Postcards & Other Experiments

This is placeholder text. To change this content, double-click on the element and click Change Content.

The postcard exercise is part of a larger story-writing technique wherein you steal preexisting forms (often ones not considered “literary”) and pirate them to produce poems, essays, and fictional stories. Many writers have used forms such as postcards, dictionary entries, recipes, fictional interviews, water bills, and mock scientific reports to create their stories.

The benefit of using a form such as a fictional postcard, recipe, or a dictionary entry is that it comes with a very tight structure and often a predetermined voice. We are all familiar with the dry and academic voice of scientific reports, for example, or the icy tone of a form-letter sent by a corporation—and we can use these tones to have a lot of fun. Remember that part of the joy of working in form is when you allow the strictness of the form to break its container just slightly.

For example, what does a dictionary entry written by someone having marital problems sound like? Are there moments when that author might let something slip into the definition that they didn’t intend? What about a formal scientific report written by someone who still longs to see unicorns? Again, the variations are as infinite as are the genres it can span!



Let's Get Started

1. Create a list of 20 forms.

These forms should use language which already exist in the world. Here's a couple examples to get started:

Postcards

Book Reviews

Self-Help Article

Menus

Report Card

Dictionary Entries

Anthropological Study



2. Choose one of the forms from your list and spend 15-30 minutes writing.

Within the constraints of the form you've chosen, write a story/prose poem. Often the form comes with really fun additional elements you can play with (for example, dictionary entries often have synonyms listed afterward, scientific reports get to use graphs and formulas, etc.)



3. Now use the same form to create a second piece.
One of the exciting elements of formalist constraint is that, within the parameters of the form you’ve chosen, you still have a lot of room for variation. For example, in his book, Michael Martone: Fictions, author Michael Martone explores an entire collection using the rather strict form of The Contributor’s Note. Exploring the same form multiple times will allow you to play with the very malleable and expandable terrain of the form you’ve chosen.





Note: in some cases you may find that you’ve got a series emerging. Particularly if you choose a form which is shorter (dictionary entry for example) you may find that the story or poem you’re producing is actually a series of dictionary entries.