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book collages
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 look like 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 with Bet Me and You Again , I made collages, and they helped so much that I doubt I'll ever do another book without one.
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. Then 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 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 Prewriting Collage:
This is the collage for Don't Look Down , the collaborative novel I've just finished with Bob Mayer. 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.
You Again Prewriting Collage:
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. I built this 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. The words this time are from poems, most frequently Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening." This book isn't finished--I'm letting it rest while I work on another book and then I'll return to it--but when I'm ready to start it again, this collage will put me back in that world, in particular the crowded richness of the house and the intensity of the characters.
Bet Me Copy Edit Collage:
The Bet Me Collage was a different process because I did it after the book was turned in to help with the rewrite and the copy edit. It's much smaller than the other two and divided into public and private spaces in its three tiers. 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).