In January, I attended workshops at our church on various spiritual practices: meditation, the Zen of drawing, and also one based on the book SOULCOLLAGE by Seena Frost. According to the SoulCollage® website, it is a process for “accessing your intuition and creating an incredible deck of cards with deep personal meaning that will help you with life’s questions and transitions.” I am a control freak but I managed to let go and enjoy this process. I hope to find time to make more cards like this, maybe at a retreat sometime.
And this week, I made my first story collage. I first read about this process in an RWR article by Jennifer Crusie, “Picture This: Collage as Prewriting and Inspiration” also available here. I was curious about the process, knowing that it worked for authors I admire including Crusie, Jo Beverley and others. Although it is designed for prewriting, I thought it might help me to reconnect with my balloonist story, which has been sitting half-finished for over two years now.
It was fun. I used all the images I’d already been collecting to inspire the characters and the setting. Browsing through craft stores, I came up with some cool finds: the perfect brilliant blue silk, cloud patterned paper. As I was cutting the black fabric for the lower part, my scissors snagged and created a jagged pattern, like clouds of smoke, and I decided to keep it that way.
While I didn’t get any new ideas, making the collage reminded me that I do have a real story to tell. I will definitely try this again the next time I start a new story.
Have any of you tried collage as a creative and/or spiritual process? Did it work for you? Are there other processes you use to tap into your intuition?
Elena
I can’t believe I never read this article. What a GREAT idea! And I just love all the pictures on your collage. I am totally dragging the hubby to Michael’s today for supplies. *squee* Thanks for sharing!
My friend, Elizabeth Holcombe used to do a collage workshop at our Washington Romance Writers Spring Retreat, which is still open (until Feb 20) for registration if you are an RWA member. It’s a great process, using different parts of your brain.
I love your collage, Elena!
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I’ve heard of this before, but never tried it myself. I love the hummingbird/butterfly card. I also like your balloonist collage. I’ve always made sure I had pictures around me that inspire me, but I never thought about being story specific. I’d like to try that.
I don’t do a collage like that, but I do have a cork board next to my desk and I change all the “inspiration” images pinned there for each new book I start! It seems to be a good “trigger” for jumping into the story, and keeps me inspired…
I don’t do a collage, but I do similar sorts of out-of-the-box brainstorming. I make playlists for my manuscripts, I sometimes find poems or quotes that bring a character to mind, I’ll look for faces, famous or otherwise, that remind me of my characters, and I’ve even been known to take my characters virtual horse shopping.
I must admit I’ve never done this but it does sound appealing. I have a notebook for each of my books. I have timelines, notes, images of my hero and heroine and sometimes of minor characters and even villains too. I keep copies of lists of references and sometimes even entire articles printed from online in the notebook. If I am just starting a book I keep all the scraps of paper on which I jot bits of dialogue and scenes onto in the notebook. I have a filebox for each book where I keep the notecards I have accumulated for each book also. (I used notecards at work so that I can jot things down as they come to me.) If it is a book I have yet to start, but have lots of ideas on I keep the same things in the notebook as they come to me. This helps a great deal when I finally get to start that book!
Still, I might just have to try the collage idea. Very appealing.
I like some of your other ideas for inspiration. I’ve never thought of trying a playbill, Susanna! Amanda, your cork board sounds like a close cousin to this collage method.
I’ve always liked working with visuals for my stories. I also pick music to write to that somehow reflects the mood for a particular story or even scene. Sometimes I have searched out scents, too. I think other sensory experiences–learning to country dance, ride, cook or eat period foods, also help this way.
I haven’t done collage in such a long time. Have had the kids do it or helped them on projects that required it.
When I work on things, I just need to spread them out in note form. An idea per page or card. Then I can line them up, shuffle them around, add comments and details. Not artistic, except when I planned summer reading and added in all the art projects I was doing. Kind of like a storyboard.
I’ve done two, one of them was pictures I pasted into a notebook– before I started writing the story. Another was a large one I did for a story that was loads of fun to do. Though I didn’t find it a breakthrough method for me, what it did do was disconnect my conscious deliberations and allow my subconscious to comment. I haven’t done it again, but I think if I ever felt horribly stuck, I might try it again, just as a way to get the subconscious cooking and stop the conscious, overly rigid self from butting in.