Creative Writing Exercises - Leicestershire County Council

This exercise focuses:
on juxtaposition, or the bringing together of opposites.
Certain themes can be explored using this method, for example: putting ‘princess’ and ‘witch’
into a poetry engine can produce some profound discoveries about our ideas and stereotypes
of beauty and ugliness. ‘Demon’ and ‘angel’ can also produce very interesting results!
Hints and tips:
Any objects will work for this game, e.g. a matchstick and a postcard of The Taj Mahal.
The paper-folding instructions can be tricky to deliver and understand (participants often feel
they have stumbled into an Origami class!). It is worth practising a quick delivery routine,
otherwise allow enough time to make sure everyone knows how to fold their paper, or provide
pre-folded papers à la Blue Peter!
Do stress to participants that they can combine and edit lines however they like, and that they
are not looking for chance meanings (although those may and do happen). Lines that have no
syntactical sense whatsoever but just sound good are very worthwhile. Also point out that the
columns of text can be ‘slid’ up and down alongside each other to give further combinations,
and also the positions of the columns can be swapped, e.g. ‘Fish’ then ‘Man’.
The poetry-engine works well as a collaboration. One person could write about Fish, the other
about Man, and then together they could work on the splicing. (The ‘Man’ plus ‘Fish’ example
given overleaf was a collaboration between Mark Goodwin and Deborah Tyler-Bennett.)
Who?
Anyone who is comfortable with writing. It is possible to modify the poetry-engine for younger
children, particularly if focusing on collaboration.
Section C
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THINGS&
workshops