It felt a bit funny at first. The story idea that I decided to start with is one for which I know the ending (kind of rare for me, that). And I hadn’t been intending to start my prewriting with collage experiment with this story, either – but the other night, I was lying in bed and all of a sudden the entire first scene started playing out in my mind.

It’s a scene that I’ve actually written out before, but I never liked it. I felt I didn’t know my characters well enough, so everything was kind of rickety and wooden.

But that night, I got to know my protagonist a lot better. And that’s when it occurred to me that she would be an ideal way to start experimenting with prewriting with collage.

One thing I’d already decided I would do was use the collage method to help me get to know my characters better. I have tried almost every method of developing a character out there – creating character profiles, interviewing my characters, writing their journals, doing stream of consciousness writing about their lives – and nothing has really ever worked for me. Since I find writing to be so much easier when I really know my characters, I usually end up writing some wooden first chapters until the characters start coming alive for me.

So I thought it would be perfect to use the prewriting with collage method to develop my characters! And I’ve decided to couple it with the cool lapbooking technique that I learned last year when I was looking at homeschooling resources. (Here’s a great YouTube video showing a trains lapbook, to give you an idea of what can be done, if you haven’t come across lapbooking before).

A file folder for each character, and then a large collage for the entire novel – that’s my plan, anyway.

When I started tearing out the pictures, images and words that called to me, I was trying at first to focus on my main character. But after a while, I’d find images that suited other characters, or the novel as a whole. So in the end, I decided to just tear out anything that felt “right” for the book. What I’ll do is collect a large pile of images and words and colours, and then I’ll start sorting and creating the individual folders as well as the large collage.

And the most important thing of all – I started! And it’s as fun as I thought it would be.

If anyone is interested in doing prewriting with collage, I’d love to hear about your progress!