Borderlines Competition – win £20!

**Can you create a piece of writing using the Borderlines material as an inspiration?**

We’re looking for writing in any form – it might be a sonnet, a story, a piece of ultra-short fiction, a character-sketch, a haiku, or anything else you fancy – but it must use the material that the public contributed to the Borderlines project as a starting point.

So we’re not looking for your stories and poems about borders in general – we’re asking for work specifically inspired by the Borderlines digital artwork. So have a good look at www.tellusanotherone.org/live to get some inspiration!

HOW TO ENTER

Either:

post your entry on Cartwheel’s Facebook fan page here, OR
email it to emma@cartwheelarts.org.uk

Entries need to reach us by Leap Day (February 29^th, 2012). The winner will get a £20 voucher, a ‘Go away, I’m writing!’ mug, and of course, publication in the next Scribble magazine.

Good luck!

Not sure how to start? Here are a few ideas!

1) Pick out one comment that interests you, and use it as a starting point

Have a read through people’s responses to the Borderlines questions, until you find one that sparks your imagination. For example:

What kind of person do you think wrote, “in my dreams i am flying with hannah montana and hello kitty”? Could you create a character-sketch of how you imagine that person to be, or a short story about something completely different, but in which they are the main character?
Many of the comments, although they’re short, feel as if there’s a whole tale behind them. What about “As a woman camping alone for a week in the highlands and climbing mountains by myself. It allowed me to reflect on my life, my goals, my dreams” or “for me it was nine months in the army – they treated you like schoolkids – I’m 86”, or “i dreamt about my wife, who’s been dead a while, which was both nice and painful at the same time.” Can you write a poem or story based on a comment like that? You needn’t use the actual line in the story – just use it as an inspiration.
What about the person who wrote, “Going vegan because I am no longer part of all the cruelty”? Can you tell the story in which a character comes to hold this belief? Or could you write a short play or dialogue between this character and someone who disagrees with their view? How will the conversation end?

2) Search for something specific, and write about what you find

If you go to www.tellusanotherone.org/live and click on “advanced options” just underneath the map, you can search by keyword, or by date and time.

Think of a word to search for. (Ordinary words with “big” meanings seem to work best. How about “love” or “scared” or “dream” or “home” or “time”?) When the results of your search come up, use them as a basis for a poem about the subject you searched for.
Or try searching for a specific date and time (remember that the Big Day was 1^st October 2011, so a lot of the answers will be from different times on that date.) When your results come up, you might find that more than one person was posting at exactly the same time. You could imagine that these different people actually meet and having a conversation – who are they, where do they meet, and what do they talk about next?

3) Make a “cut-up”

The cut-up is a writing technique that developed in the 1920s. The idea is that by taking something that’s already written (in this case, the public’s contributions to the Borderlines project) and chopping it up and rearranging the words into a different order, you can reveal new ideas and new meanings that the original writers didn’t even know were there. The people who created the Borderlines project made some brilliant cut-ups with the material – have a look at them for inspitation. They’re all on the Borderlines project’s Facebook group, here.

How to make a cut-up

You can print out the Borderlines responses onto paper, select bits that you like, and physically cut them out and stick them down into a new arrangement.
Or you could copy-and-paste the bits you like into a Word document, and take it from there.
Or why not have a go at using www.wordle.net. If you copy-and-paste a load of responses from Borderlines into Wordle, it will arrange them for you into a word-cloud, which can help you see unexpected connections and patterns you hadn’t noticed before.

A true cut-up ONLY uses material from the source – you can’t add any extra words of your own. But of course, you can repeat words from the source material if you like – so if you need a “the” or an “and”, there’s sure to be one somewhere that you can use again!