Art as Inspiration: How Collage Can Help Create Compelling Characters

I have heard stories of artists and writers being enormously productive during periods of war, plague, and national crisis, but I wasn’t one of them. Just before lockdown began, I had published my first book and begun working on a second—a novel about a queer woman photographer and a nonbinary journalist who decide to do an ambitious art project together. But as hundreds of thousands of people were dying, anything that happened in the mind now seemed like a fucking joke. Art! I thought. Hahahahahahaha.

On one of the many nights at home, I rewatched that great work of American cinema, Blue Crush (2002). It’s about four female friends surfing in Hawaii, although two of them don’t really matter. The two who do are Anne Marie—white, blond, incapable of wearing a shirt with sleeves—and Eden—Latinx, board shorts, drives a jet ski. Anne Marie is established as the more talented of the two, so Eden assumes the role of her trainer. When AM gets involved with an NFL player visiting Hawaii on vacation, jeopardizing her training by ordering pancakes post-coitus and swimming in the ocean in a cocktail dress, Eden is pissed—possibly about AM throwing away her talents, possibly something else (I am not the first to suggest that this movie is very, very gay) but ultimately Eden is there, watching from the shore, as AM makes her big bid for surfing stardom. I loved Michelle Rodriguez as Eden—she seemed hungry throughout the whole movie. She seemed starved.

There was also something in the movie that reminded me of the untouched book project: a story of something more than friendship, more than romance, and more than being artistic collaborators; it was all three. I became obsessed with the character of Eden. I wanted to see her face. No, more than that, I wanted to make her face, to make her face appear out of nothing, and in so making, I wanted to understand the essence of her hunger and of my own disdain for the idea of being the one who doesn’t do the making of the great thing but instead plays second fiddle.

I could not have written Eden’s face. I could have painted it or drawn it, I guess, but I can’t paint or draw. I remembered that I had led feelings-forward collage workshops for teenage girls in southeastern West Virginia. I cleared my shitty wooden table and procured a small plastic scissor, a decrepit paintbrush, magazines, and crusty jar of Mod Podge—a form of glue that can go both over and beneath your creations.

I began with the general shape of her face and finding chunks of magazine that were the right colors for her skin and hair. I worked from a photograph of Michelle Rodriguez—I am no great conjurer. Then I moved the bits of paper around and added darker and lighter places for a long time. For a while, no face emerged. Then suddenly, one did.

Collage works in layers that are both similar to and totally unlike drafts of writing: nothing is erased; things are only added. I found it was easier in collage than in writing to move toward a hypothesis without knowing if the hypothesis would be supportable, to be attracted to color or shape simply for its aesthetic pleasure. The ghost of your process is always there in collage, physical and feel-able when you run your fingers over it.

I worked toward the hypothesis of Eden’s eyes, that Eden’s watching her friend/beloved was the animating force of her face. As I worked, I understood that it can be a sacred experience to watch someone you love out there on the ocean, making something beautiful, even as you are yourself are still on the shore.

On the hunt for more imbalanced artistic duos, I rewatched Frances Ha (2013). Frances, a fledgling dancer, and Sophie, a more established book editor, are codependent friends in Brooklyn, sharing a bed. “The story of us,” Frances calls it when Sophie tells it–they will love each other and be successful artists together forever. As Sophie becomes increasingly serious about her boyfriend, a man improbably named “Patch,” she and Frances drift apart. Frances becomes broker and makes more and more “unhinged” decisions, while Sophie becomes ever more hinged until she finally moves to Japan for Patch’s job. Frances is devastated.

I liked the early stage of my Frances collage best—the one with no eyes. Unlike Eden, Frances isn’t watching Sophie, she wants to be watched by Sophie, she wants to be witnessed, and comes unraveled without that witnessing. As I collaged, I worked towards a different hypothesis of why some people need to be the beloved—it was the story. Frances wasn’t capable of telling a solo story, only a story in relation, and without the story of Sophie and Frances, there was no story of Frances alone. This is, I think, a thing that really happens to people, an interesting thing that is worthy of being depicted in a book from the inside. I began to return to the tricky character in my novel to see if this might be true of her too.

As I wrote, just little notes, I realized I had a new question: I began to think that my novel would feature not just an imbalance in love but an imbalance in notoriety, the beloved, who was now named Bernie, achieving more fame and success than her friend, Leah. How, I now wanted to know, does that external force act upon the intimacy of a couple?

I found just such a test site in Robyn Crawford, the “longtime companion” of Whitney Houston–what a strange thing, to be, forever, an “of” of someone!—her best friend, ex-girlfriend, assistant, scheduler, fixer, caretaker. It was summer now, and I walked around Cobbs Creek Park sweating and listening to Crawford narrate her 2019 memoir, A Song for You: My Life with Whitney Houston.

Crawford and Houston met when they were 19 and 17 respectively and they had a romantic relationship for several years before Houston signed her first record contract and told Crawford that their relationship could no longer be sexual. After that, Crawford says, being close to Houston looked like loving and supporting Houston emotionally and logistically however was most needed. There was pleasure there, and enjoyment, and jokes and common interests—the two apparently loved dancing, basketball, and doing drugs together. What broke them seems not to have been Crawford’s resentment at being sidelined but rather Houston’s ultimate inability—heightened by her family and by homophobia—to accept Crawford’s care.

I found, as I tried to conjure the immense light and glow in Crawford’s face with tiny bits of paper (it took me a long time to get the color luminous enough), that equality was the wrong paradigm, the wrong thing to be looking for in every intimate connection between two people. Crawford wasn’t just close to Houston’s genius, proximate to it, she was it, she created the conditions under which it was possible. “I really feel,” R&B and Houston’s husband Bobby Brown said in 2016, “that if Robyn was accepted into Whitney’s life, Whitney would still be alive today.” That too, I saw, is a kind of art.

I studied many loving second fiddles during that first part of the pandemic, but these are the ones that come back. As summer turned to fall and then finally into winter, I kept collaging and something new settled inside me. I felt able now to see the thing which was no longer a hypothesis, that good art is often made in the unique forcefield that rises up between two people rather than inside one person alone. As I began to write into the novel in earnest, I listened over and over again to “For What It’s Worth” by Stevie Nicks: “I got to sing, I got to dance/I got to be a part of a great romance…What you did was: you saved my life/I won’t forget it.” Aha, I thought! I had arrived, in the “I” of the lover. I kept going. The fiddles became Housemates.

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Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg is available from Hogarth Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.