English 103

Mr. Dinan

Some Ideas for Creating a Collage Essay -- Your Problem-Solution Situation

Gathering Stuff for the Collage Essay: Introductory Comments

The first thing to do is look around (and listen around) to discover materials that are evidence of the problem-situation, stuff that might “picture” that situation, “show it in action”, give it some concreteness. Using the categories below (and others you can and will think of), go ahead and “collect” as much material as you can. It’s likely that you won’t use most of it, but some of it you will use--and you won’t know until later what will “work” and “fit”, so give this “gathering” process a decent amount of time.

Where do I look?

--at your recent past: things that have happened that indicate/demonstrate the situation

--at your distant past: similar situations that you’ve dealt with in the past

--in conversations you’ve had: about your problem, w/ people who are the problem, with yourself, etc.

--in your physical surroundings

--at the people in your problematic environment, local and elsewhere

--at your own body

--in your medicine cabinet

--on your desk, in your notebook, in your letters and journals, on your bookshelves, in your desk drawers and filing cabinets

--in books/magazines/essays you have read

--in shows you have watched (TV, films, stage productions)

--in music lyrics and videos

--on the Web

--0ther Places and Times

(If you come up with other “stuff” later, feel free to use it. There’s no reason to commit yourself to the first list you make. Things often arrive unannounced.)

Selecting from the “Stuff” You’ve Gathered

You now have more materials for your collage that you can possibly use, so you’ll need to make some (tentative) decisions about what to actually use and what to set aside for now. These are your decisions to make; you are the expert regarding the situation you are writing about, so you know best what will most clearly show that situation in all its complexity and personal significance. (Having said that, I’ll also say that some narrative historical material seems inevitable in this kind of essay.)

Composing Your Individual Segment (or “Collage” Items, if you will)

Once you’ve selected the items you might want to use in your collage essay (you may change your mind and make cuts or substitutions at any time, of course), the next--and most creative--process is to figure out how you will compose each of the items. Below are some possibilities; you can add to the list.

--narrative nuggets

--dramatic (stage play) dialogue

--physical description

--internal monologue

--speculations/analyses

--pictures

--poetry/song lyrics

--screenplay segments

--letters

For each of the composition forms noted above (plus any you came up with on your own), there are often some additional options for how you render them. Consider playing around with such elements as

--narrative point of view (1st-person, 3rd person, etc.)

--verb tenses (past tense, present tense)

--voice (remember the Two Voices project?)

--typography/fonts (“Times New Roman,” “Calligraphy,” etc.)

--format (ex: italics, boldface, etc.)

--arrangement/segmentation

--color?

Arranging Your Composed Materials Into a Collage Essay

In some ways this is the hardest part of crafting a collage essay. After first gathering a lot of possible raw material, you’ve then selected the stuff you want to use and composed the different elements in ways that you like. Final move: arrange them into a “collage”--well, into the written counterpart of a traditional visual collage, that is. It is hard to give someone else advice about this part of the process except to say that how your present and sequence your materials on the page should be patterned. Better yet, the pattern should be one that you can explain. (For example, you should be able to talk a bit about why--to make up an example--you placed the narrative anecdote about your noisy roommate’s party before your emotional interior monologue about how you’d like to kill him but after the excerpts from the RA’s actual citation of your room for being too noisy.

Again, play around, check out your options, put together something you like.