Illustrating the Apocalypse

I’m always interested in typographic elements in books, especially fiction where a story is supposed to be nothing more than an unending stream of text.

You’d occasionally see it in books years ago, in the pre-digital publishing era, but knowing what I do about print production it would have been an expensive addition to the process. I can imagine dozens of arguments between publishers, agents and authors about how critical such flights of typographic fancy were to the story.

It’s far easier to do nowadays because the designer or typesetter working for a publisher only has to change the font for a few lines (even a few words) or leave a few hard carriage returns in the flow to drop in a graphic. In fact, the creation and assembly of text in the computer age is so easy you can do it in most your word processing applications.

So I’m surpried you don’t see it more often, but I think I’ve figured out why through my experience in Falling.

I’ve done it in othr projects you see. As we speak, I’m copy-editing a romance novel where the heroine visits a pagoda commemorating a Japanese family name. The story describes a brass plaque on the wood and shows the name in Japanese kanji right there in the text as she reads it.

All I did was go to Google Translate, enter the name in English (Romaji), copy the native kanji from the translation, paste it into the text and adjust the font.

But there was one example of graphic treatments in the text of a novel I just couldn’t crack no matter how hard I tried, and it was in Falling’s final stages.

It was intended to describe a huge wave of energy approaching the city, an almost cosmological-scale phenomenon that puts Dale and Tim in the path of catastrophe (and which precipitates the climax of the story).

It’s described in this excerpt;

Maybe the world would end in only minutes, two colossal energies releasing a cataclysm as they crashed together, and no amount of running would help him. But still he ran, trying to at least get off the bridge before all hell broke loose.

And all at once, amid all the sound and fury in the air, Tim felt something else. The world shifted. No, not the world, the whole cosmos moved three steps to the left.

Some enormous force approached him from behind, bigger than the dust cloud and the obscenity that had emerged from it. He thought of the wave travelling through a carpet or rope when you flick one end and it runs in a fold down the entire length. Except it was bearing down on the bridge and harbour from the north, and it was beyond tall. Beyond gigantic.

A wave was travelling through the world, like a tidal wave as tall as a skyscraper out of a 1950s end-of-the-world film, and as Tim stopped and turned back towards the north there was nothing to see, but he could feel that huge fold racing down the universe towards him.

The fold rolled like a colossal surf onto the end of the bridge, flashed past him, through him, and knocked him clean over. He felt his grip on Penny’s handle let go and he crashed to the ground in a different place…

There the chapter ends, a new one beginning with Tim somewhere else entirely, having suffered the terrifying effect of the phenomenon he felt approaching.

But a simple chapter break (even one that ends ominously with an ellipsis) didn’t seem to convey the shocking enormity of what had happened. I decided to use a graphic of some sort, but what could possibly communicate a huge fold in the very fabric of spacetime? In the story it’s like a black hole has fallen into the atmosphere and twisted the properties of matter, consequence and causation until they’re at breaking point – and then breaks them.

It needed to be something simple but profound, terrifying but also beautiful, an event big enough to affect the globe but which inexplicably targets two human beings alone.

First of all I thought of a metaphysical anomaly building, arriving and then fading as it passes. And what is physics (to say nothing of metaphysics) apart from mathematics? That meant the following idea made logical sense but looked kind of lame and didn’t really communicate anything.

Then I hit on what I thought was a much cleaner solution, an ASCII text picture.

If you don’t know what that is, it’s the art of using only text characters to draw pictures. Countless examples exist, such as the rose we’ve all sent to a loved one in an email;

@–&–

or the boobs many of us have drawn while sniggering like schoolboys/girls;

(.)(.)

But there are others that are so complex and detailed, the final image so lush and evocative they’re works of art in themselves.

So the next step was; what does a giant wave approaching a city look like?

I had plenty of examples of ASCII art cities;

I just had to find one depicting Sydney in particular;

And then add a large wave approaching it;

It was simple, clean and couldn’t have been any clearer about what was going on; there’s a giant wave approaching a city.

If you read Falling, however, it’s not in it. There’s no graphic and no ASCII art depicting the phenomenon, just the chapter break and ellipses.

The practical reason is because (as the above makes clear) it might be simple but the format of ASCII art doesn’t really exude a lot of power.

And that led me to the second realisation about why it would be better to eschew a graphical representation altogether.

It made me realise why fictional books seldom have a real lot of graphics or weird fonts or breaks from the style of uniform text on a page. There’s only one place the power of the narrative ever really exists, and it’s not on the page.

It’s in your mind.

It was never my job to show you a picture that conveys the power of what happens. I should have already done that with the words that describe it. If I haven’t done that I’ve failed, and all the cool graphics in the world won’t help either of us realise it.

So in its current form, Falling is just words. I’ll leave the cool design to the art director on the big screen adaptation.