Two guest posts I wrote on the making of Five Wounds for Spike, the Meanjin blog, are now up. The first post is about my collaboration with Dan Hallett; below is a short extract.
It was important that Dan was trained as an illustrator – that is, in a discipline that accepts collaboration as a sine qua non of its existence – because the goal for any collaborator should not be to protect the integrity of their individual contribution; rather, it should be to serve the story and the book as a whole. For me, faced with the task of writing a script for Dan to work from, the central question was, how do you describe a picture that doesn’t exist yet? And how do you relate that description meaningfully to other descriptions of other pictures that also don’t exist yet?
The second post is about the process of creating the finished manuscript; again, an extract is below.
There is a myth that novelists enjoy complete creative autonomy, in contrast to, say, filmmakers. But it is a myth, because a book is not, in the end, a collection of immaterial words. It is not a Platonic idea in the mind of the writer. It is rather an object, which is created via a complicated process involving many people. Right from the beginning, then, even as we begin the first phase of this process, the writing, our entire conception of the work has to be informed by what material form it might eventually take.
If anyone wants to comment, please do so over at Spike.
Thanks to Jessica Au of Spike for her editorial suggestions.
See here for a previous appearance of Five Wounds on Spike.
3 weeks ago
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