I’ll use a couple of characters as examples.Īnne Cole loves her mother Danica, but she’s terrified that she might share Danica’s hoarding tendencies, and so a lot of her actions are almost more reactions where she’s trying to do the opposite of what she thinks her mother would do.
How did those fixations define their characters? What would the characters be without their compulsions? TCJWW: You explore a few obsessions throughout the book: hoarding, love, control, regret. There are any number of places in the story where the reader experiences a character’s pain not through dialogue or captions but solely through what Carla’s drawn. Also, the more I figured out how the characters connected not simply to objects but to each other, the easier it was to see where conflicts would arise.Īnd once Carla Speed McNeil came on as the artist, I knew I could rely on her ability to simply show how the characters struggle. On a less philosophical, more practical level, I did a lot of eavesdropping at estate sales, and I kept in mind people I’ve known with tortured relationships to stuff. Do you gather up objects and think of them as embodied memories? Do you push them away out of fear of being weighed down? Are you hyperaware of what someone might pay for them? And of course there are multiple answers to those questions, so answering them for each character helped me define the characters’ struggles. Ryan: I’m interested in how and why people infuse objects with meaning.
How did you arrive at developing each of their conflicts? Where did you look in order to draw upon their various pains? TCJWW: Each character in your book is struggling with something personal of their own. Sara Ryan is the author of the graphic novel Bad Houses with art by Carla Speed McNeil, young adult novels The Rules for Hearts and Empress of the World, and various comics and short stories on themes including, but not limited to, teen angst, Hellboy, joining the military, the 1962 escape from Alcatraz, and circuses ( Sara Ryan online).
0 kommentar(er)
