On Vignettes

On Vignettes.

As I work on this novel, I often find myself randomly penning snippets or excerpts without any idea where they actually fit in. a scene comes to me involving my characters or locations, somewhat ethereally, and I write it. This usually happens in class, when I should be paying attention to my ridiculously intelligent Life Science Professor. However, I don’t pay attention to her, but instead fill the pages intended for notes on bacteria and flagellum with random snippets.

This is, for me, a good thing. Writing my characters into situations, even if it never plays into the main narrative, helps me to flesh out their personalities, to cement their identities in my mind, and makes it that much easier to write them as dynamic personas in the future. So I write these side-stories, these vignettes, and I keep them, occasionally putting them up for viewing in order to get a read on people’s reaction to the character or location in question.

And I encourage any other writer to occasionally pen a few disconnected snippets, just to establish for themselves the character’s unique behavior and worldview. Sometimes, when working on a story, we spend all of our time working right on the story and just getting the narrative down. And sometimes, nay, oftentimes, that is a good thing. That dedication is the lifeblood of a writing endeavor. But it’s good occasionally to take a step back and do some character or location study free of the confines of the story itself. When you’re writing a character without having to forcefully progress along the narrative tracks you’ve laid, it gives you some leeway to explore that character fully, to question how he or she would react to certain situations, or why.

As for locations, setting unrelated side-stories in the settings of your main plot allows you to do the same. I’ve written a forest-oriented city into my story. Now if I write myself a vignette about, say, a thief committing acts of his trade across the city, it allows me to roam, to explore the locale and invent things about it I may never use. It helps to have as much knowledge or idea of a place as possible, even if you don’t use it all, because it allows you to avoid the pitfall of locations that are simply two-dimensional backdrops for events, and establish places that are dynamic and catalyzing, real touchstone places that take on a life of their own.

So next time you get really caught up in a story, think about taking a break and Vignette-ing (I am aware that “vignette-ing” is not a word. But as a writer, I have the power to influence the direction our language travels in the future. So me inventing that word is just my way of pulling on the strings of the future. And THAT is real fun.) Because if you do, you might just find that it takes your main story to a whole new level.

Postscript: a Vignette is a short, complete story, sketch. or similar work of art, just in case you didn’t know.