Story Collage

Today I collaged my latest manuscript (working title Billionaire’s Blackmail Bride).

I’m fairly new to collaging and while I’d read about it before in a Romance Writer’s Report (Romance Writers of America Monthly Magazine) and was tempted to give it a go I never did anything about it until attending the Romance Writers of Australia conference on the Gold Coast last year. Barbara Hannay led the workshop on collaging and it really worked for me on so many levels. In fact, Rossellini’s Revenge Affair was the first book I collaged and I was a few chapters into the story already when I did my cutting and gluing exercise.

Now, I’ve always loved pictures and I’m a hoarder from waaaaaay back, so finding enough magazines out there for collaging is a simple matter of going to the right storage drawer unit in my office and trawling through the pages until I find the pics that speak best to my story. They say that collaging is a subconscious exercise, but I think I tend to be more specific than that. Maybe one day I really will let my subconscious fly and see what happens. But anyway, for this book I already had pictures of my hero, Luc Tanner, courtesy of a department store advertising brochure, my heroine, Belinda Tanner (nee Wallace), from a women’s magazine, and an idea of the setting. For the rest, the pictures came to me. I’m about a quarter of the way into this story and I feel quite confident that the collage won’t change too much at this stage. But the excellent thing about collaging is that you can shift or change or glue over anything that doesn’t work.

When I collaged my continuity book for our Diamonds Downunder continuity (Silhouette Desire Jan 2008 to Jun 200 I just couldn’t get a handle on my hero. Eventually I glued over my hero twice! But when I found the ‘right’ guy, I was off and running. Most women’s magazines don’t seem to have a lot of pictures of the kinds of suave, sophisticated or handsome (maturish) guys that I picture as my heroes, so I went looking through modelling agency websites. The best thing about these shots is that you get to see your hero in all guises–happy, sad, serious, intense. Whatever you need. Yay for male models, I say!

Anyway, in a nutshell this book is an Amnesiac Runaway Bride/Beauty and the Beast story, and while my picture of a runaway bride (top centre) is a little faded and blurry I realised that this is a good thing because Belinda doesn’t remember her marriage at all. It was intriguing as I flicked through magazines today and found that rather than having pictures appeal to me, it was words that jumped out. Now, all my collages usually have some wording on them somewhere, either relating to theme or character. In this case it was a phrase in the middle of an article that jumped out “Ever felt like you were living the wrong life?” I nearly shrieked with joy at the ‘Eureka!’ moment those few words ensued. And then, straight after that I found a page with the words “lives changed forever–TWICE”. Again, another one of those perfect moments of synchronicity.

So, for anyone who has never tried collage as they’re writing before I really recommend you give it a try. At the very least you’ll let your inner kindergartner out to play for a while. At best you’ll have a wonderful pictorial map for your story to prompt you through the flat spots, to inspire you through the mad runs of words and to give you something to drool over when you just want to take a break. I usually collage onto a coloured foolscap sized folder but you can choose any surface or size or texture you want for your background. So let it rip!

Have any of you collaged? Share your thoughts.