Exquisite Corpse: how to write great museum (and other) texts

Do you know what happens when 12 different people write a text? Funnily enough, it reads as if 12 different people have written it. At an individual level, the sentences are correct and coherent – some of them may even be quite beautiful – but together, they begin to turn ugly. They form a disjointed, painful, monster of a text. They are an Exquisite Corpse.

If you’re not already familiar with that term then you’re in for a treat! Exquisite Corpse was a collaborative drawing game invented in the 1920s by the Surrealists. The idea is simple: each artist draws a section of a figure, they fold the paper down to conceal all except the very tip of their drawing, the papers are passed round, and the next artist continues the lines, and adds the next set of body parts without any knowledge of what has gone before. At the end of the game, when all the sections have been filled in, the papers are unfolded to reveal a set of uniquely absurd creations. 

The drawing exercise is the most famous version of Exquisite Corpse but its origins are actually in written form. In poetry, the effects are highly arresting – they can be pleasantly and unpleasantly surprising. The game is wonderful and successful precisely because of the strange juxtapositions that emerge. This is not, however, what you should be aiming for when you are trying to take a reader on a specific journey – if you are trying to explain an idea or tell a story, for example, as you would in your museum text (and most other texts for that matter).

There will be plenty of things about your content that will be challenging – that will be novel, insightful, provocative (at least there should be, otherwise why are you writing it?) – but the words themselves should not be.

So how then, can the jarring nature of the Exquisite Corpse be avoided?

The first part of the solution is very obvious:

Step 1: Commission a writer.

Commission or allocate a writer. Just the one, whether internal or external to your organisation. Not only is this sensible as it will give the text a powerful single voice and a personality (to a greater or lesser extent as you think best) but it’s also an act of immense generosity. Writing is a joyful act and a pleasure – far better to give this joy to one person alone than attempt to collaborate and make everyone miserable as they compete to be heard.

The second part of the solution, is not always as obvious as it should be:

Step 2: Write the text

Write the text. That’s the great untold secret. It sounds like lunacy I’m sure and you must be thinking I’ve completely lost the plot, but when you look back at a text you are struggling with, answer me this – did you write that text? I mean, did you actually write it, or did you just assemble it? Sticking one fragment to another until all of the relevant ideas had been compiled?

Compiling has become our default setting and when all of the ideas have been compiled, there are always, of course, too many of them. Vital linking phrases start to get discarded left and right as you strive towards impossible word counts. You feel triumphant as the words vanish from view, like lines that are completed in a game of tetris, but just like in that gloriously addictive (yet somehow never completely fulfilling) puzzle – no matter how good you get at it, what you’re always left with is invariably full of holes.

Write the text.

Absorb all the ideas but then leave them where they lie. Brave that blank sheet of paper and write the text. You’ll feel much better for it and your writing will be better for it too.

Oh and if you are in need of a writer, please feel free to send a little joy my way!