Day 17: Don't Go Breaking My Art

I haven't posted for a couple of days, because I've been working on my promised post about world building, and I'm still not happy with it.

I've also been pretty busy working on my novel (!) and I haven't felt like writing anything unrelated. I still don't. So this post will be related.

Sometimes, when I'm writing, I get a little stuck. I can't quite visualize where my character is going. I don't mean existentially, like what their personal development will look like. I mean physically, like what street they end up on when they exit the building where they just escaped the clutches of the insane butcher. Where does the meat district end and the downtown begin? Where is my character's house in relation to the Spire of Doom?

That's when I like to step  away from the keyboard and pick up the colored pencils.

Now, I'm no artist (that honor goes to... er... every other person in my family) (yes, Dad, you too). But the inherent quality of the drawing isn't what matters to me. (Or, if you're my dad, the aesthetic merit of the art isn't where I find quality). It's just the act of moving my hand, making lines, that starts my brain thinking in a concrete, visual way.

I've talked about writing being visual before on this blog, but that post talked about using pictures as prompts to get your writing started, not about making your own pictures as a way to keep the story going once it's started.

I've also talked a bit about outlining vs. winging it, like this post and this one. In the almost-a-year since that last post went live, though, my process for outlining has changed; I've refined it a bit, just as I've refined the book that I've been outlining and re-outlining, imagining and re-imagining for the past three years. (One might think I should, possibly, stop imagining and outlining and just get down to some actual writing, mightn't one? Well, one can calm one's pants down. I'm writing. In fact, I'm going to be posting teasers and excerpts up here, probably next month.)

Outlining the plot has always been hard for me. Pacing, figuring out how to keep the story moving forward, is a huge challenge; mostly all I want to do is put my characters in various rooms and let them have long, witty, tense conversations, because I love dialogue. I finally stumbled across a method outlining that works for me, though.

Color-coded post-its. Yellow is for characterization scenes/relationships, blue for the main plot, and purple for the secondary plot. That first piece of paper outlines the first 1/3 of the novel. As you can see, the second 1/3 is a lot less well-fleshed-out, but I've got some key elements down. I like the structure and freedom this method gives me: I know what big points I need to hit, but there's room for growth and evolution as I write.

For me, drawing is also an integral part of outlining. In the project I'm working on right now (and, in one form or another, have been working on since before this blog was started), a lot of the story depends on the setting. So I drew the setting. I drew the setting over and over, and each time, the story changed the picture, or the picture changed the story, until I ended up with this:

(Remember, we're not judging my artistic ability here)

This shows the plans of my circular, self-contained, two-decker biodome city. As you can (kind of) see here, the upper level is very organized, orderly, and strictly segregated. The lower level is a mess. This is where all the infrastructure sits, and down here everybody just sort of lives wherever they can fit. 

When I draw out a city, it forces me to think about things I wouldn't think about otherwise; things like, how many people live here? Where do they get their food from? Where does their shower water come from? Where does it go? Where does the government get together to govern things?

All of these things, in turn, build the story. (Oh, all the greywater goes into a holding tank in the undercity, where it gets purified and sent back up? Why not have the villain poison the water supply? What if the main character's friend works at the water plant and is in charge of monitoring the mineral levels of the water?)

Now, in a story taking place in less of a far-fetched world, the infrastructure might not really matter, but the setting should still matter. Setting, for better or for worse, is a character, and you should be familiar with that character. Even if you don't need to create a city from scratch, you might end up looking at a map for an existing city, just to get a sense for how zoning works.

Setting is a character, but your characters are also characters. When I start building a character, a lot of what I focus on is pretty cerebral/emotional; I think about the character's backstory, their motivations, their personality, how they feel about the people around them. The problem is, very little of this is what actually needs to be communicated in the story. Unless you're writing some kind of uber-Literary meta-text where the narrative takes place entirely in the character's head and the conflict is all happening within their introspection, you're probably not going to actually write that much about the character's inner life. Much like the sewer system in the city of your story, your character's inner monologue should be there, under the surface, and it should be consistent, but you have to be aware that when you draw attention to it, people are going to get grossed out and you'd better have a good reason. 

So how do I get a good handle on my character's exterior aspects, like what kind of clothes they wear, what their hair looks like, how tall they are, how they stand? I've tried writing it out, describing them from the point of view of another character, or having one of those dreaded mirror-scenes of self-description. What works best for me, though, is to draw the character.

Seriously, I can feel you judging me. Cut it out.

It's important for me to do this, because when I write, I'm very sparse in my character design. Everybody is muted, toned-down; they're all very back-to-basics. When I draw, though, I get really bored with a color palette of olive green, grey, and black. Details creep in that I wasn't planning, like my character having a half-shaved head, red streaks, and a bunch of piercings. I never would have written her that way, but now that I have this drawing, her written character has more personality. In previous iterations of the book, my main character (the one that's drawn twice up there), always wore her curly hair in a braid, Katniss-style. When I started drawing her, though, she didn't want a braid. She wanted crazy blonde frizz going all over the place.

She also changed her name, because she just refused to look like a Talia.

The thing is, in a story, words are just tools; the words aren't the point. The story is the point: a story that comes with sights, sounds, smells, textures. A well-written story allows the words to disappear entirely, except for maybe a few places where the language is so well-crafted that it stands out on its own. Too much of this, though, and your readers will never be able to get past the words and sink into the story. So to my mind, drawing is a completely necessary component of writing (even if you're terrible at it). It also might be necessary for you to go out and smell a hamburger, if your character is eating a hamburger in a scene and you're stuck on that scene, or go outside when it's raining, or ride a subway. Do anything to get yourself away from the words for a while, and your story will take on new depth.

And if you happen to have a really, really, talented and kind sister, see if you can get her to do a mock-up of a cover for you.

Cover by Cassiopeia Pryor. Feel free to admire. Also, check out her blog here!

So anyway, that's a little peek into my writing process, what I've been doing over the past week (all of this has been created in the last 8 days). 

 

What about you? Do you ever draw when you're writing? (Or write when you're drawing?) Do you ever find yourself all tangled up in the words, unable to see the story for the prose? Tell me about it in the comments!