gives you back a version of yourself you may or may not recognize. A surface that appears neutral becomes a collaborator, a provocation, a quiet antagonist.
To look into a mirror is to meet yourself and someone slightly adjacent to you, someone who follows your movements but not your intentions.
A companion made of light.
An echo that does not speak.
In this lesson, we will wander through the many lives of mirrors — psychological, philosophical, literary, cinematic — before entering the writing practice itself. Not to define what a mirror is, but to stay with what it does: how it exposes, how it conceals, how it interrupts.
A mirror always asks, gently or not:
Who is this person looking back?
What do you allow yourself to see?
Which parts remain in the shadow, just outside the frame?
And what happens when the mirror shows too much — or not enough?
This is where our writing begins:
in the subtle tension between recognition and estrangement, between the image you know
and the one that quietly disobeys you.
They are thresholds. Traps. Openings.
They reflect, yes — but they also distort, double, fracture, and translate. A mirror doesn’t simply give you back your image; it gives you back a version of yourself you may or may not recognize. A surface that appears neutral becomes a collaborator, a provocation, a quiet antagonist.
To look into a mirror is to meet yourself and someone slightly adjacent to you, someone who follows your movements but not your intentions.
A companion made of light.
An echo that does not speak.
In this lesson, we will wander through the many lives of mirrors — psychological, philosophical, literary, cinematic — before entering the writing practice itself. Not to define what a mirror is, but to stay with what it does: how it exposes, how it conceals, how it interrupts.
A mirror always asks, gently or not:
Who is this person looking back?
What do you allow yourself to see?
Which parts remain in the shadow, just outside the frame?
And what happens when the mirror shows too much — or not enough?
This is where our writing begins:
in the subtle tension between recognition and estrangement, between the image you know
and the one that quietly disobeys you.
theory
Psychology: Lacan’s Mirror Stage
Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage is often described as a psychological milestone, but I prefer to think of it as a scene — an encounter. A moment when a child meets a reflection that feels strangely complete, strangely composed, strangely “theirs.” Around six to eighteen months, the child recognizes themselves in the mirror, and something crystallizes: a first flicker of I. But Lacan insists this recognition is already a misrecognition. A beautiful mistake.
The image in the mirror appears whole, unified, self-contained — everything the child does not yet feel inside their own uncoordinated, fragmentary body.
So the mirror offers an ideal, a promise, a version of order.
But also a distance.
A gap the child will spend a lifetime trying to bridge: between what they are and what they appear to be.
The mirror unites by giving form, and alienates by separating us from the raw, pre-verbal experience of being. It produces a self we can point to, yet one we can never fully inhabit.
This dynamic continues far beyond infancy.
In contemporary psychology, the mirror remains charged: a surface for scrutiny, a device for self-inventory, a site where judgment often speaks louder than recognition.
In therapeutic contexts, mirrors are sometimes used to meet the parts of ourselves we avoid — the body we critique, the face we no longer trust, the identity that feels slightly out of sync with the one inside.
The mirror becomes not just an object,
but a question.
What do you see?
And what escapes the frame?
The image in the mirror appears whole, unified, self-contained — everything the child does not yet feel inside their own uncoordinated, fragmentary body.
So the mirror offers an ideal, a promise, a version of order.
But also a distance.
A gap the child will spend a lifetime trying to bridge: between what they are and what they appear to be.
The mirror unites by giving form, and alienates by separating us from the raw, pre-verbal experience of being. It produces a self we can point to, yet one we can never fully inhabit.
This dynamic continues far beyond infancy.
In contemporary psychology, the mirror remains charged: a surface for scrutiny, a device for self-inventory, a site where judgment often speaks louder than recognition.
In therapeutic contexts, mirrors are sometimes used to meet the parts of ourselves we avoid — the body we critique, the face we no longer trust, the identity that feels slightly out of sync with the one inside.
The mirror becomes not just an object,
but a question.
What do you see?
And what escapes the frame?
Philosophy: Borges and the Infinite Mirror
Jorge Luis Borges returned to mirrors again and again, as if they were small doorways into the strange. In The Aleph, he calls them “abominable,” not out of fear, but because mirrors multiply the world without mercy. They create copies of copies, versions of versions — an endless corridor where the original dissolves into its own reflections. For Borges, a mirror is never just a surface; it is an opening, a slip, a quiet catastrophe of meaning. A place where reality begins to loosen its edges.
Philosophically, mirrors unsettle the question of what is real and what is merely rendered. They ask us to sit with the instability of representation, the thin veil between what is and what is seen.
When you write, you might linger with these questions:
– Can a reflection ever tell the truth, or does it always carry a slight distortion — a soft betrayal?
– What happens to reality when it repeats itself infinitely? Does it become stronger, or does it unravel?
Mirrors do not offer answers.
They offer openings.
Philosophically, mirrors unsettle the question of what is real and what is merely rendered. They ask us to sit with the instability of representation, the thin veil between what is and what is seen.
When you write, you might linger with these questions:
– Can a reflection ever tell the truth, or does it always carry a slight distortion — a soft betrayal?
– What happens to reality when it repeats itself infinitely? Does it become stronger, or does it unravel?
Mirrors do not offer answers.
They offer openings.
inspiration
In Fritz Lang’s M, the mirror does more than reflect a face — it exposes a fracture. The murderer catches sight of himself, and what looks back is not a stable self but a split one: the ordinary man he performs for the world, and the darker, disowned figure he cannot escape. The mirror becomes an interrogator. A witness. A silent judge.
Lang lets the reflection widen beyond the character. It is not only the murderer who is implicated, but the society that shaped him — a collective portrait flickering inside a single distorted image.
The mirror here asks difficult questions:
What happens when you see yourself reflected not as you wish to be, but as you are?
Where does responsibility sit — in the individual, or in the system that produced him?
The distortion of the image is not an accident; it mirrors the distortion of moral certainty. When the reflection is unstable, how do we decide what is true?
You might sit with these questions as you write:
– How do mirrors — in art, in life — force us into encounters we would rather avoid?
– And can a reflection ever be neutral, or is it always a construction, shaped by fear, desire, or the stories we tell about ourselves?
Mirrors rarely reassure.
They reveal.
Lang lets the reflection widen beyond the character. It is not only the murderer who is implicated, but the society that shaped him — a collective portrait flickering inside a single distorted image.
The mirror here asks difficult questions:
What happens when you see yourself reflected not as you wish to be, but as you are?
Where does responsibility sit — in the individual, or in the system that produced him?
The distortion of the image is not an accident; it mirrors the distortion of moral certainty. When the reflection is unstable, how do we decide what is true?
You might sit with these questions as you write:
– How do mirrors — in art, in life — force us into encounters we would rather avoid?
– And can a reflection ever be neutral, or is it always a construction, shaped by fear, desire, or the stories we tell about ourselves?
Mirrors rarely reassure.
They reveal.
creative exercises
Mirrors move in circles.
What they show always returns to the one who looks — not as a straight line, but as a loop. There is no clear beginning and no final end, only a continuous movement between image and gaze, inside and outside. When you write through the lens of a mirror, you are also writing through this circular logic: the reflection, the act of looking, and the return of what has been seen.
Circularity resists progress. It refuses climax, resolution, explanation. Instead, it insists on repetition, variation, delay. Meaning does not advance; it accumulates, thickens, slightly shifts each time it passes again.
Warm-up exercise
Write in loops.
Begin with small, almost imperceptible circles.
Work first on the level of words: let certain words return, reappear, echo themselves. Not mechanically, but with tiny shifts in tone, weight, or position.
Then expand to larger loops.
Allow sentences to bend back toward themselves. A sentence may start where another ended. An image may return altered, displaced, softened, or distorted.
Let the syntax participate in the circularity.
Avoid linear development. Interrupt yourself. Restart. Repeat with difference. Let phrases hover, spiral, hesitate.
Do not aim for coherence or narrative direction.
This is not about telling a story, but about sustaining a movement, choreographing your text. Stay with the rhythm of return. Stay with the sensation of coming back to something you thought you had already left.
If you feel lost, you are likely on the right path.
Circular writing often produces disorientation before it produces meaning.
When you finish, do not close the text.
Let it end in a way that makes beginning again possible.
Writing exercise
Write a text that moves like a circle.
A text that begins where it ends, and ends where it begins.
Let the loop be felt not only in the structure, but in the breath of the sentences, the ideas that return, the rhythms that fold back into themselves.
How to approach it
When a reader reaches the last line, they should feel the urge — or the necessity — to go back to the first.
Consider embedding smaller returnings inside the larger one: an image that reappears, a rhythm that comes back altered, a sentence that echoes itself differently each time.
With words that mirror themselves.
With motifs that spiral, loop, or drift back.
time / seasons / growth and decay / desire and loss / habits that repeat even when we think we’ve escaped them.
Notice what circularity brings:
Is it closure?
Is it repetition?
Is it a quiet trap?
Is it an eternal return?
After writing
Sit with the loop you created.
What does its repetition do?
Where does the text actually begin — and where does it refuse to end?
Let the circle teach you something about your own movement.
What they show always returns to the one who looks — not as a straight line, but as a loop. There is no clear beginning and no final end, only a continuous movement between image and gaze, inside and outside. When you write through the lens of a mirror, you are also writing through this circular logic: the reflection, the act of looking, and the return of what has been seen.
Circularity resists progress. It refuses climax, resolution, explanation. Instead, it insists on repetition, variation, delay. Meaning does not advance; it accumulates, thickens, slightly shifts each time it passes again.
Warm-up exercise
Write in loops.
Begin with small, almost imperceptible circles.
Work first on the level of words: let certain words return, reappear, echo themselves. Not mechanically, but with tiny shifts in tone, weight, or position.
Then expand to larger loops.
Allow sentences to bend back toward themselves. A sentence may start where another ended. An image may return altered, displaced, softened, or distorted.
Let the syntax participate in the circularity.
Avoid linear development. Interrupt yourself. Restart. Repeat with difference. Let phrases hover, spiral, hesitate.
Do not aim for coherence or narrative direction.
This is not about telling a story, but about sustaining a movement, choreographing your text. Stay with the rhythm of return. Stay with the sensation of coming back to something you thought you had already left.
If you feel lost, you are likely on the right path.
Circular writing often produces disorientation before it produces meaning.
When you finish, do not close the text.
Let it end in a way that makes beginning again possible.
Writing exercise
Write a text that moves like a circle.
A text that begins where it ends, and ends where it begins.
Let the loop be felt not only in the structure, but in the breath of the sentences, the ideas that return, the rhythms that fold back into themselves.
How to approach it
- Structure the circle
When a reader reaches the last line, they should feel the urge — or the necessity — to go back to the first.
Consider embedding smaller returnings inside the larger one: an image that reappears, a rhythm that comes back altered, a sentence that echoes itself differently each time.
- Work on the level of the sentence
With words that mirror themselves.
With motifs that spiral, loop, or drift back.
- Theme
time / seasons / growth and decay / desire and loss / habits that repeat even when we think we’ve escaped them.
Notice what circularity brings:
Is it closure?
Is it repetition?
Is it a quiet trap?
Is it an eternal return?
After writing
Sit with the loop you created.
What does its repetition do?
Where does the text actually begin — and where does it refuse to end?
Let the circle teach you something about your own movement.
Photo: Fortepan / Nagy Gyula