LITERATURE
LABORATORY
Writing experiments by Bernadette Mayer.
is a new poetic form, useful for creating poetry + art. Practice the technique at the Jade Quill salon.
has been called "the longest literary palindrome in the world" by Paul Braffort
In a variation of a progressive alliterative technique used in Walter Abish's Alphabetic Africa, Analyzing Haze is a story of 26 paragraphs, each corresponding to a letter of the alphabet. In the first paragraph, every word must contain A. In the second paragraph, every word must contain A or B, etcetera, such that the last paragraph's words may include any letter. However, this final paragraph is not unconstrained, because, to offset this progressive opening of vocabulary, the story is also fully homoliteral—every two adjacent words must have a letter in common.
Freitag's plot triangle is a classic formal structure in literature. The triangle describes the narrative arc of an immersive work of ficton. The X axis is time and the Y axis is dramatic conflict: beginning at zero, the curve steadily rises in exposition, peaks in climax, and rapidly descends in resolution. As readers (or film viewers), we recognize this structure and find it gratifying. But what happens when you write a story with a different curve?
In this experiment, you can click on the plot diagrams to hear a musical translation of the variation on a plot curve.
allows you to write and revise Don Quixote,
the novel by Cervantes
here > there
