Image Mapping

Image Mapping

A mapping exercise for getting a fresh perspective on a story in progress.

There are many different ways to conceive of the coherence or internal logic of a story, either retrospectively or prospectively. In the conceptual model we call “linear narrative,” coherence and sequence are both sanctioned by a plot line: a sequence of causes and effects within a single story. But even if your story wants to move in linear time, it can be refreshing to consider its logic from other groundworks.

As a warmup for this exercise, to get a feeling for how it might work, sketch a map or schema of a story by someone else that has moved you before drawing the map of your own developing story.

The task of this map is to create a visual, spatial representation of the story’s key images and preoccupations, allowing yourself to organize them in a non-chronological way. The map becomes a chance to consider their arrangement outside the perspective of the timeline. There’s no one way to do this, but one way in is to think about the relationship of key images in the story. If your story, for example, meditates on death via different narratives of gardening, moving freely back and forth between moments in time while weaving threads of the colonial and personal histories of the narrator, then icons of plants, tools, islands, ceremonial props, and cars might form a decorative border of the map, with key visual images occupying in the center of the map, arranged in a circle, labyrinth, or wreath. (My example here is V.S. Naipaul’s memoir, The Enigma of Arrival, a gorgeous piece of writing with many simultaneous temporal directions.)

To map your own developing story, depending on where you are in the process, you might want to start with a scrap page where you gather images or icons before considering their logic of arrangement. Then on a fresh page, play with putting these images into a visual logic. You might embrace geometrical figure or pattern here. Do your images make sense in the shape of a circle? A circle with a box inside it? A wheel with spokes or tiny segments? What about a cloud with emanations, or a river with different bridges or landing places? A ladder? A starry constellation? An electrical circuit? A garden plot?

As you populate your map with images, stay open to other, new images that crop up. Allow yourself to add images that are not yet part of your story, if they come to mind now. 

Finally, reflect on the map you have made. Does thinking outside of chronology offer you any fresh ideas for where and how the story might move? 

A note: when I do this exercise, I find that sometimes I have to try our several maps before I’m able to tune into a visual logic that both feels like a match to what I am writing, and ushers me into a place of mental receptivity to new ideas. 

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?