When I started working on my second novel, Salamander, I didn’t have any idea of
where the story was going to go, or what the story was in the first place. All I knew was that it was set in the 18th
century, and the main character was a printer who was trying to print an
infinite book.
I had to find my way slowly into the story, which involved
many false trails and blind alleys. But I wanted it that way. I wanted to
create a strange, dreamlike world, to suit the fantastical nature of the
printer’s quest. So I didn’t want to know much about what was going to happen
ahead of the actual writing. In effect, I wanted to be the story’s first
reader. I wanted to be surprised as the book came to be.
But with a working method like this, I often got stuck. Sometimes
for long periods of time. I’d get my characters to a certain point and then I
wouldn’t know what to do with them next. At times like that, I turned to my
collage book. This was a hardcover artist’s sketch book, full of blank pages.
Whenever the novel ground to a halt, I would take images from the Internet, or
cut them from an old, worn-out book about the 18th century, and move
them around on one of the blank pages. My goal was to think about the scene I
was working toward, but from a different perspective. A visual, fragmentary
perspective, like a dream.
Eventually, after moving the images around for a while,
something would click. There’d be an “aha!” moment and I’d have the idea I was
looking for. Then I would take glue and fix the collage in place. So the
collage book became a record of these moments of inspiration. This book of
collages, in a sense, is the novel, reflected through this dreamlike,
associative logic of images.
My wife eventually discovered me making these collages and
she wondered why I was wasting my time with scissors and glue when I was
supposed to be working on the book. I told her that I was working on the book.
2 comments:
I love these insights into the mind of an artist.
I'm glad to hear it!
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