Collette

[How do you use writing?]

I use writing a plotting device, I have a heavily research based practice, which involves reading, I use what I call ‘plug’ words’; Often these plugs words or terms are ones which have stuck with me for a couple of weeks or month. The current plug term I am working with began from “animal husbandry” has transmuted into “matter husbandry.” I use them as ‘plugs or clots of information, as in plugs can be pulled out of a bath tub, a hairy, greasy clump.

I re-read in order to revitalise work. I have a lot of ‘plug’ documents which sit dormant… I come back to them and work into them. These ‘plug documents’ consist, terms I enjoy, have a sense of word-play, terms I find via twitter, they are always short bursts of information, terms I hear on the radio (actively trying to move away from listening to too much BBC radio 4); the written word must be typed and placed into one of these documents. Recently I have been writing on Post-it notes and stick them into notebooks; they are modular and movable. Most of my works start with a diagram which plot the point I want to get to.

I realise I write in a middle aged male voice. A lot of my work has involved difficult men, which means I read as a middle-aged man. I use outmoded terminology, (...for instance, ‘olfactory’). The owner of this voice is totally self-satisfied [patrician, pompous, verbose]. This may be because writing comes easily and I assume people will ‘get it’. My research has been into hobbyists. I have invented my own idiosyncratic mode of address. Have an anthropological interest in the hobbyist. [Why not outsource the reading to a middle-aged man? Also, consider the hobbyist’s relation to power, Steve recalls his own family's hobbies and suggests they disguise a relation to the British class system and empire. The hobbyist, traditionally, also has a relation to labour, in industrial society it was a way of stepping out of the discourse of labour.]

Because I feel I have created a persona I feel I need to address it, own it(corrects self and changes word to utilise) and utilise it using a female voice. I have realised in the past week, there is such strength in the written word, [maybe you over privilege the written word]

I would like to have more of a harness on what I write.

C reads-[ it is very ‘ruminative’, ]

Nana’s seminar = texts written by women, ‘the repulsive woman’,... I want to read and perform, because excitement is in the writing and I don’t give enough attention to the presentation. Should be more equally divided.

[A set of tools and instruction.]

[Steve’s task for you= write more about this in very clear, journalistic tone, none of your arcane or flowery mode of address. See Orwell’s Politics and the English Language (on Methods page of wiki). Although they betray a prejudice for 'economical' prose, Orwell’s strictures are useful to use as a writing machine.]