Collages

The other week, I went to an RWA meeting about making collages. Okay, full disclosure: I’m not much of an art person. I have always appreciated looking at it, and adore museums and pretty things. I’m simply not gifted in that arena. Seriously. I can’t draw stick figures. But I can write, and so I’ve never much minded that I can’t do visual art for shit.

People have been telling me about the collage thing for quite a long time, and, given my lack of skills in that area, I’ve always been highly skeptical about Making Collages Work For Me.

But hey, I can wield a pair of scissors and a glue stick and I had nothing else to do that afternoon, so why not indulge my inner child and play arts and craft.

The speaker, Beth Fedorko, had a slightly different method to collaging than I’ve seen in the past. We were instructed to go through stacks of magazines, and simply rip out any pages that spoke to us.

Most of the magazines were Oprah’s. My book is a Rome-set fantasy about killer unicorns. I was not optimistic. But, with the interest of keeping an open mind, I started ripping. And the more I fell into the almost hypnotic rhythm of flip, look, rip, the more I started seeing possibilities in the play of colors on the page.

The Oprah magazine has amazing advertisements. Lush, beautiful, with extraordinary color, textures, scenery, models… I found most of my stuff on those pages. For the most part, I remained literally minded. I was looking for people, for ruins, for unicorns… but as I kept the various settings, creatures, and peoples from my book at the forefront of my mind, I couldn’t help but be drawn to unusual things — a purse with a strange pattern to the leather, a gorgeous pen, a series of black and white jewelry commercials. They were connected to the book, I just didn’t know how. But I wasn’t thinking about that — it was just: connection, rip, go. Later, when the time came to cut and paste, I could figure out how it all fit together.

Oddly enough, I found this process worked for me. When it came time to actually piece together the bits of the collage, I found that I knew where to put it. A dog lent his canines to give the unicorn fangs; a bit of unusual leather became the ever-changing dappled coat of a kirin; a gorgeous bridge, was, properly trimmed, a secret and mysterious passageway.

The only downside was the images of people. In almost every book I’ve ever written, I’ve “cast” the various characters in my book. I always know exactly what they look like in my head, so if I don’t have those images on hand, I’m not going to be able to “replace” them with people I *don’t* see. So I only got two characters from the book (and I was actually pretty amazed, especially given that the shot of Alison Lohman was actually from White Oleander, where she plays a character named Astrid), and the biggest image in the whole collage is actually of a minor character.

Here it is. Cool huh? I’m thinking this will probably serve as a jumping off point for a bigger collage.

Speaking of, I still haven’t “cast” my heroine’s love interest. I have an idea of what I want him to look like in my head, but I don’t see his face yet. Something along the lines of J.D. Williams, but a little less… rough around the edges? (Maybe it’s because I’m used to seeing him as a hardened drug dealer on The Wire.) But yeah, kind of like him. The character is quiet, strong, guarded, intellectual, careful, gentle…

I don’t know if I need to write more of him in order to nail him down or if I need to cast him in order to write more. (All three, I shouldn’t wonder.) Sometimes it takes a couple of chapters of screen time to really figure out what makes a person tick. I remember when I was first drafting Secret Society Girl and writing the initiation sequence. I didn’t know Amy was afraid of the water until Poe put her in that coffin and she started screaming. It just clicked, and it in turn made Amy click into place for me. I could suddenly see so much more of who she was and what her background was. So then I could go back and rewrite the opening scenes with more of that in mind. (Why, for instance, she’d been so bored in Myrtle Beach that spring break.)

I know a lot of writers who talk about how characters will suddenly “speak” to them and tell them what their deals are; tell them all the secrets they’ve been keeping. I know Laurie Halse Anderson describes her process that way — especially in Speak. I never do character interviews or worksheets or anything like that because it feels false to me — like I’m deciding someone’s favorite ice cream flavor without ever having met them. If the character has a favorite ice cream flavor, they’ll tell me in the scene where they are eating ice cream. If they’re afraid of the water, we’ll find out because the guy running the initiation knows… even if the author doesn’t. Clever Poe.

Which just goes to show you that even if you’re a big time plotter like me, characters can still surprise you.

Today I’m going to New York, so I won’t be around for much commentary.