The World Is Your Oracle
A Divinatory Collage Exercise for Writers
Hi y’all,
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I use collage when I teach creative writing to undergrads, and how collage frees our imaginations when we feel stuck.
Collage sounds quaint and whimsical. And it is. It also really works.
The exercise I’m sharing in this post is one I’ve used to write multiple short stories, one of which was eventually published in The Best American Short Stories anthology.
Below I’ve included a collage exercise that acts like an oracle for your work-in-progress. Think of it as making your own Tarot card, filled with symbolism and archetypes particular to you.
Before we get started on the exercise, here’s why collage is such a helpful tool for fiction writers, essayists, and poets:
You need to act like a child to make something.
It’s been observed by more than one person that artists are basically people who never grew out of their childish habit of making things. But also, when you take your art seriously, it’s inevitable that at some point you’ll feel overly serious and stiff.
Collage makes me feel like an eleven-year old, sitting in a friend’s bedroom and cutting up pictures from drug-store 90’s girl magazines like YA and Sassy, or my parents’ old National Geographics, daydreaming of all the places I’d one day visit, gagging at the perfume samples, gossiping with a friend with what actors we thought were cute, and covering our palms in glue to make glue-balls.
I never really care if my collage is beautiful or artful or not. It’s healthy to practice an art you’re not very good at it. (And I will show, in an example below, that I’m not being overly modest.)
If you’re finding lately that your inner artist is sounds like a tyrannical inner critic, collage can make you feel like a free-spirited, curious explorer. It’s naturally messy and surprising, and forces you to get out of the habit of expecting the creative process to be linear and neat.
A story always begins in the sensory world.
We’re so used to our own fluent literacy that we can sometimes forget that reading is a magical act that allows us to inhabit the life of illusory person (a character) and wander through the author’s vivid, waking dream.
Reading and writing could be described as a process of alchemical sublimation—transforming sensuous material into the airy, imaginary realm. This imaginary realm can feel just as vivid as the material realm: we smell the starchy sugar of a just-baked cookie, touch the worn-out suede of a dance shoe, or see the waxen, verdant flesh of a tropical leaf, poised to unfurl.
In collage, the simple act of looking at images gets you back into habit of noticing, and elaborating upon, the visual world. Likewise, the simple act of cutting, pasting, arranging, images returns you to the kinesthetic act of creation.
Expressing a story in a way that isn’t verbal hones our intuition.
Even though stories are expressed through language, there’s a nonverbal part of us that helps us make decisions in our writing. You’ll find that there’s a wordless moment in beholding an image, a millisecond of recognition without labeling. This moment is filled with a ripe stillness. John Berger, an art critic, talks about how the image precedes language, “Seeing comes before words. A child looks and recognizes before it can speak.”
That startling moment of non-verbal recognition is important to the creativity of language. We behold the raw material of sensory experience, like a lump of clay, before we start mold it.
Collage is an oracle because the whole world is an oracle.
When I say “oracle,” I don’t mean a crystal ball that predicts that future, I mean a mirror that clearly reflects the present situation. Oracles work because they create the conditions for us to gain insight into what is already there.
Our minds are constantly projecting meaning onto the world and looking for patterns. For example, one of the things that makes highly abstract art difficult is that the artist must paint in a way that the viewer doesn’t see a human face. This is because we’ve evolved to constantly recognize the faces other beings. Our ancestors needed to spot a predator or prey in a camouflage of leaves or in the dense thicket of darkness. That same discernment for facial pattern is what makes us find a pair of eyes and a mouth in a splatter of paint where none was intended.
The evolutionary habit of finding patterns might be burdensome to an abstract visual artist, but it’s extremely useful when constructing a narrative through a medium like writing. Because we’re wired to find patterns in the physical world, this means the physical world can be in an excellent place to answer our own questions. What seems ordinarily disparate or unrelated will cohere into meaning when placed side by side, as in collage.
Placed side by side, objects naturally form relationships because our minds, and the minds of others, are constantly on the lookout for patterns and meaning.
If we see three seemingly disparate things all together—half a green bell pepper, a drummer’s stick, and a rubber ducky—our mind can easily tell a story as to how all those things arrived in the same place. In this example, drawn from real life, these are objects I have recently picked up off the floor that were dropped by my three-year-old. But the half green bell pepper could have easily been the snack of a vegan punk band drummer who was given the rubber ducky by a fan to put in her jeep.
Below is are the instructions on how to make a collage oracle. I’ve found this exercise to be helpful at all stages of writing a story, but especially whenever I feel stuck or lost in the midst of a work-in-progress.
Paid subscribers are welcome to leave their collage and/or first 500 words of their exercise in the comments or direct message me. I will respond with feedback that will include an observation about the strengths of your work, along with a few reflective and/or generative questions to help you develop your piece further.
I offer creativity and writing exercises each month and give feedback on the work of paid subscribers. I teach creative writing at Northwestern University and also at StoryStudio, a nonprofit creative writing center in Chicago. You can read more about my credentials as a teacher, writing coach, and manuscript consultant here.
To view examples of some of my other creative writing exercises, look here.
First of all, find some magazines, old books, and buy a set of good colored pencils or markers. Used bookstores and thrift stores are all good places to buy inexpensive texts that want a second life.
You could collage digitally, but I can guarantee that you’ll have a more immersive, absorbingly meditative experience if you use physical materials.
Consider this quote by poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language.”
Think of the questions you’re about to ask as constellations to navigate by rather than destinations to reach.
Before starting any of these exercises, take a step back and ask yourself a question about your piece which relates to its meaning. The question should feel expansive and wide-angled as possible. Rather than asking yourself directly about a craft topic (such a pacing, or dialogue) go big (ex: How does time work in this story?). The question might also be something that can’t be answered completely or neatly (ex: How does love work within this essay?).
Try to write down 2 to 3 questions.
Start sifting through your materials, keeping your questions lightly in the back of your mind, the way you might when shuffling a deck of cards for a Tarot reading. Don’t think too hard about the images—just cut out whatever interests you.
Now that you have the images, paste them into a notebook in a manner that is visually appealing to you. A collage oracle can be beautiful but it’s fine if it isn’t. A simple, visually inoffensive collage still gets the job done:
Using markers or colored pencils, write any thoughts, scenes, lines, or descriptions that come to mind that connect the collage to your writing project. See how it feels to write around the cut-out images rather than in straight lines. Write in directions that aren’t just linear. Write in different sizes and use different scripts than you might normally (cursive instead of print, for example).
What you’ll have is an atmospheric kind of collage. Return to your original questions. What direction is the collage pointing to? What are the images you’ve found that can be incorporated into your work? What sensory information is being communicated? How have the images changed their own meaning by being placed next to other images? Write this down in a process journal—a place where you keep track of your creative work.
Keep your collage nearby as a guide into your work, and start writing about whatever you’ve gleaned from the oracle. I highly recommend continuing to write by hand for this next part, then retyping it once you have a few pages.
If you have any questions about this process, let me know in the comments.
Also: Feel free to share your collage and/or up to 500 words with me! I can provide you with a few generative questions and give feedback on your work’s meaning.
