The Craft of Life Mapping ~ Margaret Seelie

Every January I make a life map. This tradition began a few years ago when I was living abroad and traveling. I split my maps into three categories: Date, Location, and Life / Love. I imagine the first two are self-explanatory, but the last column highlighted who came to visit, who I loved and / or slept with, and job highlights. Each column consisted of bullet-points, and sometimes brief summaries. Being someone who is prone to long-winded prose, I was impressed by Sandell's ability to summarize, and had I never written a life map I believe her craft would have baffled me. It seems that summary is a craft tool that Sandell used to communicate her multifarious plot. Looking at her theoretical Table of Contents below we can see what portions of her life she chose to summarize in each chapter, and how she wove multiple plot-lines together. Similar to written prose, she choose vital scenes to moving the plot forward, for instance, she shows us her relationship overseas in "Flight," then launches into the rest of her dating career in "Men." Then, we take a slight detour from the main character's plot-line to revisit the story of the father. By fracturing her story-lines into summarized sections she is able to move seamlessly through time, space, and plot. Table of Contents (theoretical) Part I 1. Secrets 2. Stories & Gifts 3. Visions 4. Signs 5. A Discovery 6. Flight 7. Men 8. Relative Impostor 9. Father Fiction Part II 1. Startstruck 2. Doubt 2.5 Celebrity Zoo (120) 2.75 My Interviews (122) 3. The Big Guns (125) 4. The Towel (131) 5. Contact 6. Two Truths and a Lie 7. Argentina 8. Contract of Denial (174) 8.5 The Price of Fiction (176) 9. Goodbye Doubt (186) 9.5 A Storybook Life (188) 10. Too Little, Too Late 11. Blackout 12. Shades of Hope 13. Family Week 14. Shades of Brooklyn 15. The Good Life By summarizing, Sandell is able to pack a lot of plot into a small space. This prevents the plot from spinning out of control. For instance, if Sandell were anything like me (unable to keep her travel tales to herself), she would not have been able to keep her "I traveled more" section to six frames. I would have expanded on this section till the reader forgot who her father even was, but by life mapping I understood and admired her ability to keep months of travels to half a page...impressive! "The Impostor's Daughter" had an eighth grader's scrapbook aesthetic, for me. This was established from the first page with the pastel polka-dots around the bubble-letters reading, "Part I." In the beginning this aesthetic choice made sense because it set the adolescent tone of naiveté. As the mystery developed and the main character spiraled deeper into her father's lies and her own depression I expected more shadows, muted colors, and perspective in the frames. Even at her darkest, most depressed moments in "Shades of Hope" the pages are still splashed with pinks, oranges, greens, and blues (204-219). The bags under her eyes and zoomed-in frame of her face on page 207 are what communicate her depression. Ultimately, I speculate that the book maintained a bright aesthetic throughout because of the character's magazine background, and I appreciate that she stuck to the aesthetic she knows. I was confused by the fluctuation between pink and brown hair colors from pages 53-60. It was unclear as to weather the absence of pink in her hair signified a growing up moment (when she decides not to be a stripper, pg. 60), or primitive art (Sandell just forgot to add the pink). The absence of the pink in her hair seemed deliberate, but not frequent enough for me not to questions...I imagined it is like when you're trying to include a metaphor in your writing and your workshop says, "you need to push the metaphor further for the reader to get it." Ultimately, Sandell has inspired me to attempt to stay in scene with my writing and stick to the plot. I realized that maybe I need to start life mapping my characters as well as myself. ~Margaret Seelie~ (I apologize for the text-block, Blogger is being stubborn with the spacing.)