Storytelling as Collage
by Grant Faulkner
We’re thrilled that Maggie Smith is going to teach a class with us in October—a class on taking risks with form. When Maggie appeared on our podcast a couple of years ago, I was particularly fascinated by her creative process because she wrote her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, as a poet would.
“I hadn’t written a memoir before, so I came to it with a somewhat blank slate as a poet, thinking, okay, so how do I tell the story of my life, or how do I tell this particular story of my adult life?”
The particular story she was telling was the story of her divorce. Her children would go off to school each day, and she’d ask herself what story she wanted to tell that day. She wrote little vignettes, “completely independently of one another, not in chronological order at all.”
“I had no idea how I wanted to make them live together between two covers,” she said.
After writing literally hundreds of them, she worked with her editor to somehow figure out how to order all of the vignettes to live together between two covers. Her editor suggested that she color code the different strands in her work.
“There is a beginning point and an end point,” Maggie said. “And then there are these flashbacks to earlier in the relationship. And then there are these stories about my kids. And then there are the quotes from other writers. And then there are these unanswerable questions. And then there are the questions I imagined the reader having. And then there are these prose poem sections in italics.”
It became a craft project. Maggie printed everything out and spread it on her living room floor. She got out Crayola markers, and she swiped a color at the top of each page.
“This is how I put together a book of poems. I print it all out. I look at the way one poem ends, and I think, okay, what is the beginning of the next poem? That seems like the natural transition from this one, and despite this being a narrative, I still assembled it really intuitively, based on tone and emotional import and image sharing and those kinds of threads, trying to keep them evenly balanced from start to finish.”
Stitching together fragments into a structure
I was so inspired by Maggie’s approach because I increasingly write in a similar way. I don’t see life as a round, complete circle. It’s shaped by fragments, shards, and pinpricks. It’s a collage of snapshots, a collection of the unspoken, an attic full of situations I can’t quite get rid of. I don’t want a form that represents comprehensiveness or unity because that’s an aesthetic at odds with my experience of life.
So the form of a collage spoke to me.
But … writer beware: Reading a narrative shaped like a collage can seem as if it relieves the burden of structuring a book, but I’ve learned the opposite.
The weave of images, the suspense that the gaps in the story create, have to form the feeling of a sweeping narrative arc. There still needs to be an escalation of tension and suspense—and you have to do that with less connective tissue and explanation.
As Maggie said about her process, “Everything was cobbled together. It was incredibly messy.”
So you have to like getting messy, just as if you’re gluing scraps together to make a visual collage.
Just what does it mean to write with a “collage aesthetic”?
The term “collage,” coined by cubist artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, comes from the French word coller (to glue)—so it’s a process of assemblage, of recombination, of seeking a whole, of representing a fractured self or world.
There was plenty to glue together at the beginning of the 20th century as the world was becoming more mechanistic and industrial, parts determining the whole. And then World War I brought on explosions of all kinds—physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and cultural—and one of the best ways to represent it was through an assemblage of materials.
Artists ripped things apart and reassembled them to create pastiches of odd juxtapositions and distorted shapes, transforming a selection of parts into a new work in its own right.
Narratives that use collage, no matter their length, always ask the question of juxtaposition, the ways that other stories will abut and rub up against them. One fragment speaks to another, flirts with another, contrasts another, curses another.
Most stories are constructed temporally, with a linear timeline as the spine, but a story that is organized in a collage is told more spatially. Motifs arise and fade into the text. Echoes and reflections are magnified. Irresolution permeates the story environment instead of resolution. You read through a mesh, through refraction.
A work that is shaped like a collage represents the multiple spheres of life we inhabit, the refractions of self, the blur of experiences. We live in an age that is interdisciplinary and intersectional. We live in an age of the remote control, Alexa, and Google, where sounds and images, memes and ancient texts, can be called up on demand. We live in a swirl of odd shapes and sounds and juxtapositions.
Such a work allows an author to design as much as write, said Jane Allison in Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. “Text comes from texere, after all: to weave.”
Just as in the visual arts, constructing and shaping a narrative with a collage-like sensibility requires a different creative process.
The writer snips and glues, layers and nudges, positions and repositions text. Writing in a collage-like way is a painterly process, a poetic process that focuses on texture as much or more than structure and practices the art of calibration, of balancing harmony and disharmony, of deciding what “in tune” or “out of tune” means in such a narrative style.
I can’t wait for Maggie’s class next month—because I learn so much when I take risks with form, and when I hear how others have done it.
To get ready for the class, listen to our interview with Maggie Smith on Write-minded (now Memoir Nation, of course).