Making it real - models and maps by Kathleen Jones

My favourite childhood books are the Moomintroll series written by Finnish author Tove Jansson. She was an artist and she illustrated her own books.  For me, as the reader, the illustrations were a big part of the magic because they worked so well with the text. Moomin Valley was a very real place, maybe because I was seeing it just as the author had created it.

The Moomin house in Moomin Valley

I was quite grown-up before I realised that Tove Jansson and her partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietila, had also created maps, tableaux and an actual five-story model of the Moomin House which was in the Moomin museum in Finland.   The big surprise was that the house they  made was different to the illustrations - it was square rather than round as it appears in the books and this puzzled me.

The reason seems to be that it was specially made for a biennale of illustrations in Bratislava and was going to be exhibited in a corner.  The only way that Tove could make all the details visible to the public was to make the house square.  But the house is made with great love and dedication and I like to think of the author bringing all her characters and their possessions to life in physical form - even down to Moominpappa's top hat!

Moominpappa writing his memoirs

Orhan Pamuk went even further for one of his novels, The Museum of Innocence.  He bought a house in Istanbul, furnished it and filled it with the objects that featured in the novel.  But, because Pamuk is also, like Tove Jansson, a visual artist, the objects were grouped like still lives or  sculptural installations. This is a very grown-up dolls' house indeed.  It's now a museum - The Museum of Innocence - and you can go and walk around inside the novel.  Being a writer, he also wrote a book about the creation of the house, which I found more interesting than the novel.  It's called the Innocence of Objects and available on Kindle.

 Lots of authors make physical models of the imaginary worlds they are creating.  J R Tolkein drew intricate maps of Middle Earth and The Shire.  Brian Sibley has even written a beautifully illustrated book about them.

One of my creative-writing workshop exercises is to take along reams of paper and coloured pens and sticky bits and pieces and ask writers to make a detailed landscape for their stories.  Somehow making it visual helps the narrative to develop.  Taking the reader for a walk down the streets and pathways of Storyville often produces revelations that wouldn't have happened in plain text.  All sorts of discoveries are possible.  If the author doesn't know the shape of the landscape, if they don't know the small details of their characters' lives, they are never going to be able to bring the story vividly to life for the reader.

Henrik Ibsen had a box of small wooden figures he called The Devil's Orchestra.  When he was stuck with a plot, he would take them out of the box and make them act out scenes, moving them around on his desk.  This sounds like a good creative strategy!  You can see the box on his desk just to the left in this photograph.

The pediatrician and psychologist Donald Winnicott had the theory that all forms of art are a kind of play, and wrote about his theories in the fascinating book Playing and Reality.  He believed that play fostered our capacity for 'being' in a very intense way. It was all to do with identifying the 'true self'. He wrote that  'only the true self can be creative and only the true self can feel real'.  So perhaps in playing with dolls' houses and maps and pieces of coloured paper we stimulate our own creativity and make our imaginary worlds more intensely 'real' both for ourselves and for others.

I collect pictures and postcards and bits of wood and shell  - objects that have some relevance to the plot or the characters - when I'm working on a story. What do you play with while you're writing?

Kathleen Jones writes poetry, fiction and biography and divides her life between Cumbria and Italy, though she's currently down-under in New Zealand. She blogs at 'A Writer's Life' and you can find her books at www.kathleenjones.co.uk