Footballs, sheds, socks and Angela Carter

Project H’s Lydia Marchant writes…

Angela Carter described the process of writing her subversive fairytale collection the Bloody Chamber as ‘putting new wine into old bottles’ and watching them ‘explode.’ Existing literature is the platform for bold, shocking writing; you can’t write anything new or ground breaking without taking into account what’s gone before.

We experimented with this on Wednesday and used existing extracts of a variety of poetry and prose as the basis of our own pieces. The short space of time we were given forced us to think quickly and the final products were so intensely personal because they were based on our initial reactions to the texts.

We wrote about footballs, sheds, socks. The frameworks and stimulus may have been identical but the final products were unrecognisable; although the activity seemed to ask us to take on someone else’s writing style, what it really did was make us find something really explosive: our own raw literary voices.