Guests
Part 6 of an online seminar on Tinderbox and World Building for fiction and creative nonfiction. Join us! Email questions and suggestions to Mark Bernstein.
Our young heroine, Florence Smith, longs to own a great painting. Unfortunately, she cannot afford to patronize the galleries of Bond Street. She can’t really afford to pay her new cook.
What is she to do?
She might get to know a great painter, or a young painter who is about to become great. Perhaps she can assist him (or her?) in some way, and receive a painting as a reward.
In any case, the Victorian painters of the third quarter of the 19th century were an interesting crowd. Their paintings were full of ideas, their lives were full of controversy. Ruskin’s wife, Effie Gray, became Millais’ wife. Rosetti’s model, Lizzie Sidall, became his wife. His sister Christina wrote a poem about the relationship:
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel -- every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
There are interesting fictional possibilities here, and plenty of plot springs, though we don’t want biography to overtake and overwhelm the story. Perhaps we can invite some of these painters into our family circle? And perhaps they will introduce us to others, and tell us stories, and somehow we’ll find that great painting.
Image Adornments
One nice trick for brainstorming is to scatter small thumbnail images through your maps, image references to help you focus on your characters. Keep these small — you don’t need incredible detail, you simply want an impression.
Adding image adornments to Tinderbox is easy. First, you want to select an image, or (more often) part of an image, and scale it to the size you want, using Preview or iPhoto or your favorite image editor. Next, copy the image to the clipboard. In Tinderbox, right-click where you want the image adornment and choose Paste Picture from the contextual menu.
Questions? Alternatives? Corrections? Improvements to the story? Join the conversation: email bernstein@eastgate.com . Discussions are the Tinderbox Forum and at NaNoWriMo. We'll be back in a day or two with part seven.
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