Still experimenting.

I’ve recently gone back over the docs and files from my weekly Experimental Fiction classes earlier this year, and wanted to share more of my explorative exercises with you. My chosen ‘theme’ for 2026 was learning, and one of the many goals I set was to finish the/a/any damn book(s). So this course helped a lot!

Here’s something I already wrote about it, early on…

Week 3 was when we explored The Readymade Form (ugh, don’t Google that looking for a succinct definition of the writing style, because you’ll only be served sales pitches for ‘quick and easy’ digital form templates that you probably have to reformat entirely anyway once downloaded).

Basically it’s a way of putting narrative across in a particular medium that may seem restrictive (or it certainly did to me at first!) but can be a really great creative device; i.e. time-stamped receipts from a month-long relationship (read this piece here for reference — I loved it), letters to a specific person or business (see the latter here, in a piece by Lydia Davis, and an attempt at it below, in the exercise we were given) or instructions/recipes (annoyingly I can’t find this reference piece online but it was by this guy, and my attempt which was actually just a brutal edit of a pre-existing and beloved — by me — BBC recipe, below)…

I think this format has been my favourite to explore so far. I hope my short pieces (each written in 6-ish minutes, please bear in mind) reflect that.

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Exercise 1; a complaint letter that has more depth than it may initially appear to.

Dear [town name redacted!] Theatres team,

I have to express my disappointment in the recent production of ‘Punk Rock’ at your [redacted] Theatre. This in no way reflects the play itself — I actually studied it at school, and then performed it at sixth form! I played Cissy, the most popular ‘top dog’ lad’s girlfriend who was fierce and determined to leave her small town life behind and not let any other girls take her crown. I actually found the young woman who played the part quite amusing and believable.

It could be argued that the play is unnecessarily violent with sexual themes also, and that its script contains too many expletives — actually I was slightly surprised to see it was to be put on in a town with a huge elderly, Conservative and middle class population such as [town name redacted], and as I anticipated, a few old grannies walked out during — but that’s not what bothered me.