More About Attention and Attaching

Attaching images to images, stories to stories, scenes to scenes, consciously investigating; this is the assembling that all narrative works from. Pulling from your collected store of images and stories, pulling from the culture around you and creating more connections, while exploring and expanding the existing paths already between them. This is what makes works of narrative art that speak in your voice and connect with your audience.

Want to make a giant graphic novel? The connections will start to make sense via plot. Of course the mother who discovers the knife is the woman you imagined crying at the zoo... She went there because it was where her husband was a custodian. She discovered the knife when she found him dead in the pool. The woman’s story begins to emerge. She must find her husband’s killer, and will learn more about ... Themes will emerge about deception. Pictures will emerge from those themes.

Look to your store of other images and fragments. What else suggests a double life, unsolved mysteries, or what else just calls out to be part of this larger story? Guide this all to a narrative which allows the deepest exploration of those themes.
Want to work in short forms? You’re more than halfway there. Connect the two images... Tick that story clock one or two notches and and let the reader alone to imagine and believe in other connections. Why is it short rather than long? To allow the reader more identification? To free the reader from too much authorial control? Consider these questions as you guide it to the right size.

Regardless of your larger goals, the process is always the same: mixing ideas, images, marks and dedication.

Stanislavski again: Put life into all the imagined circumstances and actions until you have completely satisfied your sense of truth and until you have awakened your sense of faith in the reality of the sensations.

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