The Making of Five Wounds: An Illuminated Novel – Part Two
Guest Post by Jonathan Walker
May 14
In the last post, I discussed working with illustrator Dan Hallett, but our novel Five Wounds also involved several other collaborators, notably the designer, Zoe Sadokierski, as well as the editor and publisher at Allen & Unwin, Hilary Reynolds and Erica Wagner.
There is a myth that novelists enjoy complete creative autonomy, in contrast to, say, filmmakers. But it is a myth, because a book is not, in the end, a collection of immaterial words. It is not a Platonic idea in the mind of the writer. It is rather an object, which is created via a complicated process involving many people. Right from the beginning, then, even as we begin the first phase of this process, the writing, our entire conception of the work has to be informed by what material form it might eventually take. (The rise of the e-book complicates this argument, but in a sense the e-book is still an ‘object’, even if it is an immaterial one. It can, or rather should, still be designed.) So then, if the contributions of illustrators and designers are an integral aspect of a book’s meaning, then we need to learn what they do, how they do it, and how to talk to them about it. In this respect, the creation of Five Wounds was a huge learning experience for me.
The videos below do not just introduce the design and illustrations of Five Wounds. They also encode the various phases of the collaboration between Dan, Zoe and I, which is important because it is only by reviewing the ins and outs of production that we can understand what ‘collaboration’ might mean in practice. These phases are described in full after the videos.
1. Coats-of-Arms
2. Illustrations
3. Annotations
4. Plates
Production History
1) In late 2004, Jon finishes a complete draft of the novel, which has no illustrations at this stage. In 2005, Jon and Dan collaborate on Jon’s first book, Pistols! Treason! Murder!, which is published by Melbourne UP in 2007. This experience suggests possibilities for working together again.
2) In 2006, Dan creates the set of illustrations now grouped together as Plates (as introduced in the last video), working on the basis of detailed instructions from Jon, and with the example of Goya’s etchings in mind. For each of the five protagonists, Jon designs a heraldic coat-of-arms, which Dan also creates.
3) In 2008, Jon meets Zoe Sadokierksi, a freelance designer who is working on a Ph.D. at UTS on ‘Visual Writing’: that is, books in which design and illustration are integral aspects of the storytelling.
4) At the end of 2008, Erica Wagner of Allen & Unwin buys Five Wounds on the understanding that it will be repackaged in a format closer to that of a graphic novel, to fit in with the other titles in Allen & Unwin’s nascent list in this area. Jon suggests the idea of an ‘illuminated novel’, by analogy with the ‘illuminated books’ of William Blake. In practice, this means retaining the text of the novel more or less as it is, but adding several new sets of illustrations and working on the design closely. Dan is promoted to co-author. Zoe is chosen as the designer.
5) According to the established norms for fiction publishing, Jon does a structural edit on the text in response to readers’ reports, and a subsequent copy edit and proofreading. This is normally the end of an author’s direct involvement in the production of a novel.
6) The next phase of production begins with Jon breaking the entire manuscript internally into chapters and verses, on the model of the King James Bible. All the chapter and verse numbers, and every instance in which a protagonist’s name appears, are then highlighted in red: they are ‘wounds’ on the page.
7) Zoe typesets the text in a two-column layout, and creates a dummy of the book, in which she assigns provisional spaces for illustrations by Dan. At Jon’s suggestion, these are distributed by Zoe according to design considerations, without reference to the possible subjects of such illustrations. From Jon’s and Dan’s point-of-view, this serves as a randomising effect, which shakes up the process in interesting ways.
8) Using the provisional page breakdowns assigned by Zoe, Jon designs a miniature coat-of-arms for each double-page spread, which indicates in colour-coded form which characters appear on that layout. Dan creates a grid of these miniature coats-of-arms, from which Zoe cuts and pastes the individual shields into successive layouts in the manuscript. Jon also suggests a unique running head title for each layout, which will serve (among other things) as a cue for the new illustrations to be created by Dan.
9) Jon writes a list of subjects for these new illustrations, and in the process suggests some changes to their distribution, when this seems necessary (i.e. there are some points in the novel that absolutely require an illustration, and the overall distribution has to be adjusted accordingly). In contrast to the procedure used to create the Plates, Jon’s suggestions for subject matter are often fairly sketchy, leaving Dan room to explore his own ideas.
10) Dan creates 45 new illustrations, working more or less independently, with occasional editorial input from Jon, who also makes numerous changes to the running heads and the typeset text in response to Dan’s work, to ensure that the text and images resonate with each other in the most effective way possible. This part of the process takes about six months.
11) Zoe incorporates all Dan’s illustrations into a new version of the manuscript. Jon then creates a list of possible visual ‘annotations’: subjects for marginal doodles to be added by Dan around the typeset text and the new illustrations. For the most part, these are confined to areas where there is a lot of empty white space, but there are several examples where an annotation is added to a layout that already includes an illustration, to create a separate layer of reference. The annotations are drawn in pencil rather than ink, and in an even looser style than the illustrations proper, to distinguish them technically as well as conceptually.
12) Jon checks that all the miniature coats-of-arms are still correct in relation to the contents of each layout, since changes to the typeset text during production (of which there were many) have also changed where the page breaks fall, and in some instances have therefore changed which characters appear on which pages. Cross-references to the Plates are added to the margins of the typeset text, which is now locked.
13) To complement Dan’s visual annotations, Jon creates a list of written annotations, which include handwritten corrections to be added on top of the typeset text, and labels to accompany some of Dan’s visual annotations. The registration on these is critical; that is, they have to be positioned very precisely on the page in relation to the typeset text underneath. Zoe works out the necessary procedure, which involves Jon tracing the annotations over printouts of the manuscript pages on a lightbox. Zoe then scans these tracings, which are added to the previous version of the manuscript as a final, separate layer.
14) Zoe and Dan create the cover and the endpapers.
15) Five Wounds is delivered to the printer at the end of 2009, and is published in Australia in May 2010.
Above: Magpie’s coat-of-arms, created in 2006
Above: One of the 45 new illustrations, created in 2009
Above: One of Dan’s visual annotations, created in late 2009
Above: Plate 2, Cur’s first murder, created in 2006
Above: Sample page layout
If the collaborative model I have outlined above is to reach its full potential, then everyone has to communicate directly with everyone else. It won’t work if the publisher adopts a strategy of ‘divide and rule’. It’s not about competing for control: rather, it means inviting everyone to participate more fully in the creative process rather than stick rigidly to their compartmentalised area of competence. This requires a high level of mutual trust among the contributors, and this will not be possible (or desirable) for every book, but I hope that Five Wounds demonstrates what authors have to gain by getting their hands dirty.
In short, collaboration is not a dirty word. I would not want complete creative autonomy, even if it was possible. I need the input of Dan and Zoe to improve my work.
Jonathan Walker is the author of Pistols! Treason! Murder! The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy and the co-author of Five Wounds: An Illuminated Novel. He is appearing at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival in a panel on ‘Graphic Novels vs Illustrated Texts’, with Josh Neufeld and Zoe Sadokierski.
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