Notes on Writing Strange Flowers

A few days ago I shared The Inquisitor’s Spear, an excerpt from my upcoming surrealist botanical field guide. I thought it might be fun to talk a bit more about the creative process that goes into writing these entires.

From the outset of this project I wanted to maintain the conceit that these stories might plausibly be entires in one of those Peterson’s field guides that I used to love as a kid. This meant that each story would have to be very short. This, of course, places stringent limits on how much storytelling one can do. My story for The Inquisitor’s Spear is one of the longest in the entire manuscript, and it’s only about 250 words.

Working with such a tight length constraint turned out to be pretty challenging. I wanted stories that were interesting and compelling, but I also knew that I would be very limited in terms of what I could do with characters, settings, plot.

In the end, I opted for an approach where I treated each entry more like a poem than a story. These Strange Flowers are more about establishing a mood and a theme than they are about conveying a plot. This approach was very much inspired by some of my favourite experimental novels of the 70s–books like Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition or Calvino’s Invisible Cities or Burroughs’ Exterminator. (The graphic design elements in the magazine, like the fonts and layout, have also been inspired by the aesthetics of those books.)

Following this approach, The Inquisitor’s Spear has been stripped of almost all the conventional aspects that make a story work. There’s no protagonist. The setting is ambiguous. And there really isn’t a plot in the conventional sense. Instead, the story is mostly just a surreal/poetic meditation on the history of inquisitions, using the (ostensibly real) practice of bamboo torture as a starting point.

The other “stories” in this magazine will be very much along these lines. Each one is meant to convey some emotional state or theme in a very abstract way. In the end, I think this is fitting because that’s very much how still life compositions work, also, so it makes the pairing between text and images that much more meaningful.