Writing Experiments: The Personal
Writing Experiments: The Personal
Critical strategies:
Take a sentence or two from a paper you've written in which you refer to yourself in some way. Then try changing the pronoun to "I" and "you" and "one" and "she/he" or "we" to see if either of these pronominal shifts affects the tone of your writing. Which sounds better in an art writing context? Try to relate (or contrast) your experience to Maria Fusco's article "Say Who I Am."
Creative strategies:
Write a paragraph or so in which you confess something. It can be made up. It could be a confession about art or your own practice.
When you're done writing, analyze the kind of language you use in writing the confession. In what discourse situations could you use this writing? How could you shift the uses of language to make it work in other scenarios?
Creative Analysis:
Take a paragraph of your own writing that you feel good about and try to come up with a list of adjectives that describe the "voice" in your writing.
Adrian Searle writes of Gillian Wearing's work, "This is what we call a personal voice, which we often take for a kind of authenticity, generated by some inner spark: the essential me inside the mess of being alive." Later he says, "all art is a construction, and so are we."
Post your paragraph and the list.
Low Stakes - For Fun
Write about a time when you felt lucky.