Observation Journal: Five Things to Steal from Porco Rosso

This page of the observation journal features five things to steal from that delightful Studio Ghibli film Porco Rosso, which at the time of these notes Grace Dugan and I had just been to see again.

(Related: previous Five Things to Steal posts and an explanation of what it means, drawn from Austen Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist.)

everything lit golden, then frosted with blue light

I made these notes the day after the Five Things to Steal from Midsomer Murders post, so you might notice recurring characters.

• Reliance on/use of very particular visual language to carry weight of story forward, while story is doing finer work.
  • (Language of Casablanca, etc, here — and I compared this to Sunshine on Leith which lets expected cliches do a lot of quick lifting for characterisation.)
  • I really liked the idea of making a choice of a very distinct aesthetic pay its way, and also to use it as misdirection to conceal a secondary story which is happening in the clues.
  • I made a note to practice writing scenes from different aesthetics (which I was already doing — see posts on aesthetics).

Adding an era and setting aesthetic to the previous page’s mouse

• A story that subtly passes a baton — the role of main character gets passed over and someone else ends the story.
  • Here it’s Fio, who was always the narrator — and it’s worth comparing to Nevil Shute’s No Highway (filmed with James Stewart as No Highway in the Sky), which ends with the narrator’s attention already being turned to new safety complications, and taken away from the winding-up of the main story.
  • I like the potential for combining this with an apprentice/journeyman/master transition (as noted on the previous page).
  • And also a connection to stories where a minor character gradually increases in importance, with a note to play with that in pictures.

somewhere, they still…

• At some point, heroes and villains being rolled together to be allied in gentle nostalgia, and bundled away together into the past as time accelerates.
  • There’s a note here about the passage of a time/dream being the plot rather than the characters.
  • The trick of playing with this is not to be too easily merely sentimental.
  • That sense of the focus of a camera receding on (ex-) main characters.
  • And then the eternal charm of an entirely isolated independent hotel/island/refuge. The last homely house, little groves…

• A character exists who is, incidentally, probably something significant (e.g. a spy), and that is never addressed by the plot.
  • Such a good trope.
  • Connected to notes on secrets.

• Two characters from separate strands of plot who only meet at the very end of a plot, and become instant friends.
  • (Or instant-ish, with respect to Oscar Wilde.)
  • Another variation: where their later relationship has been hinted (allusions, or the story is in flashback), but because they still only meet at the very end you never get to see any of that later connection.

At the bottom of the page, you can see I’ve made a little list of ways to explore some of those fascinations further.

Art/writing exercises

For general five-things exercises, see the end of the previous Five Things to Steal post.

Here is one way to turn a fascination into an activity of your own — basically a situation generator or a make-your-own Mad Libs:

• Pick a story mechanic you find fascinating/a trope you like. (I find it easiest to limit myself to a certain genre).
  E.g. here, the baton-passing between two characters.
• Identify the variables.
  Here, two characters/roles and a metaphorical baton.
• Make a short list of possibilities for each variable. I usually try for at least five of each, often limiting it to the genre, but not always.
  With the example above, it would be two sets of five character roles/jobs (apprentice, journeyman, journalist, head of guild, patron, etc), and then five ‘batons’, which could be e.g. pursuit of justice, delivering a message, investigating a mystery, etc…
• Mix and match.
  By the end of this story, a wealthy patron who has been investigating a mystery eventually passes responsibility for that to an apprentice cabinetmaker. Or vice versa.
• Make a few notes (drawn or written) of characters or scenes this suggests.
• Rinse and repeat.

Crow at McDonald’s

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Observation Journal — picture to story idea

This little observation journal investigation kept me occupied for a week (you should be able to click on the gallery images below to see larger versions).

I wanted to watch myself come up with ideas, and try to isolate what made gears catch and started a story moving forward (and the continuing usefulness of moods/tones, whether to shape a story or as a point to aim for).

Getting ideas from pictures isn’t a new process — the point was watching myself do it. However, these pages did turn out some very effective ideas. A number of the notes here have got into finished projects in variously unrecognisable forms. However, several stories did emerge almost fully-formed — I’ve redacted some sections until the corresponding projects are published.

The white noise of eucalypt leaves

Distant screaming

Sloe gin and silhouettes

Goths in trees

Who topiaried the durantas?

The experiment began with a selection of images. I chose a handful of pictures I knew felt story-ish to me (they’re on a Pinterest board called “stories for other pictures” if you want to see — I didn’t upload them, and tracing copyright through Pinterest can either be a delight (if links to the source are correctly made) or a wild Google Image ride — be aware).

Then for each image, I made a note of a possible last line for a story, an aesthetic the image suggested, and any additional ideas/notes that sprang from the picture.

I chose “last line” rather than “first”, because it gives a point upon which possibilities can converge.

So for example:

Last line	Aesthetic	Other notes
“There is, of course, a reason the girls in the photograph are looking up as if they’ve just seen you.”	Old tinted photographs, 1920s and uncanny valley, knowing and unsettling.	Dangers of exploring abandoned buildings.
“I don’t believe she’s dead, but it will take her a long time to crawl home.”	Green mossy, tarry mud, wet grave-clothes.	Someone resigned to endlessly re-killing their enemy.
“But in the summer house, if you sleep, you’ll dream of looking up through green water to the splayed palms of lilies.”	Translucent, emerald, dank & stagnant & sunlit & green. A clarity.	A failure to escape. The promise of a ghost story.

Then I collected some more three-mood story shapes, and tried a few of those images against them.

Here are the three-mood story shapes. They were from stories dimly recalled, and I strongly suspect it includes at least one O. Henry and one M. R. James. Maybe a Henry Lawson? I’m trying to get better about recording the stories! (Currently, via the December 2021/January 2022 thread on Twitter.)

appearance	consequences	disaster
appearance	persistance	dismissal (from unexpected quarter)
a nefarious plan	the consequences of success	an attempt to undo
a careless addition	an eerie consequence	a lingering discomfort
initial distress	increasing stress reveals world	brief interaction sealing humanity
odd affection	dual-track distress	strange discomfort

Then I dropped the image into one or more of the story-shapes, to see how it would change as it flowed through.

Finally, I decided to see how the ideas would change if I added a particular character or viewpoint (see By Whom and To Whom and Some Less Common Points of View).

Those two pages above all follow the single image of a boat sunk in a lily-pond, and the question (which emerged on previous pages) of whether the people to whom it belonged actually ever left: “you, the reader”, “boarding school student”, “robust but secretly romantic governess”, “elusive horticulturalist”, etc.

For each, I made a few notes on how the story would might grow to suit it — “you” listening to the story being whispered through a locked door, the stern governess ridding the house of enchantment but secretly grieving its departure, someone who thinks of themself as adventurous but fails to notice what’s going on and leaves before the mystery is solved.

Writing/illustration activites

• Finale
  • Choose a selection of images — randomly or (for preference) some that feel like stories to you. Public Domain Review usually has some interesting images going on. If your taste is like mine, feel free to consult stories for pictures but note that Pinterest can be pretty rickety in relation to ease of tracking back the original rights holder (some pictures will link to the source, though, and when that works it’s great). Be aware of copyright, etc.
  • For each image, make three notes. What final line (or event) might suit such a story? What aesthetic does it suggest to you (written or visual)? Any other story events that might be needed to get from the image to the story’s end?
  • Sketch out (in words or images) one or two additional scenes for the story, in your chosen style/aesthetic.
• Three Moods
  • Take one of the images suggested above, choose a three-mood story pattern, and see how the story would flow out to fit that.
  • Sketch an outline in words, or a progression of three images that together might tell a story. (For more story shapes and elaborations on this activity, see: Story Shapes: Three Moods).
• Points of view
  • Make a list of characters suggested by this image/story. People in it? Characters implied by the topic or the aesthetic? Inanimate objects? (There’s a starter list at the end of the post By Whom and To Whom and a few more in Some Less Common Points of View.)
  • Consider how each would tell/perceive the events above. Make a few notes/sketches depicting the scene from their point of view — not forgetting physical viewpoints: see Viewpoints.
• Bonus round: Throughout, notice where (or if) stories seem to catch fire for you. Do they? Is there a common spark? Are there bits of the process you’d tinker with? Are there similarities among the images you chose, or the directions you took? What happens if you flip some aspect of that?

Finally, while I tend to use more atmospheric images for inspiration, here are a few sketches from the observation pages above.

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Observation Journal: Mixing and matching stories and imagery

This observation journal page is a continuation of previous thoughts on in-world surface patterns.

This time, I was remixing/mixing and matching stories. I’ve written about that previously, too: Mix and Match (contains a lot of Pride and Prejudice).

This time I listed some key characters from Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood, and looked for similarities (warnings of risk, insufficient information, victims of predators, wily carnivores), and for ways to link the stories (misguided/rash actions, trapped by other’s choices, manipulation and threat, innocent third parties).

These suggested some possible stories that I could combine with various aesthetics: an innocent in high society; vanishing or seeking revenge; victims working together.

Then I started adding the visual elements, pushing the Little Red Riding Hood elements into the high society version (hothouse flowers, fur hoods, red gowns).

And vice versa (magnificence, ropes of flowers like jewels, beautiful hair).

And then just following the ideas and the lines — food and home, a red wolf, a beastly woman, until I ended up with the first line of a story to play with another time, that “Once there was a woman who accidentally changed her daughter for a wolf”, which feels like it asks enough questions to start a tale.

You can see in the final note that I was still working out exactly what I was trying to do with these exercises, although I knew I was chasing something (and would continue to). But it was very helpful for working on retellings and riffs of existing stories, and a way to clarify ideas into something “vivid, coherent & deliberate”.

Writing/illustration activities (adapted/abbreviated/extended from previous posts: mix & match and surface patterns).

• Pick two stories at random (fairy tales, favourite movies, etc — the least like each other, the better, e.g. Pride & Prejudice and Jurassic Park). Then find at least 5 similarities between them (forcibly and improbably, if necessary).
• Concentrating on those similarities, how could you edit one of those stories to be more like the others? Try a quick paragraph or sketch.
• Look only at the list of similarities. What sort of new story you could build out of them?
• Finally, make a list of the key imagery from one story. How would adding those elements to the other change it? (Try a quick paragraph or sketch seeing how it would work in practice).

Observation Journal: Industrial Fabulism

On this observation journal page l was looking at the idea of industrial fabulism.

A few weeks before this, I noted I was interested in the “fabulist-practical and the industrial-fantastic”. This is something that appears in articles in car magazines at mechanics’ offices (often very romantically written) and in some of Diana Wynne Jones’ books, in collections of rural inventions and the science columns in 19th-century periodicals and in Cold Comfort Farm, in Longitude and Apollo 13 and Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange.

It was also a choice I had to actively make in Flyaway, choosing to underline the reliability of beauty by describing aspects of even mechanical detritus as worthy of notice. And it runs throughout Travelogues, much of which involved processing an industrial landscape through the language of enchantment. I touched a little on that in the post All the shape of the land: “a way not only of expressing the experience of made things, but of experiencing the world through them, and finding enchantment in that.”

Extract from Travelogues

So on this journal page, I was identifying that particular aesthetic and its appeal. Some points:

• It is more of a mode/style/setting than a genre.
• It relies on and seeks out beauty in machinery:
  • It is realism in service of fabulism.
  • There’s a conscious effort to enchant.
  • Lyricism is used to deal with industrial objects and surroundings.
  • It’s an innate aesthetic — not adding a gloss of beauty to the mechanical/industrial, or bolting ornaments on, but seeking it in the objects themselves. The industrial can even be what adds beauty to the fantastic.
  • It represents a society without a division between the technical/technological and the fantastic.
• It is not the same as clockpunk/steampunk/dieselpunk.
  • There can be overlap, but there is an effort to distinguish itself from the usual genre markers (e.g. going for a blue tint instead of sepia).
  • It leans on machinery more than the fantastic.
  • It often avoids the obvious supernatural/fantastic altogether.
• Its appeal for me includes:
  • It is anchored in the real. The enchantment is integrated into reality/realism, OR the fairy-tale is anchored by the industrial element.
  • As mentioned above, it’s an integrated/innate aesthetic.
  • It’s designed to be actively attractive.
  • The cliches and stereotypes of the industrial (especially as opposed to the fantastic) are well established, so I need to consciously choose to use the mode, which can make writing in it a pleasing puzzle. (Swapped descriptions, e.g. light vs tin cans, and switched stereotypes are useful for this.)

Observation Journal: In-world surface patterns

This observation journal page features a little exercise in thinking through some thematically appropriate in-world surface patterns for fairy tales.

I’d been making notes, on and off, reminding myself to pay attention to the surfaces of things (in writing as much as drawing), not to forget the human urge to ornament surfaces, the narrative usefulness of surface ornament, and had played some sketching and writing games varying surface detail in stories. (It ties a bit to thoughts on staginess and strong aesthetics too, of course.)

On this page, I picked a couple of fairy tales, and just leaned into what might be story-appropriate ornaments.

First, for Cinderella: pumpkin-coloured brocade, silks hand-painted with vines and doves with beaks the colour of blood, jacquard in gilt & grey like the scales of a lizard, wigs fantastically styled into bowers and coaches, or featuring a real clock that struck the hour.

The second half shifts through several stories:

A deep blue overdress stitched with a full of snowflakes, thickening towards the hem so that no blue remains visible. A bed carved by a master-carver with castles and briars and a girl going off sturdily on some adventure. The back of a rocking-chair carved with a comfortable-looking wolf.

It is all self-referential, but to an extent that adds to the depth and concentration of a small world — and the details could be swapped out where breathing room is needed.

I discovered my default mode was direct references to the story, or foreshadowing. But as I pushed it further, it became wider references to the shape of the world (the importance of glass to fashion at that moment, the tales told within the world). And that of course lets you push further to ask: Who makes these things? What fashions prevail? Who is responsible for the glass, with or without enchantments? Who put these stories in the carvings?

Writing/art exercise

• Pick a fairy tale (or another story you know well), and a key (or favourite) scene from it.
• Make a list of important objects and colours and themes from the story as a whole. (Pumpkins and glass and lizards? Newspapers and bicycles and dogs?)
• Consider that key scene. Where could you add surface ornament? Wallpaper and clothing? Graffiti and paint jobs? Jewellery? T-shirt logos?
• Make a quick sketch (drawn or written) filling those surfaces with story-appropriate designs, as thematic or literal as you like.
• Where do they add to the story? Where do they raise questions about the world? Where do they overcomplicate things, or make the world too small or self-aware? Do you like that artificiality, or want to open the world up? (There’s not a wrong answer here, but it’s interesting to feel out the edges of your preferences.)

Observation Journal: Tinkering with story engines

Around this point in the observation journal, I spent quite a few pages tinkering with how ideas worked — which ones appealed to me, and where they might come from, and if I could deliberately recreate the process. I wasn’t so much trying to write a story as watching myself work, looking for the little epiphanies that make a story emerge, and tricks I could use if I got stuck on something I was writing.

However, some of these exercises led directly to projects which aren’t finished (or aren’t published) yet, so I haven’t posted the pages. Others, like the blue page below, led to stories which have evolved into something unrecognisable. And some (like the pink page) didn’t work, for reasons which were also interesting.

• 

  Witches

• 

  Meet-cute inception

This first page combined several previous exercises, and revealed a bit more about the aspects that were useful (for me) and the ones which didn’t work the way I do.

Here are all the stages/exercises, with links to some related posts (I’ll add more if I find them):

• Idea: First, I picked three things at random from preceding observation pages (here: arcane symbols, working blocks, using a laundry rack as a laptop stand — pic). Then I used those three to come up with a base concept (using household objects for arcane [vibes?]).
  • See Improbable Inventions.
• Aesthetic: I then picked an aesthetic. The three objects themselves suggested a down-at-heel contemporary tone, which I wasn’t feeling. So I flipped that into something smokier and Victorian. (On the second page, I chose both a colour key and a place-aesthetic.)
  • For aesthetics, see previously: Do it for the aesthetic, Do it for the aesthetic #2 and Do it for the aesthetic #3.
• Swapped stereotypes and cliches: Next, I chose some of the obvious stereotype pairings (mundane/magical and wizard/housewife), listed some associated words, and swapped them. So the housewife becomes mysterious, aloof, and robed in velvet and the house is a site of arcane ritual and (apparently) carpets, while the wizard is cheerful and stout with a clean apron and magic is associated with domestic work.
  • See: The Caudwell Manoeuvre.
• Contrasts and impetus: Then I started feeling for where the pressures behind the story might be — where the points of tension and conflict come from. In this case velvet-draped darkness and sunny good-humour seemed an amusing contrast at least — perhaps one hires the other and must deal with the unexpected consequences. A cheerful wizard takes on a morose relative as housekeeper, or a Gothic housewife hires an inappropriately upbeat necromancer to reanimate someone who died.
• More flipping: I also tried looking at what they might want and what could stop them — picking the obvious goals and obstacles and inverting them. This was fun but the standard question of a character’s goals and motivations has never felt instinctive for me (and generally aggravates me) — I’ve tinkered more with that question since.
• Structure: It wasn’t quite shaping into a story yet — there are some notes there reaching toward story-shapes and styles of humour that might match the idea. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day and The Enchanted April and Lolly Willowes. On the second page I more deliberately chose (at random) a sequence of story moods and used it to suggest how a story might take shape, which helped a lot, and when I came back to expand the (unrecognisably altered) version of this idea, I used that approach to expand it.
  • For structures, see Story patterns and Story shapes and extrapolation.
• Finally, the point of this exercise was not to write a story but to watch how I work. (See e.g. the questions at A tremor in the web.) So I made a few notes on where the idea sparked or why perhaps it didn’t. The main lessons were:
  • I continue to enjoy mixing/matching/flipping in order to come up with an idea. This remains consistent, and fun for roadtrips.
  • An idea isn’t enough without a story shape to flow into.
  • The aesthetic has to appeal to me (or be made to appeal).
  • An idea, story shape, and attractive aesthetic aren’t enough (without e.g. extreme outside pressure) if it isn’t a type of story/genre I care to write. This was in relation to the second page, which turned into more of an experimental romcom idea.

Observation Journal — variations on descriptions

This observation journal page has what is now one of my favourite observation journal activities. It’s a chance to be poetic and/or silly, a splendid vocabulary workout, and also intellectually soothing enough to do late at night.

Variations keep emerging, but this is one of the first I tried (and is particularly useful for exploring variations on a central theme). It was preceded by “One of these things is quite like the other ones” — an arguing game (see the end of The Emma Heist).

Unicorn piñatas and bougainvillea-shrouded statues, glittering cats, finger limes, and a rock grown into the fork of a tree.

The basic idea is to pick (at least) three nouns. One noun is “it”. Next, describe that noun using descriptions more commonly used for (or words more commonly associated with) each of the other nouns. I try to get at least 10 descriptions for each of those two reference words.

So on this page, I wanted to write some descriptions of light. But I keyed the descriptions to the way I might ordinarily describe (a) water and (b) tin cans.

So, for example, describing light using terms I associate with water, I get:

• light rivered and pooled
• sunlight that eddies around your ankles
• buildings an archipelago of shadows in the swift, bright tide of autumn
• tepid, stagnant light in the parlour
• a chill trickle of moonlight

And for “tin cans” there is:

• a hard enamel of light
• jagged edges of light
• corrugated and smoke-rippled autumn air
• the light had a clean, crimped quality, as if the town had been sealed against contamination
• a chill bright day kicked ringing like a can along the street

It is a thoroughly enjoyable exercise, but also surprising. It pulls out unexpected metaphors and similes, it forces me to look with new eyes at the reference terms (how many thoughts do I associate with tin cans?). It tunes aesthetics (industrial beauty? aquatic moods?) and begins to build little worlds (how does light work in this place, and how do people interact with it?). And changing my perspective on the first term (light) in two different directions sets up echoes and comparisons and resonances.

Related posts and writing:

• For unexpected descriptions and going against the obvious, see: The Caudwell Manoeuvre
• See also the observation journal posts on aesthetics generally.
• And my short Australian Gothic novel Flyaway (very descriptive) and chapbook Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion (a written sketchbook)

Writing/art exercise

• Pick three nouns at random — common ones you can see around you, or try a random word generator.
• The first noun is the one you will have to describe (or illustrate).
• But first, look at the other two nouns. Think of their characteristics, and things you associate with them. It could be words or cliches, myths and moods. Or it could be shapes, textures, colours, weight and movement.
• Now look back at your first noun:
  • Writers: Make a list of descriptions, metaphors, similes, etc describing the first noun, but using those associations from the other ones. (I like to try to do 10 descriptions for each of the reference nouns).
  • Illustrators: Try to draw the first noun using the (textures, colours, associations etc) of the reference nouns (one at a time).
    (NB. If you’re using more conceptual nouns, you might have to get particularly creative — but feel free to limit yourself to visible, concrete nouns. Drawing a fox using textures (for example) more associated with a staircase and velvet is a rather different artistic proposition to illustrating the idea of a program using imagery you associate more with hope and intellect — although both are quite possible.)
• Take a step back and notice how the activity went. Where were the surprising resonances, the difficult mismatches, the things you began to notice about any of the nouns? Where did you push against your default settings? How are the two different directions different, and what did they reveal about the core idea with which you began?

Note: If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) and patrons there get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1, or you could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel (and I get through quite a bit of coffee).

Observation Journal — Five Things to Steal, cosy crime edition

The observation journal, here, shows traces of comfort viewing in my house. In particularly, my housemate and I got deep into Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators and Rosemary & Thyme, two series I’m fond of for very similar reasons: They have a light touch with the ridiculous, but a keen awareness of it; they have vigorous interpersonal relationships without romantic tension, and they are about people actively going into business partnerships and dealing with the consequences (which more often involve mysterious murders than tax returns).

Given that similarity, I’m surprised by how little overlap there is in the things I admired in each show — although taken together, they are a list of elements I’d love to try and include in a hypothetical cosy crime show.

(Related: previous Five Things to Steal posts and an explanation of what it means, drawn from Austen Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist.)

Shakespeare & Hathaway

Left: Cashew pesto and ominous clunking, and a picture of a fly

• Strong visual associations for each character — Frank’s untidiness and Luella’s Barbie-pinks (and Sebastian’s magnificence). There’s a note that says “vivid, characterful, delightful”. At the time, the offices of Shakespeare & Hathaway reminded me of the Boffins’ sitting room in Dickens Our Mutual Friend, but the technique also has a lot in common with the clear colour-coding of families in Bridgerton. It’s highly stylised, but for that reason it can be attractive and charming, and it’s an effective shorthand.
  • *An art/writing exercise: See end of post.
• Vigorous platonic found family — neither particularly functional nor dysfunctional, but comfortable and not putting up a facade
• Unfashionableness of characters (which ties into the strong visual simplification). Frank and Luella and Sebastian are in their own ways odd, either from not caring, or from intense caring, or from pursuing a non-standard approach to fashion. It adds the sense of openness between the characters, too.
• Ongoing fiction that no-one in the area recognises or notices Luella’s very distinctive car. It’s just a faint ridiculousness that everyone goes along with, and adds to the sense of a little intense world. It’s not magic, but it’s heightens the sense of fiction.
• Low-key superpowers — each character is slightly better than average at something which you might be justified in not expecting (if only based on what’s common on tv). Luella is not presented visually as the sort of character who is good with numbers and memory, but she is; Frank outpaces suspects regularly; Sebastian is very flamboyant for someone whose disguises are so thoroughly believed. Among the characters themselves, it is never a big deal — it’s just them. It adds a sense of kindness and possibility that I think might be lost if it was acknowledged.

All of this tied into a few patterns of things I’d been enjoying recently:

• surfaces (honouring and using them)
• vividness and colour
• playing things straight and very low-key
• people who are good at their jobs

Rosemary & Thyme

(I do like this blue — these borders have previously appeared in Framing Devices and Stories in the Ornament)

Left: Breeze and sun and a man warbling like a bird and carrying a skateboard. Also a drawing of a pigeon.

• A job which is an excellent reason to be in other people’s worlds and lives, which is useful for an episodic mystery. I was thinking of this because of having a lot of tradies in the roof and under the house at this time last year, although I’ve also connected it to Lord of the Rings, Gilmore Girls and abrupt intense proximities.
• Early easy friendship –> going into business, and the structure this gives not only to character and relationship arcs, but also to plot possibilities and parameters. It’s something I like about Kiki’s Delivery Service, too.
• Two Bad Mice as a character/relationship template. There’s a sense of glee and amusement, significant glances and body language that only they can read, mischief and trying to tiptoe out of trouble. It’s also a template that adds a lovely over-the-top-ness to bits where characters are in the background.
  • *An art/writing exercise: See end of post.
• The freedom of having characters ‘of a certain age‘. They have a degree of freedom (hard-won) to simply be, not to have to be discovering themselves or transitioning between life stages, or bounded by obligations, but with the confidence and freedom to be flirtatious, etc. It’s just kind of nice.
• The appeal of the settings. Beautiful buildings, ridiculous privilege, excessively sweet villages, acres of gardens (all moderated, of course, by crime). This felt connected to the power of an aesthetic in stories — settings that are compelling enough to do half the work of dragging the viewer (or reader) in and keeping them there. “A want to be there and a place to be drawn into.” (In part, this is a good reason to keep checking that I’m writing things I like).

Writing/art exercises

• Surroundings: In a written or drawn sketch, show a character’s personality only through their surroundings. Then try showing the effect of that character’s presence on another person’s setting.
• Dynamics: Pick a scene in your story or genre that might have background characters (the Proximities post talked about this, too). E.g., the christening in “Sleeping Beauty”, the bystanders at the airport during the climax of a rom-com… Think of a famous couple (not necessarily romantic —Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner work). Give two of the background characters that relationship dynamic. Do a quick sketch (drawn or paragraph) of the scene, and see how it changes.

Note: If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) and patrons there get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1, or you could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel (and I get through quite a bit of coffee).

Observation Journal — unsubstantiated manifesto

This observation journal page features strong but deliberately not particularly thought-through opinions — and also a council employee dancing dramatically with a whippersnipper.

The exercise is from Elizabeth McCracken, who tweeted:

I enjoyed this type of manifesto much more than some introspective ones (see: Manifestos (ugh)). It’s rather fun being unreflectively and unsupportedly opinionated. Here’s the list as it stood then (with some commentary):

• Art should be just absolutely infested with so-subtle-its-invisible allusions & references & foreshadowing. [I don’t like doing puzzles, so I kind of hate this as a viewer, but as long as I don’t expect anyone else to pick up on them, it’s an excellent way to add texture.]
• Movement trumps accuracy. [I went to the She-Oak and Sunlight exhibition and just sighed a lot at hurrying flecks of people busying themselves across canvases in one or two smears of paint.]
• Expression ditto.
• Aesthetic is king. [Guillermo del Toro makes movies for illustrators]
• Keep it chatty. [An excuse or a philosophy?]
• Space should be filled with a network of bits.
• Tinier is easier (it isn’t).
• With enough SIZE or REPETITION anything can become fine art.
• The soul of most composition is just this: be deliberate.
• Why realism, though?
• Texture and colour like icing is a heaven closed to me. [I write so I can be painterly — there are passages in Flyaway that are deliberately me using e.g. Tom Roberts’ palette and light.]

Revisiting this after almost a year, I don’t think my feelings have changed significantly (although some are being tested, though not threatened, by recent projects). However I’ve been thinking more about them, ever since writing them down. Some have turned into exercises and workshops; some have helped me make clearer decisions; some are lessons I never learn.

Here is another element that emerged from the journal! It’s a tiny note on which jagged leaf shapes were most fun to draw (at least in ballpoint pen).

Together with some ornaments from a summary page, these leaves made it into the May 2020 calendar (also demonstrating repetition, small drawing, and filling up space with bits).

The design is available on Redbubble on cushions, throws, clothes, etc, and on Spoonflower as fabric and wallpaper.

Note: If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) and patrons there get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1, or you could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel (and I get through quite a bit of coffee).

Observation Journal — do it for the aesthetic #3

This page of the observation journal is an further follow-up to the previous two pages playing the impact of an aesthetic on a story idea ( Observation Journal: Do it for the aesthetic and Do it for the aesthetic #2).

Left page: Frying ham, apparently, which seems out of character. Also the eternal feeling of futility that arises when there is so much to do other than making things (to be fair, it was April 2020, but of course Brisbane is going into another short sharp lockdown today).

On the right page, I was (literally) mixing things up a bit. First I made a table with four columns

1. AESTHETIC — I created these by choosing three elements at random from the observation pages (the left side pages).
2. GENRE (some favourites)
3. MOOD (the first ones that sprang to mind)
4. CHARACTER (again, chosen from the observation pages — they are very useful for these sorts of exercises!)

The game was then to choose one at random from each column, and work out how it could be made to work, and notice how each element pulled against the story. Some examples: “high fantasy in a brooding suburban utopia” starring “walking girls”; “an elegiac junior sound & fury” featuring a radio announcer; and “a mystical Gothic of wildlife and, incidentally, murder” about an officious clerk.

Things I learned:

• This was quite fun, as with all recombining. At the time, I was beginning to feel tense about not actually making anything with some of ideas. However as I revisit them, especially in light of other journal activities, I find there are many sparks of interest and possibility there, and a couple of ideas I want to pursue. And of course, just having fun is nice, too.
• But as I review these pages I’ve also noticed some of these elements have got — indirectly — into other projects (a few of the crime/gothic aesthetic bits of this are definitely in something I’m working on at the moment. And the lessons of this page — the vigour of some of these elements, and the degree to which I have to wrestle a story to an aesthetic — are also ones I’ve been consciously using on a current comic project (of which more in the fulness of time).

Art/writing exercise: (This is really quite short! You can just read the bold bits. Everything else is elaboration and alternatives).

1. Make your table, with a column each for Aesthetic, Genre, Mood, Character. Try to put at least 10 entries in each column, if you’re going to use it a few times. Below are some notes on ways to fill each column:
   1. Inventing aesthetics:
      1. If you want to do it exactly the same way, start by making a list of 5 things you’ve seen, heard, and done today. Choose three things at random from that and use them to create an aesthetic. E.g., from last Friday I could choose “Red striped umbrella by work ute”, “wide low small planes” and “Zoomed into confirmation meeting” which might give me “moiré-print airline graphic design”, which I swear is a thing (stripes + video = moiré; moiré + planes = flashbacks to airline blanket patterns).
      2. An alternative way: Look around you and pick random things around you — I can see a judgemental porcelain figurine, a waterbottle and a crime novel, which gives me, let’s see… Tudor riverside Gothic. (Or if you don’t want to do the full word-association process, just hyphenate two things in your field of vision, e.g. folk-art robotics). You can be ridiculous here — a great many things have the potential to be a vivid aesthetic. (Folk-art robotics! Outsider-art AI!)
   2. List genres. Pick ones that you find interesting or likeable, and maybe the opposites of some of those. Or search online. If you only work in one genre, that’s cool — consider these all hyphenated subgenres of that one.
   3. List moods, as above.
   4. List characters. These are really just types, or people-who-do-x.
      1. You can find or invent them from a list of observations — last Friday, for example, gives me “Middle-aged man on scooter with go-pro on helmet”.
      2. Or you can mix and match in the same way as for the aesthetic: “carbon paper” + “once you’re there, you’re locked in” give me a greyed-out office worker, while feathers without a bird and people pulling faces after an uncomfortable experience give me enchanted swan-girls who do NOT enjoy the transformation experience.
      3. Alternatively, you can list the great stock characters of your favourite genres (miserly uncle; brave governess; dashing cavalry officer, etc).
2. Pick one at random from each column and make a sketch (drawn or written) of a key scene from this hypothetical story.
   1. If you’re stuck for a key scene, it’s okay to rely on cliches.
      1. Ask yourself what sorts of scenes does that genre almost always have (or get ridiculed for having?). Is it the equivalent of a chase-to-the-airport scene in a rom-com, or a “Fools! I’ll show them all!” from a pulpy science fiction novel, or even a bored-in-the-car opening sequence from the start of a YA fantasy? Take that, and apply mood, character, and aesthetic.
      2. Or do the same with a character (judgemental barista? elusive bird-girl?) or mood (does “elegaic” suggest someone standing on a balcony staring sadly into the rain? does philosophical suggest someone smoking a pipe?) and go from there.
3. Notice what is happening as you try to make the elements work together:
   1. Can you make the elements work together? Why or not? What gives? What — for you — exercises the strongest pull on a story? (It’s the aesthetic, for me, followed by the genre.)
   2. If you do this a few times, what patterns emerge?
   1. Try swapping out just one element. What shifts?
   2. If any of the stories spark into a bigger idea, can you identify what made that spark?
   3. Which individual elements do you like (or loathe!), and want to use (or avoid) in future?

Note: If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, I have a patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) and patrons there get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1, or you could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel (and I get through quite a bit of coffee).