Observation Journal: Five Things To Steal From The Art Gallery

This page of the observation journal is a reflection (nefarious) on a visit to QAGOMA (the Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art).

The Five Things To Steal exercise is a useful way to quickly make notes on and tease inspiration from specific books, movies, etc. But I’ve also found it a lovely way to approach a broader experience — in this case, an art gallery.

It’s a good way to capture a substantial (but not overwhelming) handful of impressions, and speculate on what to do with them.

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

• The sense of being parachuted into someone else’s visual memory: a sense of slowly descending into a landscape belonging to a particular artistic vocabulary.
  • This was in relation to a Mavis Ngallametta exhibition — I’d seen the paintings in small reproductions, but that was nothing like the experience of simultaneously looking up at and floating down into their enormousness. And simultaneously being reshaped to fit into them.
  • I wrote a bit more about this vs writing in my post about Travelogues: All the shapes of the land.
  • It’s also something that I’ve been thinking about again more recently — it seems like it should relate very much to map illustration, but I love it as an example of lowering readers into a world.
• The scrolling effect of the repetition of a long cabinet full of ceramic forms like water plants and coral and fungi.
  • This is for the reminder to use repetition, but also the appeal of long decorative bands.
  • (Like the notes on the camp dogs, below, this fascination continues to get into the calendar patterns.)
• The mundane writ large, gaining weight and honour and importance.
  • This is about the value of the everyday, yes, but also of the contribution detail and texture and focus have to making something feel mythic.
• Sunken garden, mirror pool, bronze figures, water dragons — a particular enchanted aesthetic.
  • (This is a description of the gallery cafe.)
  • I’ve noted it as a potential aesthetic for a large project I’m just now editing. It managed to completely flow off the back of that story, but I’m hoping it will pool in the next project.
• The Aurukun camp dog sculptures, for a large number of repetitions that are entirely individual and have very distinct personalities. (And I mean, look at them.)

I enjoy looking back at these five-things-to-steal posts, finding my way back into an experience of something, turning over fascinations to see how they’ve grown or what’s grown under them.

I also like this little list of things seen on the same day (from the left-hand observation page — that structure is based on a Lynda Barry exercise, see more on this page: observation journal).

I like the specificity of it, the way that makes the everyday remarkable, the way the list of disparate things forms into an impression of a day, the weight of wistfulness of the absence of jacaranda flowers under the painting where they are sometimes scattered.

Illustration/writing exercise:

• Go to an exhibition or art gallery (in person or virtual). Roam around it idly.
• Then think of five things you would like to pinch from it.
• Then ask yourself why — what about that artwork or approach to curation or unexpected lighting appealed to you?
• Then make your heist plan: how would you steal each of those effects for your own art/writing?
• Do a little written or drawn sketch of a way you might incorporate that aspect.

terrible lizard sketch, water dragons do not look very like this

Support and/or follow

If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, here are some options:

• I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) where you can get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1.
• You could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel.
• I sell prints and products at Redbubble and Spoonflower.
• I have a mailing list for occasional major updates.

Observation journal: Turning observations into (silly) ideas

A very quick look at four pages of the observation journal, all with the same activity (although with rather different slices of life on the left-hand, observation page).

I’ve written a bit about this activity in the past, see e.g. Improbable Inventions.

The left page in these journals is based on an exercise from Lynda Barry’s Syllabus — 5 things seen, heard, and done, and a picture or diagram of something from the day. (I’ve added a fifth box for overarching observations about what I was/wasn’t noticing, etc).

The game

For each exercise, I picked three observations at random from an observation page. (Sometimes from the page I was on, sometimes from a day earlier in the week.) Then I made myself combine them into three new ideas. Usually the ideas are for a story or image, but sometimes they are just for ridiculous innovations.

For example:

• a boat covered with an old vinyl ad instead of a tarp + hairdryers + feeling sad in the grocery store became, by degrees: a pitch for bush mechanics but in space.
• chalk thanks + a floor shifting + ordering Thai takeaway became: chalk-drawing powers/generates $ to buy food — kinetic, feet create or complete circuits
• handbell + marking assignments +shifting a heavy table became: an exploration of a way to outsource assignment marking to the afterlife

But more usually they are for story ideas.

For example a cat bell + lightning + mulberries became:

• belling the lightning –> lightning as cats or cats playing with lightning –> lightning sets all the mulberries ringing [and then a note that ridiculous as this sounds, you can take mulberries + big wild cats all the way back to Pyramus & Thisbe]
• trees harvest lightning/storm energy to bake fruit on the branch [with a note to compare this to something in Gulliver’s Travels, although I might also have been thinking of the Big Rock Candy Mountains]
• electric-purple lightning ringing around the bell of the world
• and finally a note that asks the very reasonable question: What mice?

(And then I made a few notes teasing out possible connections to other recent fascinations.)

And a fainting couch + the shadow of a man on the roof + machinery roaring like the sea became, among other things:

• A sickly lady sees the shadows of an angel cast on the lawn from a roof and hears the roar of the absent sea.
• Someone on bed rest is entertained by a haunted magic lantern that gathers up and spools back.

At the time, I was looking for a next step — something to do to tease out the ideas that sparked. This was before I’d really leant into the three moods approach for quickly outlining and storing ideas until I could grow them into a picture or story.

Revisiting these pages, however, I’m amused to find that some of these did get into stories, occasionally much altered. Aspects of the roar of the sea certainly got into Girl Flees House, and from there into some short story projects. These particular mulberries became a key scene in a large draft I’m editing — they’re currently at risk of getting edited out again, but they did contribute.

Purpose & usefulness

I do find this game a way to generate story ideas. But it’s more about the practice, the fun, the silliness, the sifting through the events of the day to turn the mundane into lightning-cats or baby-bouncer powered randomisation engines. And while it’s fun to mash-up any two observations into an idea, adding a third stretches the imagination in different ways.

From experience, it’s also an effective way to get a class (or myself) to come up with an original but ludicrous idea upon which to practice serious techniques. It loosens their (my) hold on my precious concept and lets me learn instead. See also Improbable Inventions.

Writing/illustration/invention activity

• Make a quick list of things you’ve seen, heard and done today — or that you can see and hear right now.
• Choose three at random.
• Try to combine all three into a new idea for a story (or a movie or an invention — choosing only one category actually tends to help).
  Then come up with at least two more ideas, using that same combination of prompts. (This takes the pressure off and lets you try different angles of approach.)
• Choose another three observations and repeat.
• Bonus 1: What did you notice about how you combined the prompts into an idea? Did you try different methods each time? Did you try to hang them on some fascination or story-shape you like? Did any of the ideas spark, or seem so ridiculous they became sublime? Can you identify where they lifted off?
• Bonus 2: If there’s a technique (writing or art, etc) you’ve been wanting to try on one of your own projects (or an intriguing exercise you’ve seen somewhere), try it out on one of these ideas first instead.

Support and/or follow

If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, here are some options:

• I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) where you can get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1.
• You could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel.
• I sell prints and products at Redbubble and Spoonflower.
• I have a mailing list for occasional major updates.

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

Support and/or follow

If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, here are some options:

• I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) where you can get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1.
• You could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel.
• I sell prints and products at Redbubble and Spoonflower.
• I have a mailing list for occasional major updates.

Observation Journal: Five Things to Steal from Midsomer Murders

This page of the observation journal features five things to steal from Midsomer Murders. (The show has shown up in this category before — see Five Things to Steal: Cosy Crime Edition.)

(Related: previous Five Things to Steal posts and an explanation of what it means, drawn from Austen Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist; also Midsomer Murders TV sketches)

(Also a continuation of vaguely Minoan-inspired border design.)

As ever, this exercise was both useful and soothing. And also as ever, I enjoy murder mysteries for the narrative hijinks they permit far more than for either the murder or the mystery.

The sense of someone being gradually taught (and learning) the next stage of their profession, and being somewhat supervised but also getting to be clever occasionally. Why? The charm of the learning-of-a-craft and the romance of the acquisition of competence. (Related: The Romance and Horror of the Navigable World.) (There’s a note here that says “nb also ducklings” and I’m not sure what the context of that was.) This was also connected to previous notes on the charm of listening to apprentices inserted into the ceiling of my house: Sparks and Navigable Worlds and Improbable Inventions.

master & apprentice stories vs journeyman & apprentice stories — with magic

Endlessly stable central family never entirely uninvolved. I’d already been thinking about this more broadly (see Favourite Tropes About Families) and it would show up again.

a family calm in the heart of chaos and/or ghosts

Good Guys defeat main Bad Guys but minor Morally Questionable Guys get away with a small windfall easily overlooked by the other parties. E.g. Sackville-Bagginses.

a tale of one bad mouse

Someone whose tall stories/colourful background turns out to have been completely true. (Less Big Fish and more flashmob society funeral). The opposite of secrets — the truth not believed/credited.

Everyone has a secret and not all is murder. I’d also recently read Kate Milford’s Greenglass House, so it’s cited here.

As usual, most of these include notes on how to adapt/adopt an idea. The “why” dot-point in the first entry was worth doing, and I’d like to do it more. And several points of fascination would show up in other entries.

Art/writing exercise

Basically, this is a way to take contained, useful notes about something you’ve seen/heard/watched/read. But it’s also an excellent way to identify fascinations, activities, and creative puzzles that you want to pursue (and to always have something to say about a topic).

1. Think of something you’ve seen/heard/watched/attended/read etc. You don’t have to have liked it.
2. Think of five things you could steal (i.e. learn, adopt, adapt, try, not plagiarise) from it.
3. For each, if you want, dig a little deeper. Why this?
4. Then for each, make a note on how you’d ‘steal’ it — how you’d adapt it into your work or life or a particular project. You don’t have to follow through on it, as the thought exercise alone is quite useful. But you might!

Listening? In my living room, anyway

Support and/or follow

If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, here are some options:

• I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) where you can get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1.
• You could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel.
• I sell prints and products at Redbubble and Spoonflower.
• I have a mailing list for occasional major updates.

Observation journal: remixing good art

On this observation journal page, I used previous notes on my creative habits in order to remix an image.

I’m still amused by the little seen/heard/did icons on the left (observation) page

In a previous post — Points of Habit and Resistance — I did an activity where I listed some of my creative patterns and habits (good and bad) and then flipped them. (See also Paired Points, for more on that).

So e.g. “whimsy” flips to “violence” or “grotesque”.

The aim was to not correct habits, but to be aware of them and see where I wanted to adjust them and where I wanted to double-down.

I’ve been working that list up into a larger project, about which more soon!

On this page, I just wanted to play with some of those prompts.

For the purposes of trying them out, I chose an image I already liked — in this case, Ryo Takemasa‘s Water Lily illustration (see it here on Ryo’s portfolio or buy prints on Society6).

Those blue-greens, the DEPTH they give the darkness, the shimmery yellow fingernail moon…

(A few other water lily images I’d been looking at recently also got into these ideas.)

Trying an exercise with someone else’s picture is a great way to:

1. study how and why that picture works for me,
2. know I’m working with something I already like (I’m sometimes too close to my own work), and
3. relieve any pressure I feel to make something out of the exercise — this is Ryo Takemasa’s picture! I’m just conducting an exercise.

I then ran that image through a number of my prompts, and made quick drawn and written sketches of how they might change the scene.

It was interesting to note which gave rise to new ideas, and which suggested a treatment for a related topic.

There are close-ups of the exercises below:

Observation Journal: Fitting pictures into shapes

This observation journal page is the art-exercise counterpart to a previous post on fitting stories into spaces.

This time, instead of getting an (illustrated) story to fit into a panel progression, I was forcing images from the past few days (a tree, a person with a dog, an ibis, a bottle of hand sanitiser) to fit into a simple shape. (I’d done something similar in the post Sketching the People Glimpsed From the Corner of Your Eye).

Lessons learned:

• This sort of exercise can be useful for developing an illustration. Choosing a strict framework for a composition both narrows the available options available and makes me be creative in designing new ones. It can also compress an image and make it iconic.
• It’s also good practice for fitting art to unusual surfaces, e.g. a tureen.
• A standardised shape for a set of illustrations can unify a set of disparate ideas. E.g., the illustrations for the main story-chapters in Flyaway all fit into a square. You can see some of those here: Illustrating Flyaway.
• But squashing something into a strict shape which doesn’t necessarily suit it can teach a lot about that containing shape, too. That was the point of the exercise in the Rearranging Scenes post earlier this week, just with plot structure instead of e.g. triangles.
• Those realisations aren’t revolutionary. A triangle, off-balance, creates an unbalanced composition. A triangle tends to be less organic, and movement runs into/up against the frame, but feels as if it lends itself more to narrative or character-in-action. A circle lends itself to organic shapes, and is more balanced and contained and iconic, but creates peculiar interaction with artificial/less-organic elements.
• But in an exercise like this, the process of reinventing the wheel is the important thing — learning by doing instead of by being told, or understanding why what I’ve been told is so.

Illustration exercise (for writing exercises, try the ones in Fitting Stories into Spaces or Rearranging Scenes)

• Basic exercise:
  • Pick three things you’ve seen today (objects or interactions).
  • Pick three basic shapes (circle, rectangle, square, pentagon, triangle, etc).
  • On a sheet of paper, draw each of those shapes three times.
  • Now, try to sketch each of your subjects (scenes/objects) once into each shape, as pleasingly as possible.
• Bonus: Make a note of which combinations were easy, and which resisted. Did certain shapes fit certain types of subjects better? How did your approach to sketching a subject change as you repeated it through different shapes?
• Bonus bonus: Pick a scene from a favourite story or movie or artwork (tip: consider viewpoints). Sketch it into several different shapes. Notice which weaken and strengthen the scene, and what you learn about both the shape and the scene.
• Variation: See sketching the people glimpsed from the corner of your eye.

Support and/or follow

If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it (particularly welcome at the moment, as I’m still in isolation with Covid), here are some options!

• I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) where you can get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1.
• You could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel.
• I sell prints and products at Redbubble and Spoonflower.
• I have a mailing list for occasional major updates.

Observation Journal — rearranging scenes

On these observation journal pages, I was playing again with “Cinderella” — see previously: Mapping movements in stories.

(Noting the observations on the right: it was a windy, glinting-winged spring week, and my first copies of Travelogues had arrived.)

I was giving feedback on and marking creative writing assignments for a creative writing subject in the UQ Doctor of Medicine program (such a great subject) so I was sitting in on the lectures. Charlotte Nash gave a lecture on classic story structures (beginning/middle/end) — more or less the classic three-act structure.

I’ve mentioned before that while I find this sort of approach to structure very useful for editing — especially for diagnosing problems I suspect exist — I don’t find it particularly intuitive or organic. So I wanted to play around with this structure on a story I knew well (see: the usefulness of template stories).

First, I fitted that structure onto “Cinderella” — more or less the version with three nights of dancing, and the birds attacking the sisters at the wedding.

Next, I scrambled the scenes, and forced them to fit that structure in their new order.

I wanted to see how the scenes would need to change if they appeared in a different position — not necessarily in the internal chronology of the story, but in the order in which they were told. E.g., if the story opened on the delight of the prince rediscovering Cinderella, what introductory work would that scene need to do?

Here’s the randomised list of scenes, with the turning points between the acts (beginning, middle, end) marked.

delight of discovery — godmother’s appearance — to the ball — [gear change — story really gets going] mystery of identity after the second ball — the shoe — the wedding — the search — the mystery of identity after the first ball — [central tipping point] final revenge on step-sisters — the third ball — Cinderella reveals herself — attempts by the step-sisters to mislead the prince — [gear change — end becomes inevitable] the first dance — the early mistreatment of Cinderella — happily ever after — the second ball — Cinderella’s initial bereavement

But it was also interesting to see how it changed the emphasis of the story itself — in this case, a concentration on vengeance and/or filling a loss.

I repeated the exercise a week later.

Here is how the scenes fell out this time:

dance #1 — misleading by step-sisters — dance #3 — turning point: initial mistreatment — you shall go to the ball — wedding — reveal identity — mystery after second dance — [central tipping point — happy ever after — initial loss — the prince’s search — dance #2 — turning point: delight of being found — revenge — appearance of godmother — shoe! — mystery after first dance.

Breaking “Cinderella” down this way suggested a story that went: joy! –> oh no! bad things behind it –> sense good things in the future –> fight for good things (in knowledge will get them) –> gentler fairy-tale business to wrap it all up.

That is, a story told in the confidence that evil will overcome, but in the knowledge that goodness must still fight in the meantime.

Breaking the story down this way highlighted a clearer separation between the character‘s journey and the reader’s journey — whether the two experiences run in harness, and where they play off each other.

I also kept a little sketched list of events and lines that occurred to me as a result of the exercise, for a story, if not for this one.

It was a very interesting exercise for:

• Understanding classic structures a bit better.
• Thinking through what scenes do and can do.
• Approaching a retelling.
• Shaking up my understanding of a story, even after I’ve put it back into order.
• Coming up with little stray ideas.

Writing/illustration exercise:

1. Choose a story you know well (fairy tales are usually quite useful and relatively short). List the scenes.
2. Pick a common narrative or dramatic structure you want to play with (three-act structure and Freytag’s pyramid get talked about a lot, but if you’ve taken any writing courses, including in school, or read books on narrative, you’ll have been exposed to some version in detail).
3. Line the structure up against the story. You might have to force it to fit in places. It’s interesting to note what might need to change in the story to make an Official Structure fit neatly, and what lets the story work in spite of not fitting some classic mould.
4. Now, mix up your scenes randomly — cut them out and shuffle them, or roll a dice, or close your eyes and point.
5. Again, line the structure up against the new order of scenes. Note what new work some scenes might do, and whether the new order suggests new meanings for the story.
6. Pick the new first or final scene. Do a quick written or drawn sketch of it, letting it take on the new emphases, and making it do that new work of e.g. opening up the world or introducing characters or closing off the narrative and themes.

Housemates and magpie

Support and/or follow

If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it (particularly welcome at the moment, as I’m still sick with Covid), here are some options!

• I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) where you can get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1.
• You could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel.
• I sell prints and products at Redbubble and Spoonflower.
• I have a mailing list for occasional major updates.

Observation Journal: Mapping movements in stories

On these observation journal pages, I was thinking about the way stories interact with the space in which they take place. (This was because of a comment about Travelogues, which is very much about moving through landscape.) But the exercise turned into another way to break apart and consider stories, and find new ways in.

I began by quickly noting down the main locations in some favourite fairy tales, and tracking how characters moved between them (see also: The Usefulness of Template Stories).

Below, you can see Little Red Riding Hood (the version with the river and the washerwomen), Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel (the one with later attempted murders), Beauty and the Beast, and Snow White.

Charting stories like this highlighted some interesting patterns. The shuttling activity of Cinderella, the concentric, narrowing focus of Sleeping Beauty. The increasing distance from home and outward movement of Rapunzel, the ring-road of Little Red Riding Hood.

It also highlighted the places where other locations were implied but not revealed, and the difference between story movement and that of individual characters. For more on that, see Plotted: A Literary Atlas by Andrew DeGraff and Daniel Harmon and Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies by Andrew DeGraff and A. D. Jameson.

Cinderella in particular amused me.

Looked at this way, the focus of the story became the road between home and palace. So a few days later, I took a closer look:

There are several nebulous implied locations (where the stepmother and godmother originate from, for example) — they could be expanded, ellided, or conflated.

And while the road is a key location, there is rarely much time spent on it. What would the story look like from the point of view of observers along the way?

What about the tension between the landscape passing outside the carriage and the anticipation of the person within it? (Tangentially connected post: bored teens in cars.)

The next day, I was just playing with tiny maps of Cinderella, for fun:

But while the earlier charts open up the story, the map forces decisions, from aesthetic and style to the details of the world, the number of bridges the carriage should go across, and therefore the waterways and surrounding geography. At least, they do so if you build the world out from the events of the story.

If you fit a story to an existing geography, draping it over a landscape or running it along known roads, it is mostly the story that changes (and, perhaps, the meaning of the landscape). “Gisla and the Three Favours” (published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet last year) began as an exercise in draping the story of Cinderella over a volcanic landscape, and letting the story change. When writing Flyaway, the process involved introducing several fairy-tale elements to an ill-suited climate and watching them shift — but also letting the mythic weight of those stories become a lens through which to view landscape often written about more cruelly. And Travelogues explicitly involved attaching fantastic and fairy-tale imagery to very real geography and journeys.

I’ve also used this approach when planning and editing a current large project. Here’s a slightly redacted chart of the key locations, to see where movement was concentrated, and where the story opened up or was bottled in.

Here is the same for an early version of an house from the story:

Writing/illustration activity

• Pick a story (a fairy-tale, a movie with mythic weight, something you’re working on — see The Usefulness of Template Stories).
• From memory, do a quick rough chart of the key locations, and how characters move between them.
• Notice and consider:
  • If you notice anything new about the story, or a new angle of approach to it, make a quick note of that.
  • If you wanted to open the story up, make it more claustrophobic, more cosmopolitan or focussed on logistics, what changes could you make to its locations?
• Write or draw:
  • Are there any locations that don’t get a lot of focus? Implied off-page points of origin (or destination) — where was the woodcutter cutting wood? Heavily trafficked but almost unmentioned roads or driveways? Important outbuildings or waterways (did Sleeping Beauty’s castle have a moat, and what water fed it, and what became of it when everything was overgrown)?
  • Do a quick sketch — written or drawn — of a scene set in that place, or viewed from that point of observation.

Some related posts:

• Breaking down stories — variations
• Three Thoughts About Maps
• Drawings from the QWC Map Workshop (including links to some good books)
• Other posts tagged with “maps” (including map illustration process and interviews)

Support and/or follow

If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, here are some options!

• I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) where you can get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1.
• You could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel.
• I sell prints and products at Redbubble and Spoonflower.
• I have a mailing list for occasional major updates.

From one of the observation pages: my suitcase full of art books for a workshop

Observation Journal: A suite of ideas

On these observation journal pages, I was again playing with ways to tease a central concept out into a cloud of ideas.

Spiderwebs and poems and cars held together with bandaids

I refer to “suits” here, as in a deck of cards, because I think my original concept was to try for 13 ideas for each quadrant.

However, what was primarily on my mind was the maps I illustrate, with their unconventional compass points. I picked a central idea to play with, and four objects that felt highly thematic/mythic. Then I filtered the idea through each of those — their possible meanings and aesthetics and colours.

So here, for example, I took “Little Red Riding Hood” and passed it through each of “leaf”, “stone”, “sprocket” and “rose” to see how the idea would refract into green men and grandmother oaks, red pebbles that bring down brigands, the rose’s perspective on “Beauty and the Beast”, and a girl wandering the woods with a wrench.

It was a very pleasing way to scatter a number of ideas — and also entertaining to track some of the influences on my ideas & associations, e.g. Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Das Versprechen and Charles Causley’s poems.

Two weeks later, I tried it again, shining “Ghosts” through “ibis”, “coriander”, “spider-web” and “cat” (chosen, this time, from things I’d seen that day).

This yielded ideas such as a genetic predisposition to taste ghosts as a soapy presence, ghosts scavenging from cafe tables, and ouija-webs.

Quite a few of the ideas from these pages have, in one form or another (mostly unrecognisable), got out into current projects, including a story scheduled to be published soon. When those projects are public, I’ll tell you how they link back to these pages.

ibis

Writing/art exercise

• Pick an idea you’d like to play with. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be an image, an object, a word, or a classic story (see Template Stories). If all else fails, a fairy tale is a handy place to start.
• Then pick four other objects or words. They can be ones you feel have mythic weight. Or they could be four different things you have seen today.
• I set these out by putting the main idea in the middle of the page, and then four little nodes around it, one for each “suit”.
• Now, combine the central idea with each of the four “suits” and see what ideas they suggest. Try to come up with at least 3 for each quadrant. Jot the ideas down as words or images. (I’ve done some image-only versions of this which I’ll post when I get to that part of the journal.)
  Here are some ways to think about this process:
  • force the main idea through the secondary word (or vice versa)
  • use the secondary word as a lens to see what it reveals about the main idea (or vice versa)
  • think of the two words together — do they suggest other stories/images you know and could riff on?
  • squish the main idea and secondary word together into a mash-up
  • knock the two together until sparks fly
  • where are they jagged against each other? where do they fit neatly?
  • what sort of things does the secondary word do? what if the main idea did that?
  • could you borrow the patterns/textures/aesthetics of one to reskin the other? or drape one over the skeleton of the other?

Observation Journal: Favourite tropes about families

On this observation journal page, I loosely corralled some thoughts on my favourite tropes about families in fiction.

The observation journal is a useful place to quickly pin down vague fascinations. Sometimes they turn into a project, or a point of reference. Sometimes, as here, they don’t seem to lead to any epiphany. And yet I keep coming back to the ideas on this page, and gradually it’s getting out into other projects, and I keep linking other related interests back to this one, building a pattern of thoughts for some future enquiry. Further, just having written this down means the knowledge as a corrective to a slight tendency to default to an individual, unanchored central character.

Here are some of my favourite tropes & treatments of families in fiction:

• The odd one out — the strange character in a normal family; the normal character in a strange one.
• The vast and peculiar family — unique circumstances, idiosyncratic, Gothic…
• Erratic but functional — feel but don’t necessarily react; appealing/sympathetic but strange…
• Scattered but resonant — geographically; seen across generations
• Parents vs kids — smart parents intrigued by strange kids; practical offspring of bohemian parents
• All get stories — siblings each pursuing their own stories; multi-track (e.g. kids, teenagers, adults each on their own plot); crossed tracks
• Present — actively can’t shake them; part of the context of the story, e.g. qctive hindrance, or secretly very important to the context
• Haven — for others; for main character; for readers
• In summary:
  • families that function as both unit and context (as well as a group of characters);
  • families that are something the reader is terrified to lose (but that will not actually be destroyed by the story).

Stories referred to include: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (specifically the family mechanics in the book, which aren’t in the movie), and indirectly most of Diana Wynne Jones’ books; Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson; Stranger Things (seasons 1 and 2 but in different ways); Fargo (movie and at least the first season of the series); Midsomer Murders; A Surfeit of Lampreys by Ngaio Marsh; Queen Elizabeth, a portrait of the Queen Mother by Penelope Mortimer (seriously, whatever your position — and Mortimer’s book is not a hagiography — it’s a fun read); The Addams Family (Charles Addam’s work and the show, movies, etc); and My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell (the book and the 2015 movie, especially).

Ibis savaging a stolen croissant

Support and/or follow

If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, here are some options!

• I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) where you can get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1.
• You could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel.
• I sell prints and products at Redbubble and Spoonflower.
• I have a mailing list for occasional major updates.