Tessera
The raw materials of a new idea; a journey to Thisaway, Arkansas; and the heresy of a straight, clean line
Vol. 1, Issue 4
Once, I took a mosaics class with my dad at The Vinery in Madison, Wisconsin. We shattered sheets of colored glass into small pieces and arranged them on a round wood tabletop. My dad’s design was a detailed, symmetrical spiral. Mine was a decidedly abstract palm tree. We each mortared over our tiles and fixed the wood onto a short, black metal frame. My little table now sits next to my daughter’s bed, and though I’ve thought many times about making a new and more sophisticated mosaic on top of my amateur one, I can’t quite bring myself to cover up that first effort at crafting a functional whole out of broken little bits.
In mosaics, each individual piece is called a tessera, and the first step in the process is to select the tesserae that will aggregate into a larger and cohesive whole. Some mosaics just use glass, while others incorporate ceramics, shells, rocks, and other items. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative tesserae as I’ve been struggling to embark on a new fiction project this summer. What is the very first little bit of this new story? What will be the very first sentence?
I’ve been mulling over Stephen King’s advice in On Writing about the question of where — and with what, exactly — to begin a new project. King says that his books usually start with a situation, and the characters evolve next, followed by the plot. Essentially, a random scene may come to him in a dream, while on a walk, in the shower, etc., and he begins to build around that, like a clam secreting pearlescent fluid around a grit of sand.
In the past, I’ve often tried to approach my fiction in a similar way. I generally start with a “What if?” question and build out entire speculative universes as I consider the answer. My first-ever novel manuscript started with the question “What if we could switch ourselves into the bodies of others?” And my latest manuscript, which is currently on submission to publishers, started with the question “What if a girl from my hometown said she had special powers?”
For weeks now, I’ve been toying with various big-concept questions to prompt myself into starting another novel. Yet this time, I can’t seem to find the right tesserae to arrange around any of my prompts. Instead, I keep coming back to, of all things, the title of a short story I wrote while I lived in Europe. That title had originally emerged suddenly and randomly from the depths of my subconscious, and in response to it, I’d constructed an entire town with a problem and a cast of characters. I published the story and used it to get into my MFA program. Yet now I can’t help thinking that maybe there’s a whole new and different narrative that I could build over the basic foundation of that first short one.
The truth is, I’m not sure, not yet. But maybe this is the right little piece of glass (or grain of sand) to put first on the page. And maybe I’ll arrange a few words around it. Maybe I’ll even keep going.
If you, too, are wrestling with the beginning of something new right now, I hope something in this week’s newsletter helps.
Listen
As you read today’s issue, I suggest this as your soundtrack:
Read
Fire Bones, by Greg Brownderville. This “go show” incorporates text, illustrations, videos, and animated elements to tell the story of a missing pilot/preacher in a fictional Arkansas town called Thisaway. Each individual element of the project is beautifully crafted, and together, they create a rich and immersive narrative experience.
The Artist Who Fills Potholes with Mosaics, The Guardian. “Em Emem is an anonymous, Lyon-based artist … His work involves filling potholes and cracked walls on city streets with beautiful mosaic designs.”
Consider
The Tessera Oracle is a set of tiles that function like a Tarot deck. Crafted by archaeologist, book-maker, and designer Tory Woolcott, each tile offers stand-alone symbolism (just like an individual Tarot card), but when used together, the tiles offer a larger and more mystical narrative experience.
First/last words
My favorite mosaics are those with broken and uneven tesserae that somehow manage to aggregate into something balanced and complete. Perhaps that’s why I fell in love Hundertwasser architecture while I lived in Vienna. His work incorporated mosaics in many forms at massive scale, and he was militantly opposed to the clean, plain lines of most 1970s architecture.
Because of the straight line the products of design, drawing board, and modeling have become sickeningly sterile and truly senseless. The straight line is godless and immoral. The straight line is not a creative line, but simply a reproductive lie. In it there lives not God and human spirit, but a mass-created, brainless ant addicted to comfort … We should be glad when rust settles on a razor blade, when a wall grows mouldy, or when moss grows over the geometric angles of a corner, because, together with microbes and mushrooms, life thus moves into a house through this process we more consciously become witnesses of the architectural changes from which we must learn. —Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Whenever you find your way to your work this week, I invite you to consider focusing on the fragments of whatever idea you’re currently wrestling with. Try jotting down snippets of characters, settings, dialogue, or events on Post-It notes or grocery receipts or other bits of paper. Let the pieces of a story come into form before making any attempt to assemble or order them. Try to let go of linearity and a false sense of control over your own creative process. Let your ideas (and words) aggregate more organically than you usually do. Let them spore across the page, like mold on one of Hundertwasser’s cherished natural walls.
Connect
You can find Sandra on Twitter, Instagram, and at sandrabarnidge.com. As always, thank you for being here.