Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

I pulled myself back to working on You Again instead of playing with Curio–because I’m a serious writer, that’s why–and began to look at the book as a whole. I remember the parts but rereading them just takes me down the same path that led me into a wall, so I stepped back and thought, Look at the whole thing first.

This is really hard for me. I’m not a global person, I’m a detail person. Plus, novels are big, she whined. It’s hard to see the whole thing at once. So I put it off again and began to gather images for the You Again Curio collage. I have a huge detailed paper-and-glue collage that I did three years ago for the original You Again, and I like it. A lot. But it too was going to lead me into a wall so I began with a family tree.

You Again is one of those the-whole-family-comes-home-for-Christmas-and- somebody-starts-killing-them books. So this is one of the few of my books where a family tree actually works. I had to add a space at the bottom for the non-family members, but since they’re all acting as servants, I could just label them “Downstairs” and the family “Upstairs” and then stick in the sheriff since there were going to be bodies. But having to find pictures for everybody really concentrated my mind, looking not just for the right faces but the right expressions. Some of them were real surprises, but they opened up the book for me again, and I began to realize just how freeing working with images is when you’re planning a book. I can get from details to global idea because I take all the details and put them together into one collaged image. The problem was, I needed to white board the book, figure things out at the scene level, and while you can get a lot on a Curio board, I didn’t see me getting seventy or so scenes on one board in any kind of easily accessible order. The feel for an entire book, yes; scenes, no. Novels are big.

Then I remembered that somebody on the CherryForums–Rox? Katy?–titled her acts as if they were novellas on their own. And I thought, What if I collaged the acts with the scenes labeled and summarized on there? Heidi’s been doing something very similar to that, following plot trails, showing herself how the different characters’ actions affect each other. But I could do what I do on my white board: I could split the book into four acts and then list each act scene by scene, seeing how they relate to each other. Only with the collage on the board.

Of course, there was always the chance I was just wasting time, too.

So I labeled four Curio boards as acts one through four and started putting in the images I’d already found and then going to look for the images I needed. And in sifting through pictures, I found my ideas firming up. “Not that one, not that one, not that one, THAT one.” And then putting them together did what it always does, makes me see relationships I’d been missing. And all of a sudden I could keep all of these different pieces of the book together because I’d have these mini-collages of each scene, some of them only a couple of pictures, some of the big set pieces six or eight images layered. And I had them all on the board that was their act and I could see them in relation to the others, and suddenly scenes that had been people just nattering became more, and I could see how to rewrite them and make them what they needed to be.

And I thought, Okay, this is big. Then as I was manipulating the boards, I remembered I could change the backgrounds which I had made a pale brick color to go with the images I’d put at the top to represent Rosemore. So I made each act background get progressively darker, and that changed the way I looked at the images that were already on there. I’d been working for a couple of days when I noticed that the last act, which is the one most completely collaged, was covered in ice. And the second act ended in fire, symbolically. And I realized that third act is completely fire, people being swept up in fear and rage and grief and passion, so that I had a fire motif for Act Three and an ice motif for Act Four. Which sent me back to Act Two as a contained fire, a civilized fire, a fireplace fire with a screen. Banked passions. Which sent me back to Act One, which begins in snow. So, Snow, Banked Fire, Wildfire, and Ice.

I’ve never looked at a book like this before, at the mood behind it, but putting the pieces into these acts with those images translucent behind it made me see how cold everybody was when they arrived at Rosemore, the alone kind of cold, so Zelda and Scylla haven’t seen each other in awhile and Quentin’s alone in that cold kitchen, and Rose is alone in the rest of the house, and James is walled off from the others in that car with the snow raining down around him, it was all right there. They’re cold and they grow warmer because they’re together, warmer in love and anger and resentment and passion, and then those passions flame up in the third act and end by consuming all that heat so that the fire’s out at the end of the third act which propels them into the icy final push.

All of which was helped along when Bob gave me Zelda’s motivation. Bob is a genius. An annoying genius, but a genius.

So I went back and collaged the backgrounds of the boards for those moods/motifs and started laying in the scenes I knew about and some that had occurred when I saw pictures and thought, Yes! And I think this is how I’m going to do the whiteboard this time. It’s a collage whiteboard, combing the two techniques that help me see the book globally. It seems like a time sink except it’s working so well.

You Again still scares the hell out of me–I’m terrified every time I start a new book–but this is giving me such a concrete way to see the whole book and the relationships, that I’m thinking it’s worth the time.

Here’s the top of the Act One board, the three scenes I worked on during the Twelve Days of Zelda:

I like it. Of course I have many scenes to collage yet and a lot of writing to do, but I think this is going to be a great road map for finding my way through this book.

I am absolutely bewitched by Curio. And that’s before I’ve even started doing white boards on it. Heidi showed me the opaque slide which means I can make some of the images transparent on a sliding scale which means I can make faces come out of flames or water or layer landscapes over landscapes . . .I’m telling you, for a writer, the ability to layer pictures the same way you layer symbols into a text is intoxicating. And this is a ghost story, so it’s really fabulous. I still have to get in the majority of the supporting cast and then start layering in the key words and phrases, but since I have to write another book first, there’s time. And in the meantime, a book I’ve been thinking about for ten years has just taken a leap forward.

It’s just amazing how much story this process brings out as you work. It’s not an art piece, it doesn’t matter if it looks good, all that matters is that I can get down visually the way I want the book to feel so that when I look at it, I go into the world of the story automatically. But this program makes it an artistic experience, visually writing the book the way I’d write in text by moving pieces around and layering them.

I know, I’m getting boring on the subject. But I love this program. And now I have to go work on poor Zelda, starting with a collage and a white board in Curio. I love this program. Mad Geek Love.

Oh, and when you “Zoom to fit” and then hit Think to black out the rest of the screen . . .Whoa, babe.

You’re laughing at me, aren’t you? I know Bob is. Sigh.

Greatness is always misunderstood.

Addendum, Nov. 10, 2007:
Here’s the cut-and-paste collage for the same book, also still in progress, to show how the two processes result in different aspects of the same book:

So I meant to work on Zelda, I really did, but I was working with the Curio software, trying to get some images together so I could figure out who she is and get her motivations, flipping through tons of photos from the Daily Kos post I blogged about a couple of months ago, and I kept finding images and thinking, That’s not You Again, but it is Always Kiss Me Goodnight, better save that for later when I finally have the skills to write that one. So I started to save a file of Always images. And then I got obsessed with those images, and since Curio will let you keep making the board bigger and bigger and I lost my grip.

Curio is really organizational software, a place where you can keep project plans and notes and many other things. Or as the site says, “Curio is the ultimate brainstorming and project management application — a flexible and powerful environment which promotes visual thinking for gathering and shaping your ideas, while managing all the notes and documents associated with your project.” But what I love about it is that it gives you idea boards–like a white board in your computer that’s also a bulletin board–that you can put images and text on and move around easily and quickly. Which means I can now collage in my computer. (You can download Curio here but it’s going to cost you after your fifteen day free trial.)

And now I have to go back to work on Zelda, but I feel like I’ve made real progress on a book that’s been sitting on my shoulder for years. Maybe that will be the next one, I don’t know. What I do know is that collaging in the computer just inspired and nailed down a lot of things about that book, and I am jazzed. And a Curio fanatic now. (And a big thank you to Heidi Cullinan for finding this software and showing me her gorgeous story boards so that I wanted to do it, too. I owe it all to her.)