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  • Planning Through Drawing: Xanthe Wells

  • Summary
    Planning academic and creative writing is not always easy. Having spent many years using 'mind maps' to organise shorter writing, I found that this strategy would not cope with structuring a novel. What has developed instead is a symbolic image that holds the outline and construction of my work within a single drawing. From this piece of art I can begin to develop my text in confidence.
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    Perhaps I should begin by saying that I am not an artist. I have always enjoyed drawing, but there is no great talent at my fingertips, no spark of genius between pencil and paper. As such, I have turned my attention to literature and now build pictures with pen and ink of a different kind. However, the writer and the artist are not all that dissimilar, as Hélène Cixous notes: 'Perhaps I, in writing, paint in a different way. I paint in the dark. But this is my blind way of calling forth light' (1991, p.106).

    Calling forth light with words can be as iridescent an experience as looking at a painting, yet one is guided through a text from start to finish, always being told what to encounter next. Not until the reader turns the final page and closes the book can the text be fully interpreted and made into a coherent whole. With an image, on the other hand, such coherence is there at first glance and, instead, the conscientious viewer deconstructs the picture into pockets of meaning so that they may appreciate it fully.

    In her book Art Objects (1996), Jeanette Winterson discusses the intensity of art and the length of time it takes to truly embrace and understand a painting. She suggests that looking at something fully takes more than a ten second glance and a rash decision as to whether or not we like it. We may be quick to accept a piece of art, and even quicker to criticise it, but we seldom look long enough for the painting to tell us something about itself.

    Appreciated fully, a piece of art can be seen as a direct reversal of a literary text. That is to say that one needs constructing by the reader, whilst the other requires deconstructing. It is this notion that has allowed me to utilise drawing in the writing of a creative/critical novel for my research thesis.

    Planning has always been of great importance to writers, especially when the intended outcome is a full-length book. Organising a book's worth of ideas is a formidable challenge for any writer and I was overwhelmed by the practicalities involved in somehow making sense of what was in my head. In the past I had tried the usual list making, index cards and post-it notes but found that I couldn't write unless I was able to see the spread of the whole plan, rather than individual quotes and concepts. Rejecting these linear strategies, I soon became a devoted follower of the 'mind-map', whereby I could structure all my ideas on one piece of paper, branching out from a central theme. This method not only allows you to incorporate everything onto one page, but also gives plenty of scope to interlink and cross-reference ideas.

    With a large piece of paper and an assortment of coloured pens, there was no essay I couldn't handle, but it soon became quite clear that I was going to need a new technique to plan a novel. Either I was going to need a really big piece of paper, or I was going to have to write really small - or both. My first attempt made the map of the London Underground look easy to read. What I needed was some way of conveying, on one sheet of (albeit large) paper, the overall themes and progression of my thesis.

    Luckily, the nature of my thesis leant itself to the task. The format of my work structures itself around the building of a house, with each part of the novel focusing on one particular area and the themes therein. As I began to conceive my work in greater detail, I was able to visualise the house more clearly and transfer the images onto paper.

    I now have the symbolic image of a house that is split into significant areas with the use of colour. Additional images within each area serve to remind me of the particular themes or concepts whilst acetate overlays make room for written note and references that can be altered or removed as required.

    Altering words into pictures has allowed me to abbreviate my planning into precise coherency. Rather than pages and pages of notes, I now have a single, if complex, image that can be glossed over with a single glance. My day-to-day work involves the deconstruction of my image, piece by piece, as I reconstruct it into text, but it is the image as a whole that gives me comfort. Having the picture in front of me reassures me with its progression and intended destination: I know that I can follow its path safely to the novel's end. By planning through drawing I can, as they say, see the big picture.


    References
    Cixous, Hélène (1991) Coming to Writing and Other Essays [Jenson, D. Ed.] (London: Harvard University Press)
    Winterson, Jeanette (1996) Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (London: Vintage)

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    Xanthe Wells
    Postgraduate Research Student
    English and Drama Department, Loughborough University

    Email: Xanthewells@aol.com