The Dadaists were members of an avant-garde European art movement. The Beat Poets were a US group indulging in substances of a not entirely legal nature. So what have I got in common with them. Cutting up small bits of paper.
To explain…
I have just made my first e-book. It’s a collection of my short stories published by women’s magazines in the UK, Australia and around the world. The hardest part of making the book (webmaster John did all the techie stuff) was deciding the order in which to place the stories.
There are 15 of them. Easy, right?
Wrong.
It was a lot harder than I thought.
I’ve had stories in a couple of anthologies. In Loves Me Loves Me Not, the story order was set by the publishers – and the ‘big names’ were right at the top – as they deserved to be.
When I donated a story to the 100 Stories for Queensland charity anthology – the stories were in alphabetical order of the writer’s name. That seems fair.
But what about a book of my stories?
I thought about chronological order- but should that be the date of writing or publication?
I considered alphabetical order – but five of the titles started with The. And I didn’t want stories that dealt with similar subjects side-by-side.
That’s when I discovered the cut-up technique.. as used by the likes of William S Burroughs and David Bowie.
The technique involves writing some text, cutting it into small chunks of words or phrases, then re-arranging them to create new text. It was a big thing among the Dadaists in the 1920’s. Curt Cobain had a go at it. I decided if it was good enough for T S Eliot, it was good enough for me.
Never one to play by someone else’s rules, I added a twist. I made a slip of paper for each story – but each story also had one or more colours associated with it – green for an Australian setting, yellow if children were featured, magenta for fantasy or sci fi… and so on.
Then I started to shuffle the pieces of paper about. I tried making sure that no two stories with the same colour followed each other – but there were too many stories with the same colours. Still, it was a good starting point.
I then moved one.. or two .. or three.. of them until I was satisfied with the final order.
I spent about 40 minutes agonising over story order before doing the cut-ups, without reaching a decision.
With them, I decided the order in ten minutes.
The book is available here as a free download. Please let me know if you think I got the order right!
