Chapter by Chapter in Harry Potter

Holy cow, I’m on the WordPress Freshly Pressed list today! Thanks to WordPress for the opportunity, and to all the readers who have stopped by to check out last week’s Friday Fifteen. If you liked that post, it’s a regular feature so you should check out the Friday Fifteen archive. So many fifteen-word reviews!

Back to normal book business. One lovely feature in the Harry Potter series is the illustration featured at the beginning of each chapter. Now Redditor ajcfood has put together each chapter illustration in one giant composite:

Click through to see the larger image. Wouldn’t this make a fantastic poster? It really gives you a sense of the scope and narrative of the series.

Mary GrandPré is the artist behind it all (she also does the covers). Her work provides a glimpse into each chapter, and connects beautifully with Rowling’s magical stories. Check out this interview with GrandPré in which she talks a little about her process.

You Write What You Eat

Writing requires sustenance–sometimes weird sustenance. Check out Wendy MacNaughton’s illustrations of famous writers’ favorite snacks. I’m all in favor of Emily Dickinson’s homemade bread (we could swap recipes), but I’m not sure I can get behind Fitzgerald’s canned meat.

I try to limit the snacks during actual writing time. Otherwise it’s an excuse for me to not be working. But when I am munching, I tend to go for almonds or dried mango from Trader Joe’s, and a steady flow of water and coffee.

Do you have any favorite writing snacks?

(image: Wendy MacNaughton)(via the Kitchn)

 

A Whole New World

When I first read The Princess Bride, I thought Florin was a real place, or at least that it had been at some point. (Prussia was real.) Goldman crafted his novel so well that I really wanted it to exist. Also, my copy of the book included a map. It had to be real if some cartographer had written it down!

Okay, so I was a naive little reader. (Um, I still might be waiting for Goldman to finish Buttercup’s Baby–WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME, GOLDMAN?!) But there is something exhilarating about fictional lands. World-building is difficult, but so necessary for novels, particularly in the fantasy realm. The Pevensies are great, but what I love most about Lewis’s books is the possibility of Narnia. As a reader, you want to go to these places.

Part of world-building requires actually knowing where these places might exist. Maps like the the one in The Princess Bride can help a writer figure out how events can unfold and keep the narrative on track.

The Awl has a great collection of some literary maps, including Goldman’s. Others I hadn’t seen, like A.A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood or Baum’s map of Oz. Although it wasn’t included in the actual books, the recent map of Panem also gets a shoutout.

In case that’s not enough map-love for you, make sure to check out this gorgeous post from the Horn Book by Julie Larios. One point I especially enjoyed:

“I ask my writing students at Vermont College of Fine Arts to think long and hard about the setting they develop in their books for children. Kids want to be explorers, too. They don’t always want to identify with a familiar character in a familiar world. Books, says Fran Lebowitz, should be doors, not mirrors. So I ask my students to think of offering the setting of their stories to young readers as a gift that opens doors. By doing so, they turn their readers into explorers, and what child doesn’t want to explore?…We explore, and we come to know the unknown.”

I love the connection between maps and children’s literature in particular. Books are a major way (maybe the only way) children get to freely explore. Why not have fun with it?

Tips and Tools for 2012

In case one of your resolutions is to be a more productive writer/illustrator this year, there’s no where better to get inspiration than Kathy Temean’s roundup of her Writing and Illustrating articles from 2011. A few I’ve dived into:

Now I just need to make sure I’m also doing actual writing and not just reading Kathy’s blog. Hope you get inspired for 2012 writing, too!

 

 

You Are What You Write

Fictional books are awesome. Reading about a character reading a novel that doesn’t exist is like literary inception. (Minus Leonardo DiCaprio.)

So of course I dig Warren Lehrer’s visual novel, A Life in Books: the Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley. Lehrer has created the covers/some content of 101 fake novels by character Mobley–quite a task. The books develop the life story of Mobley and allow for an engaging look at book design. About the project, Lehrer says:

I decided I wanted to get at this kind of panoramic view of the world in a different, more evocative and fun way, by writing a novel about one man’s use of books and storytelling as a means of understanding himself, the people around him, and a half century of American/global culture.”

It’s kind like “you are what you read,” except in Lehrer’s novel “you are what you write.” I’ve included an image of one of Mobley’s books here, but there are a ton of others in the original article. Make sure to click through and see the rest.