Writing on the Wall...

My copy from Uni.
Still on my shelf, slightly
yellowed with time.

In Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut's semi-autobiographical novel of the firebombing of Dresden - Vonnegut describes how he organised his story.

"I used my daughter's crayons, a different color for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, and then there was the middle part which was the middle. And the blue line met the red line and then the yellow line, and the yellow line stopped because the character represented by the yellow line was dead. And so on. The destruction of Dresden was represented by a vertical band of orange cross-hatching, and all the lines that were still alive passed thought it, came out the other side."

A roll of wallpaper that neatly encapsulates the entirety of the Dresden bombings as well as the narratives of fictional characters? If only I had a spare roll handy. I could come up with my own semi-autobiographical work of genius. Except it's not really that simple is it. Even if Vonnegut did unroll wallpaper and get crayoning, I don't understand how he moves from something so visual and graphic, to forming sentences, paragraphs and chapters. The leap is too great for me. I don't get it.

It might be crossing your mind why I'm concerning myself with this now, particularly as I last picked up Slaughterhouse 5 in 1998. (What a memory I have for detail!) It's because I was reminded of it last weekend. Nothing to do with Vonnegut himself, but because over Saturday and Sunday, I binged Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You. 

I May Destroy You. 
Sigh. I miss them all, especially Terry.

There is so much to say about that show but I'll be succinct. It is a masterpiece. I'd seen everyone buzzing about it online before I jumped in, and they were all 100% correct. It felt both revolutionary and utterly relatable. There were scenes depicted onscreen that I've never before seen enacted fictionally. It showed, with careful nuance, the aftermath of sexual assault and rape, in various guises, as well as the trauma existing around them. I held my breath for large sections of episodes, whilst wanting to punch the air in triumph, at others. TLDR? It's well worth your time. 

But this isn't what today's blog post is about. Let's get ourselves back on track. This is about writing. Because Arabella, the protagonist in I May Destroy You, is a writer. We see her write at various times. She gets out her laptop in a taxi, in her bedroom, in her agent's office - all over the place. But she is stuck. She has looming deadlines and rising debts. She is struggling to complete the draft of her book that her contract demands. (The reasons why are clear. It's no spoiler to say - and with greatly understated euphemism - life got in the way.) When Arabella is shown to have a writing breakthrough, she does the thing that writers always do. She writes plot points on postcards, and arranges them on her wall. 

Exactly how Shakespeare worked.

This is where Vonnegut and his wallpaper comes in. Writers in fiction always have these methods. I assume that some writers in real life do too.  Having a visual map of the plot or structure, must work for some people. Otherwise why does it get bandied about so much? Whenever you see a wall covered in Post Its, onscreen, you know immediately that the character is a writer. It's universal shorthand for the creative process. Either that, or they're trying to solve a murder under the police's radar. Except the murder wall is usually in a basement and always involves string. Let's be clear.

But back to the writer's wall. I have tried. Really I have. At the start of the year, when I set up my work area in the pharmacy office, I had a clean white wall in front of me. It seemed a shame not to use it. Perhaps as everything else was pharmacy-based, I was trying to stake out my territory, and metaphorically piss on the environment around me. So I tried to make a writing wall. No really, I did.

Not up to scratch. 

You can see from the photo it isn't up to scratch. It came after I had completed the first draft, so it was nothing more than tokenism. But I tried. I split the book into three sections and then focused on each of the three characters in those sections. This gave me a grid of nine squares. Then, I added some notes about the mood of the characters in those sections. I recorded which chapters were from which character's POV, and I blue-tacked it on the wall at eye level. The upshot was, it was semi-useful. Most of the time I edited, I ignored it, but every so often I would look up. I'd see the summary of how Tilda was feeling in the chapter I was working on, and it would focus me a little. Occasionally, I would take the square down from the wall, and stick it next to my keyboard, as I typed. Like I said, it was semi-useful.

It's not like I don't plan. I have a bulging notebook, thank you. It's full of crossings-out and sweeping arrows, with every double page containing a plan for a chapter. I still carry it around now, even though I've finished writing the draft, just in case I want to check or change something. I've come to realise that wall or no wall, I'm still a planner. Just not a very visual one. Back in my teaching life, I spent far too long on courses being encouraged to Mind Map my ideas. Mind Maps - those colour coded spider diagram things - look beautiful. They contain lots of bullet points spread out over the page in a non-linear way. For people who learn or retain information in a non-linear way, they must be fabulous. For me, in order to revise, learn, or structure my ideas coherently, I need the lined pages of a notebook. Anything else tends to distort my clarity. Not that it's ever fully clear at the beginning, but you know what I mean.

So, what have I learnt this week? Well fictional writers use planning walls and that is OK. I like notebooks, linear thought-processes and lists, and that is OK. I remembered a detail in a book I haven't read for twenty-one years, and that is OK. And Michaela Coel is a writing genius, and her show - I May Destroy You - has raised the bar for everyone. And as I carry on ignoring that, I'll continue to focus on the more irrelevant stuff like walls and wallpaper, whilst panicking that everything I write is nonsense. And that is OK.

Have a lovely week, folks.