Included Below: Maps / History of Dreaming / Unreconciled / Riverdale Park / Stories We Don’t Tell. Click HERE for further information about this newsletter. To those from before and those who are new-
I. WELCOME
X marks the spot.
I’m a big fan of mapping a story out. Not actually drawing maps, but using visual aids to lay out a story. Years ago, I used cue cards - pinned them up on bulletin boards, taped them to the walls, and even had magnetized sheets. I liked being able to move things around, try a scene in a different place, or be able to recognize and focus on the important elements.
Recently, I’ve used various digital tools to achieve the same effect. It’s not always the same as tangible cue cards, but it does the job. I find a lot of this upfront work is incredibly helpful later on, especially if it is a complicated story. This has definitely come in handy with what I’ve been working on lately. I’ve become very interested in how the environment informs the behaviour of characters. I am a terrible visual artist, but with this project, I started drawing maps and putting a lot of thought into the terrain the characters are trodding. The physical space they inhabit and how this affects their lives.
I must say, this has been a bit of a revelation for me. I usually build characters from some form of internal mechanism, which has more or less worked. But, I’m seeing that combining this with the physical space makes for much more interesting and surprising choices, both from myself and the characters.
I’ve been an avid reader of David Mitchell for many years. Cloud Atlas is a brilliant piece of work - don’t hold the film adaptation against him. Many of his novels, like my personal favourite Ghostwritten, unfold as a series of interconnected stories. These are not short stories, rather a novel with one story that is broken up into fragments. Mitchell talks a lot about using maps and imagining the physical space of his novels in order to achieve this unique stylistic achievement.
If I’m describing a character’s ascent of a mountain, I need to know what he or she will find on the way up. Most of this information won’t get into the text, at least not directly, but I need to know. So either I use a real mountain that I’ve climbed often enough to keep in my memory, or I go hunting for one in the right area on Google Earth, or I draw my own. It’s very sketchy, but that’s O.K.: you can work with sketchy. What you can’t work with is a blank. My mountain and its trail was enough to catalyze an exchange in my imagination between the mountainside I already had and the mountainside I needed. Much artistic creation involves this Ping-Pong exchange: not between Nothing and Something, but between Something O.K. and Something Better. — David Mitchell / Start with the Map / The New Yorker.
The new Matrix movie has nothing to do with maps (but sort of does?). However, I got a kick out of how Lana Wachowski brought on David Mitchell, a novelist, as a co-writer on the film.
Q - If you’ve seen The Matrix Resurrections: skip it or go watch it right now?
II. TALES FROM THE DREAM ROOM
Each month welcomes an exclusive story from a parallel world.
The Dream Room is a place that where everything is interconnected. The sights and sounds and people that inhabit this world feel familiar. The tales pulled from the Dream Room are sometimes true and sometimes fiction, they may scare you or make you laugh. The Dream Room is a place not to be taken lightly and if you’re ready to enter, read the excerpt below and click on the link for the full story.
Over the last year of writing stories for this section, I’ve been working at pulling them together and building a book from this. One of the main characters driving the story is Jazmine Moon, someone that, in some ways, I have been developing for many years. Below is an excerpt from where she starts out in the story.
AN EXTRAORDINARY TIME IN THE HISTORY OF DREAMING: A dream can be a map to unlock reality. Or, at least I was hoping that was the case. This concept, that dreams are trying to tell us something, was why I found myself sitting in the waiting room of The Dream and Nightmare Laboratory at the University of Montreal. I felt this was the place for me because whatever I was experiencing fell in between a dream and a nightmare. I wasn’t waking up from a fright, but it wasn’t exactly pleasant either.
Every night for the past six months, which coincidentally was around the time that the pandemic started, I’ve been having the same dream. I am floating in space - there is no sound and nothing much happens. I’m just floating. I am not wearing what you usually see astronauts wearing, but one of those old timey diving suits, like a steampunk kind of thing. There’s a tube running from the chest area of my suit which is attached to a spaceship. And I float, for a very long time. Nothing happens, I just watch the stars and the Earth.
Q - Do you remember your dreams or not?
III. PAUL’S PICKS.
A recommendation of something watched, read, or listened to.
When I picked up Jesse Wente’s new book Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance, I didn’t realize he was going to use film as a portal to talk about many issues that affect Indigenous people. It’s quite amazing how he uses film to showcase his imagination, while understanding its shortfalls - seeing how art both pulls representation backwards while at the same time has the potential to propel it forwards.
Wente is an amazing writer, taking complex issues and breaking them down in ways that do not remove their complexity, but provide the reader with a deeper understanding. His writing voice is so tight that it feels as though you are having an engaging conversation with the smartest person in the room. And in that room, there is bluntness in what needs to be done and a compassion for those who continue to suffer.
Below is a powerful commentary by Wente in response to that nonsense a while back about an appropriation prize. He wrote about this experience extensively in Unreconciled. It was fascinating to read about all the emotion and thought that went into these few minutes. You can feel it.
Q - What’re you reading lately?
IV. FROM THE ARCHIVES.
An old story brought to you in a new way.
RIVERDALE PARK (NOVEMBER 2019): The man’s eyes darted past the kid’s head and out the window, down the hill that bordered Riverdale Park. He slammed his right hand on the STOP button and barely could wait for the doors to open. I watched the man dangerously run across the street, swiping his eyes from his phone to the other side of the street. Pretty much ignoring the honking cars.
The chime sounded for the streetcar doors to close. At the last minute, I slipped through the closing doors, my backpack getting caught between them. I could feel everyone on the streetcar glaring at me. I was that guy. The guy who puts his own convenience above everyone else. With one last pull, my backpack came free and I ran across the street, a car slamming on its breaks, barely avoiding me.
I caught up with the man. I didn’t have to worry about being discrete as he was focused on his five phones. He walked fast and had to pick up my pace to catch up. I kept the quick stride with him, stopped when he stopped, mirrored his every move. Out of the corner of my eyes, I thought I saw something unusual in the sky. I know this sounds strange, but the only thing that came to mind at the time was: there’s a dragon in the sky.
Q - What’s your favourite outdoor space?
V. WATCH, LISTEN, READ, OR DO.
Something to take with you.
Last November, myself and the rest of the SWDT Crew were really excited to start planning an actual live event. It felt like the old days and it’s pretty amazing how much muscle memory we have for things. The pre-holiday COVID wave totally washed away any hope of having a live event. So, we cancelled it, again. At some point, we will gather again and tell stories!
Until then, there’s actually quite a lot of resources available on the SWDT website. A lot of it has to do with writing, storytelling, and performing, but there’s also stuff on how to start events and so on. And it comes in any form you like:
SWDT Podcast: 144 episodes of writing tips, tricks, and secrets of the storytelling trade. Plus, tons of live stories from the event.
SWDT Blog: if you don’t like listening to something, a lot of the episodes are transcribed here. Plus, other writerly things.
SWDT Book: I don’t know where you’re at, but it’s been freezing in my neck of the woods. If you’d like to cozy up with some great stories, get your very own copy of the book.
Q - What event are you looking to attend once things open up (again)?
You’ve probably noticed that I’ve included a question at the end of each section. No, this isn’t required homework. However, if you are compelled to write to me with your thoughts, I would love to hear from you. Who knows, I might even share some of the answers in future newsletters (anonymously, of course). Email me here: jpd@pauldore.com.
January 2022 Edition: Cats / Emotional Friction / Beans / Chaos / Storytime.