by Ros Woolner
Earlier this month, Roger Noons led a very enjoyable workshop on collaborative writing.
As he pointed out at the start of the session, when we get feedback in a writing group and incorporate suggestions into our writing, that is already a form of collaboration.
However, the workshop focused on more formal types of collaboration. Roger gave a quick overview of some places where we might have come across collaborative writing, including songs (lyricist and composer) and films adapted from novels by one or more screenwriters.
The most relevant example for the workshop though was the renga, a collaborative form of Japanese poetry. Renga have alternating verses of haiku and couplets and are often written in a group setting. Sometimes there is a time limit for each verse, which turns the exercise into a competitive game.
As a warmup, we split into pairs and played a word association game – one person writes a sentence, the other person picks up on a word or idea from the first sentence and writes a new one, and so on. Roger’s example:
The yellow curtains in my bedroom contrast with the royal blue carpet. The carpet fitter had a lion’s head tattooed on his left arm.
Leonora, a lioness at Dudley Zoo has stopped eating since her mate, Lancelot died.
When the nurse weighed me, I told her I was a failed anorexic.
Having read out our sequences and listened to everyone else’s, we went back into our pairs to develop them further. Some people turned them into haiku, others started a haiku train, in which the last word of one person’s haiku became the first word of the next. And one group had a go at the prose option: writing an article for a local newspaper. If you come across a story about escaped sheep in the Mander Centre with lots of baaad puns, you’ll know who to blame!
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