Weekend Stubble

Over at the Times of London, Grahame Rawle describes how he collaged the text of his novel Woman's World from his massive collection of 1960s women's magazines:

Found text became an integral part of the story. By cutting out words and rearranging them on the page, “big-boned” Norma Fontaine finds a feminine voice with which to tell her tale — a voice that inevitably takes on the chirpy wisdom and underlying moral tone of the original writing.

To get the story structure right, I set the collage aside and wrote my book in the traditional way as a word-processed document. At the same time I was collecting fragments of text from the magazines, saving anything that I thought might prove relevant – words, phrases and sentences that would approximate to what I wanted to say. I think in all I clipped more than a million words from editorial pieces, romance stories, problem pages, and advertisements..... A sentence might be made from five or six separate components. A simple line such as “I was furious and had to leave the room” could end up as “Red rage rose within me like mercury in a toffee thermometer and I knew I had to leave before I reached the boiling point for fudge”. Instead of saying “Nonsense”, Norma might say: “That’s all tosh and table margarine.”

In a related story: Cosmopolitan Releases 40-Year Compendium: 812,683 Ways To Please Your Man.