When I wrote The Incredible Here and Now I started by writing vignettes about where I live in Parramatta and the surrounding areas of Granville, Merrylands, Harris Park and then I put all these vignettes together to form a much longer narrative about two brothers and the events that shape their lives over one long summer. A vignette is a kind of short short story, it is used to capture one small moment in time. It is like taking a picture of something you see and then turning it into words. I take a lot of pictures in my head. This is what writers do, they think really hard about the things they see. They turn those images into words and those words into stories and this is what I did with The Incredible Here and Now.
Here’s some pictures of the communities I wrote about. I turned each of these images into a vignette in my book so that all of these pictures that might seem insignificant have become short, short stories that have a lot to say. I bet if you took another look at the things you see in your communities everyday you might find that there are lots of extraordinary stories to be told about those ordinary things you see everyday. Here’s some pictures of places that turned into vignettes in my book.
