Stringing Beads and Writing Books

Does a necklace have a story logic?

I’ve made jewelry since I was in high school, back when I didn’t even know you could buy beading wire and so I would, instead, rip the wire from spiral notebooks and use my dad’s pliers to bend them into links. I did some metal-smithing in college and then more afterward, and I came back to beads and jewelry in the past few years as stress relief and as a treat for myself. I love color; it sustains me in some basic way I can’t explain. I have also learned about myself that when my tank is low, I need to see visual art to fill it up, I think because visual art is a very different medium that turns off my analytic mind.

And then there is the tactile routine of making jewelry, and the fact that it is quick and easily rewarding (unlike writing). Making jewelry has helped me through a rough few years because the act is non-verbal and requires a single-minded focus, and when I’m done I have something either I can wear or that might make someone else happy. This is high dopamine jewelry, which I also need. (And yeah, I have an Etsy store—Candy Beads Studio— which apparently is a cliche for an empty-nesting white woman, but I DON’T CARE! I love it!) Btw I’ve got a sale on now.

Now that I’m further along in writing, and now that I actually have money to buy beads, I have been thinking a lot about necklaces and how putting beads in patterns and rows is an intuitive process like structuring a manuscript. I sometimes have in my mind an overall mix of colors or a pattern of contrasts that might look cool, but I find that sitting down with beads and doing a rough draft on my bead board gets me closer to the specifics. When I’m playing with the beads, I notice juxtapositions and contrasts as well as minute differences in color in a different way than the general ideas in my head. This process feels similar to the structuring work of writing, because I can have an abstract structural idea for a section or paragraph, but then when I’m in the weeds of the sentences, I see that the piece of writing is slightly different than my idea of it, and that it offers different connections and leads to different places.

This also makes me think about different structures that might work with writing, because a necklace like a long line of text is basically linear, even if the effect it produces is more two- or three-dimensional. What I mean is that writing creates a world, and our impression of it is a world when reading and why we remember it, but the process of making it is linear—at least the drafting of the sentences, but certainly not the editing and constant re-imagining of it. Writing differs in that we can only imbibe it in a linear fashion, but jewelry has a global effect.

To explore this further, I’ve tried to put words to some of these necklace structures and then to try to think about what they would do to or in writing, and in some cases connecting them to my books. What I notice is that despite every structure having a valence or two of play and surprise, other levels focus on continuity to hold the structure together.

1. Gradient, relying on color, major variations in shape, color, and translucency, ending not defined by ROYGBIV: I am obsessed with making these because the structural experience is so different than a pattern. Instead, I start with a bead and go from there, seeing what I can come up with. You’ll notice these don’t necessarily follow a linear rainbow pattern as defined by red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo violet, as a color palette can tend toward undertones and can mix toward something surprising. These feel like essays, in that I’m surprising myself with where I’m ending up, and in that I have to pay attention to the undertones of a bead’s color to figure out where it’s tending toward. For example, you can see in the left necklace the initial pink bead has a bluish undertone, so I followed it toward purple and into blue, and from the other directly I left out red entirely and skipped toward a cool yellow. In the necklace on the right, I tried to go from pink into a deep blue-red and into warmer tones and orange (which felt a little off to me).

2. Variations on a Brightness with blue tones, with differences in shape but pretty uniform in size, with continuity of mostly Czech opaque, with Rondelles as counterpoints: This is kind of a Pain Woman necklace, an essay collection where all the pieces look yummy and weird on their own, and the effect is yummy and weird despite the variations, because they’re held together by the continuity of their weirdness, and some are short and some are long: (I am going out on several limbs here but I hope you follow?)

3. Color Family, pattern in shape, size and translucency: This is a calm necklace in structure, to balance out the BRIGHT ORANGE of the color. This makes sense to me in terms of Supremely Tiny Acts: a weird idea enacted weirdly, balanced with consistency of style and voice so that it holds together:

4. Continuity of size, with broad and bright contrast in color and translucency, interspersed with rondelles for further continuity: The watchword here is BRIGHT COLORS and pleasing contrast, sort of a logic of maximum contrast at the single-bead level. This might be Voice First.

5. Cool-toned beads with similarity in color and size, but a range of shapes and translucency: These are beads from India, mostly, and I chose cool tones based on a few deep-blue semi-translucent cool muted green-bluish beads that I really liked but that looked odd if I tried to mix them with different color families, so I kind of built this necklace around those beads. To me, this is starting with a specific inspiration for a project, like Cover Me (seeing my life through the lens of a health insurance card) or Opa Nobody (I wanted a grandfather so I wrote him.)

6. Shape Uniformity and General Color Uniformity with Variation and Contrasts, with Rondelles as Counterpoints I don’t know if I’ve written a book like this, where each piece is defined and separate but they have similar shapes, and it’s the shape that holds them together, even when some of them are very different in color, translucency, or even shape (some are round). So this is a harmony that is so regular it contains several rogues but doesn’t feel disrupted by them. OH! I just realized that this is a portrait of a book I am working on that might be getting closed to finished called The Chasm: An Unnatural Field Guide, which is about inequality as seen through field-note entries with elements of the natural world.

Clearly these are not rules—just what I like! And everyone has their own aesthetic.

It’s helpful for me to name these thematic arrangements, because it helps me see some of the story logic here. And I love any discussion of structure; it was what blew my mind in my first grad nonfiction workshops. I love Jane Alison’s book Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, because it offers so many other ways to envision narrative beyond Freytag’s pyramid (which is explained below in case you have not heard that term; you’ve definitely been experiencing the structure your whole life.)

From this site: “Freytag’s Pyramid describes the five key stages of a story, offering a conceptual framework for writing a story from start to finish. These stages are:

1. Exposition

2. Rising Action

3. Climax

4. Falling Action

5. Resolution.” The image shows the stages rising to a peak at the climax and then falling in the last two stages.

I realize, too, that why I love linked story collections and essay collections is that they have a circular logic in which each essay may have this or another structure, but that the pieces may or may not hold this structure overall. Sometimes the experience of a ring-narrative is the sense of connection among the pieces (that reminds me of Joan Silber’s novels-in-stories) and sometimes the collections proceed toward climax (thinking of Susan Muaddi Darraj’s beautiful novel in stories, Behind You Is the Sea.

I realize that in teaching narrative structure, adding color would just make things go off the rails, because I really don’t know anything about color from a technical side. But I have enjoyed trying to explain my own process and discovering that there is a story logic to necklaces! I’d love to hear from artists of all stripes about how they think about structure.