{"id":2710,"date":"2012-06-24T21:15:30","date_gmt":"2012-06-24T20:15:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janetgover.com\/?p=2710"},"modified":"2012-06-24T21:15:30","modified_gmt":"2012-06-24T20:15:30","slug":"what-next-using-the-cut-up-technique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/?p=2710","title":{"rendered":"What next? Using the cut-up technique."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
If you try hard, cutting up small pieces of paper can lead to ... a book.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

To explain\u2026<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

There are 15 of them. Easy, right?<\/p>\n

Wrong.<\/p>\n

It was a lot harder than I thought.<\/p>\n

I’ve had stories in a couple of anthologies. In Loves Me Loves Me Not<\/a>, the story order was set by the publishers \u2013\u00a0and the ‘big names’ were right at the top \u2013 as they deserved to be.<\/p>\n

When I donated a story to the 100 Stories for Queensland <\/a>charity anthology \u2013 the stories were in alphabetical order of the writer’s name. That seems fair.<\/p>\n

But what about a book of my stories?<\/p>\n

I thought about chronological order- but should that be the date of writing or publication?<\/p>\n

I considered alphabetical order \u2013 but five of the titles started with The. And I didn’t want stories that dealt with similar subjects side-by-side.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
paper, sissors and colour - the best starting point for any project<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That’s when I discovered the cut-up technique.. as used by the likes of William S Burroughs and David Bowie.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n

Never one to play by someone else’s rules, I added a twist. I made a slip of paper for each story \u2013 but each story also had one or more colours associated with it \u2013 green for an Australian setting, yellow if children were featured, magenta for fantasy or sci fi\u2026 and so on.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 but there were too many stories with the same colours. Still, it was a good starting point.<\/p>\n

I then moved one.. or two .. or three..\u00a0 of them until I was satisfied with the final order.<\/p>\n

I spent about 40 minutes agonising over story order before doing the cut-ups, without reaching a decision.<\/p>\n

\u00a0With them, I decided the order in ten minutes.<\/p>\n

The book is available here <\/a>as a free download. Please let me know if you think I got the order right!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
There's a lot of pink - I wonder what that might stand for?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7g6jm-HI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janetgover.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}