How can we tell stories using the spaces around our characters?
For a little while now I’ve been trying out exercises from Scott McCloud’s brilliant book Making Comics[i]. It’s a deeply thoughtful text on the art of storytelling and, with a little imagination, its lessons are just as applicable to the traditional novel as they are to the graphic. I recently shared my first sequential art project, which you can find here. In this article, I’m going to share one of the exercises I completed and use it to talk about telling stories with empty spaces. (more…)
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Early on in the drawing class this morning the teacher brought out some pictures the group had been working with the day before. They were medical diagrams of intestines. I didn’t want to look at them. I didn’t feel good. I had a bad taste in my mouth.
In the break, when everyone else grabbed coffee and biscuits and talked about what they’d been doing, I sat down and did the drawing on the right. It was big and it was fast. I didn’t like looking at it.
The picture didn’t look right. It wasn’t how I remembered it happening. For a start, the only thing that had screamed had been the cable right before it broke. Second, when I think about it, I wasn’t even looking when he fell. I remember him being all crumpled up in the stupid yellow coveralls they gave us, the angles being wrong but the blood all dark and mixed up in the other wet and mess. (more…)
A couple of weeks ago I was accepted onto a part-time fine art course at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts – Glacières. Getting to study at an art school in Paris is something of a dream come true (I always wanted to do art but was too scared in case my Dad found out[i]), but it didn’t seem strictly relevant to this blog so I wasn’t going to talk about it here. I quickly found, however, that what I was doing in the course was immediately useful to my writing.
In this article, I am going to talk about the first classes I took at Glacières and share images of my work. The purpose is not to show-off my art, but I think some stories are better told with pictures. I’m sure it will be clear very quickly why these lessons are also applicable to the writer, and how the process of risk and repetition is useful to any creative endeavour.
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“All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of Beggars’ Teeth.”*
Is the mark of a great artist that they walk a fine line between genius and insanity? While the rest of us mere mortals toil in our mediocrity, does the visionary merely summon their muse in bursts of creativity that produce great works in days? Does their innate, inborn talent supplant the need for hard graft?
I found myself thinking about these questions when I recently visited the Musée d’Orsay’s wonderful exhibition “Van Gogh/Artaud: The Man Suicided by Society.”
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I recently studied Peter Stockwell’s two-week course on cognitive poetics via Future Learn, a free online study resource. Cognitive poetics is a tool of literary criticism that applies some elements of cognitive psychology to understanding of literature, and particularly how readers engage with and understand a text. In this article I’m going to talk a little bit about what cognitive poetics is, and then briefly about Future Learn as a useful tool for the writer.
Cognitive poetics begins with the idea of the “Theory of Mind”. This is our capacity to recognise other entities as having beliefs, perspectives and world views of their own. Somewhere in our earliest childhood we begin to recognise that those around us might be thinking, feeling creatures like ourselves. But how do we know that they are people? And how can we figure out what their individual beliefs and perspectives are?
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