Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Left Side of the Desk

Left Side of the Desk

One of the things I have noticed in reading the Game of Thrones series by George Martin is that he uses essentially the same approach to novel writing that I am following in the Exploratory Writing Workshop. That is that his chapters are a series of vignettes. What he does is combine what I describe as character vignettes.

This approach has some strong advantages. First it gives readers a close look at his characters and there are many in his novel. Second it takes the reader to many story worlds giving a reader a broader scope. Finally by having several stories working at the same time he has more than one central character. By focusing on character rather than story line he is not hard to follow despite the large number of characters and different settings.

For a writer there is ‘oft the chicken or the egg question which translates, does the story beget the characters or the other way around? For George Martin I suspect it all begins with characters. That is the first Lesson in the EWW and by the end of the week I should see what the students have come up with.

Today I am showing the figurines on left end of my workstation. I think of them as characters and no single one is particularly remarkable. Most cost less that $10 and all were under than $100. Some were broken when I found them but each one had a unique quality which I call the “Wow!” factor. That is the overriding criteria I use in buying a figurine. Most are female but one is a cowboy. For some reason I get more WOW out of the female ones. Anyway when I see them together it has a synergizing effect almost like they are trying to tell me stories.

Part of what I stress in the workshop is using imagery and writers are drawn to different mediums…For some it is statues, others fine art and still others photos. Publishers understand the importance of this and come up with some compelling images on book covers. In the future I want to share some of my writing imagery with blog readers and talk about some of the aspects of the figures I find compelling. Eventually interest in my ramblings will begin to wane (I will see it in the views) and I’ll move on to other aspects of what interests me.