Found Forms: Bring magic to the everyday with writing
You may be familiar with “form” as different types of short fiction writing. This can include flash fiction (6 word stories, 50 word stories), short stories, novellas. But what if you could uncover a world of more forms to add a bit of flavour to your short fiction?
Welcome to the first of my posts on writing!
Today I’m going to be writing about “found forms”. Found forms are essentially taking mundane objects around you such as texts, tweets, instructions, documents, cards, receipts and turning them into a form of writing. Have you ever seen a story written in tweet form? How about as a receipt? “Found” comes from the fact that you find these objects around you.
As supported by Shields and Vollmer (2012), the 21st century is full of information, and the ‘genres and linguistic forms’ that structure that information can be restraining. If you look around you, language is expected to behave in a particular way in whatever form it’s using. But what if, instead of just a mundane document that you may not look twice at or an internet post you might just scroll by, we elevate the language in these forms to create a story. What if we make this artefact come alive in a new and exciting storytelling way?
You may ask: what is the point of this? Well, using found forms could mean:
- Authenticity
- Freedom as writers
- Meaning through subversion
- Meaning through the form itself acting as a symbol/representing an idea
- To enliven a mundane form
Vollmer (2015) says from his introduction to ‘21st Century Prose’ series:
- ‘it seems weird that so many writers seem more interested in foregrounding story-or plot-than the language they rely on to tell that story.’
- Vollmer wants ‘to experience the kind of narrative fueled by the idiosyncratic manner in which the writer sets words on the page’.
- ‘to tap into modes of representation that exhibit an artist’ idiosyncratic and thus singular experience of being alive in the world’.
Below I will add an image of form prompts that you could possibly explore in your next short fiction endeavour!
So how do you use these found forms?
- Know the rules of the form
- Break them
- How? Use unexpected language for that form; and
- Put the form to a different use (i.e by having the form carry a story rather than an instruction/directions/proof/answers/whatever the expected content is)
Tips:
- Choose a form that has meaning regarding your story
- Know the architecture of the form
- Signal the form clearly
- Look to surprise within that form
That’s all for today!
Signing off,
Quinn.
References:
Shields, D & Vollmer, M 2012, Fakes: an anthology of pseudo-interviews, faux lectures, quasi-letters and “found texts”, W. W. Norton Company, New York.
Vollmer, M 2015, 21st Century Prose: We like words and voices and that for which we have no name, Essay Daily, viewed 14 September 2021, <https://www.essaydaily.org/2015/04/matthew-vollmer-on-21st-century-prose.html?showComment=1429714071716>.
Further reading and examples:
O'Neill, R 2014, The Lists, The Monthly, viewed 1 October 2021, <https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/december/1385816400/ryan-oneill/lists>. (love this one)
Orozco, D 2011, Orientation: A Short Story by Daniel Orozco, FSG Work in Progress, viewed 14 September 2021, <https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2011/05/17/orientation-by-daniel-orozco/>.
Yu, C 2020, Problems for Self-Study, Harvard Review Online, viewed 14 September 2021, <https://harvardreview.org/content/problems-for-self-study-2/>. (for any physics enthusiasts)
