Note: This page is being revised with new photos coming soon.
When I’m starting a book, I try to get as many sensory cues as possible: the taste of the food in the books, the sounds (music, water, street noise, whatever), and the things that feellike the book, not illustrations of scenes or characters but images and object that evoke the mood. I used to just keep them all taped or tacked around the computer, but during the copy edit for Bet Me I made a collage, and it helped so much that I doubt I’ll ever do another book without one.
BET ME:
I’ve always collaged, but I didn’t start to collage to brainstorm my stories until I was in copy edits for Bet Me. I was trying to wrangle the book into a tighter structure, and for some reason that I do not for the life of me remember, I decided to collage the copy edit. I found an old shadow box in my junk stash, used the three sections in it to divide the book into my heroine’s public life in the outside world (bottom section), her public life inside buildings and rooms (middle section) and her private life in her apartment (top section). Most of the pictures in it I’d collected as brainstorming for the story, and then I hit the craft stores to make replicas of things that were in the book like Min’s shoes and also to find objects to represent important symbols in the book, like the chicken next to the bottle of Marsala to represent Min’s Chicken Marsala. The picture of Min’s snow globe is a photo of the vintage snow globe I found on eBay before I started the book; it still sits in my office. The pearls aren’t in the book, I just liked the way they looked glued to the frame. This collage really has the look and feel of Bet Me, so it was a great touchstone during the copy edit (which I always use as another rewrite/polish).
YOU AGAIN
It was so amazingly helpful in seeing the book as a whole that I did it for the next book,You Again: One of the things I like most about the collage process is that it’s a double layer of discovery. First I find things out as I choose images and objects; for example, I didn’t realize there was a time crunch in You Again until I kept cutting out clocks. But it’s more than just discovery. You Again is a sprawling story with a lot of characters trapped in a three-story house for the week between Christmas and New Years. So to organize and contain all the images, I built the collage as a house, with the terrace in front and some blue excelsior water (the Ohio River) lapping at the stonework. Within that framework, I could build my Upstairs/Downstairs communities, get the feeling for the interior spaces, see the relationships between the characters, and put in placeholders for the scenes and symbols. Unfortunately, You Again stalled out and I went on to write other books, but some day I will finish tit. I know that because of the collages I’ve done for it, both scissors-and-glue collages and virtual collages done in the Curio program.
Once I start putting everything together, I keep the process as intuitive as possible, gluing things down where they feel right, and the juxtaposition of the pictures, objects and printed words often shows me relationships I hadn’t seen before; the fact that Pepper ends up so isolated in the Don’t Look Down collage below made me realize how much trouble she was really in. I keep the collage for the current book beside me as I write, adding to it and taking away from it as I work, using it as a touchstone for that story’s world.
DON’T LOOK DOWN:
To get out of my writer’s block and also to learn more about writing Real Men, I teamed up with Bob Mayer to write Don’t Look Down, a story that takes place mostly on a bridge over the swamps of the low country in South Carolina. The protagonist is a movie director named Lucy Armstrong (that’s her in the center), and she’s caught between her ex-husband, Connor Nash, (on the right) and the new guy she’s just met, J. T. Wilder, (on the left). The idea is not that Lucy, J.T. and Connor look like this–they don’t, at least not in my mind–but that the photos capture the characters’ personalities (that’s why J. T. is represented by two different men who don’t physically resemble each other). Everything else on here represents keys scenes or major characters, such as Lucy’s niece Pepper (the little girl sitting in the swamp on the lower right side) or Althea, the actress starring in the movie who seduces J. T. (the blonde saluting up at the top left). The song lyrics I’ve printed out and glued on represent Lucy’s conscious and unconscious desires: She’s sitting on a lyric from her character’s signature song, and behind her in the moon is another lyric, this one the subconscious underpinning to the one she’s perched on. This is the only book I’ve ever written that takes place mostly out of doors (that would be Bob’s doing) so this collage is swamp and woods and road and bridge, no interior spaces at all.
HOT TOY
Then I did a novella called “Hot Toy” for a Christmas anthology called Santa Baby. I used a dilapidated shadow box that reminded me of the splintered shelves in the toy store, and used the frame to collage the character of the protagonist, Trudy, and the box itself to collage the plot with its antagonists and complications.
THE UNFORTUNATE MISS FORTUNES: Mare
Then I did another collaboration, this one with two friends, Eileen Dreyer and Anne Stuart. We wrote about three sisters who were witches, and we each took one sister. Mine was the youngest, Mare, so the collage I made was really Mare’s collage, not a collage for the whole book.
AGNES AND THE HITMAN
Then Bob and I collaborated again, this time on Agnes and the Hitman, another story set in the low country, but this time in a big house on a river:
DOGS AND GODDESSES
My next book was a collaboration was with Anne Stuart again and Lani Diane Rich, a story called Dogs and Goddesses. My character Shar was the oldest, and again this is really her collage, not a collage for the whole book. Shar’s preoccupation with color and magic dominates the design. It’s organized around a step temple since that’s where most of the action takes place, although the coffee house at the top of the pyramid is equally important.
WILD RIDE
Then Bob and I did our last collaboration, Wild Ride, an insane story about an Ohio amusement park plagued by demons that was as much fun to write as it was to collage for.
MAYBE THIS TIME
After that, I went back to solo novels with my homage to The Turn of the Screw, a ghost story called Maybe This Time:
Currently I’m working on a four book series, The Liz Danger Mysteries about a ghostwriter. Even though I’m writing the books one at a time, I’m collaging them all at once to make sure I keep them connected thematically:
LAVENDER’S BLUE
REST IN PINK
PEACHES AND SCREAMS
YELLOW BRICK ROADKILL
And down the road, I’m going write books about Alice Archer, all grown up after Maybe This Time, and Nadine Goodnight, all grown up after Faking It. Here are their collages at the very start.
HAUNTING ALICE, aka Spooky Alice
STEALING NADINE
And also percolating in the back of my head are two more collaborations. One is with Anne Stuart and Lani Diane Rich (now writing as Lucy March) again, and the collage is still very bare bones:
FAIRY TALE LIES
And another with a collaborator whose name shall remain secret for awhile because she wants it that way. That collage is really bare bones:
CLAIRE AND ROSIE
Nothing but good times and a lot of tape and glue ahead.
