Hello there! So, I thought it would be fun to upload some of the folio work I did back in my 3rd year of uni that I was actually pretty proud of, but I didn’t want to clog up Short Stories or Poety, and I wanted all of the folio pieces to be clearly grouped together. So, here you have it. My 3rd year writing folio.
This folio was a variety of pieces demonstrating constraint-based writing. I really enjoyed it, and found that working with the constraints added so many layers of meaning and intention that I wouldn’t have achieved otherwise. I encourage you to not read the rest of this summary now, and go read the folio pieces. See if you can figure out what the constraint is for each one, then you can check back here and see (below) if your guess was correct.
First things first: This introductory piece is constrained by the fact that it does not at all use the letter ‘a’. It also introduces the character Frederick, who will appear in subsequent pieces in the folio, and who serves simply to create continuity between otherwise disparate pieces.
Five at a time: Pretty simple: no words which are longer than 5 characters were used in the construction of this piece.
Dust: This is probably my personal favourite. Every second sentence contains no active verb. This creates an almost unbearable slowness and lack of action that is perfect for the story.
Drunk and loving it: This is both ‘found poetry’ in that I did not create the words, but simply found them in the world and shaped/curated them into their final form as seen here, and ‘image poetry’ in that it is a picture, and the visual elements add another layer of meaning created by the way your eyes have to move to read and understand the poem.
Ballroom: Each stanza contains four lines, and of those four lines the syllables all follow this count: 6, 8, 3, 5.
Garbled: I wrote a simple bit of dialogue and then used that as source material to create a new piece of art by jumbling up the word order. This was not meaningless or thoughtless, but actually embodies the very spirit of the dialogue in the first place. They were talking past each other. In this fashion, the reader gets to experience the lack of successful communication that the characters were experiencing.
Distilled Orthopraxy 