THE ART OF STORIES

A long time ago, I used to draw as well as write. I took up this occupation when my
oldest daughter was an infant because I was going crazy waiting on her all day.
I needed something interesting to keep me busy. Writing took too much
concentration and didn’t lend itself to frequent interruptions, but art was
ideal. My first attempt was a portrait of the baby. It was to be a gift for my
mother, and as it progressed from an approximation of a baby to a fairly
creditable baby to an actual portrait, I learned a great deal about myself and
about art in general.

One of the most important things I learned was that art requires a good eye. You can’t draw it if you can’t see it clearly. This is true no matter what your medium.
Whether you paint in pastels or words, you cannot accurately portray what you
cannot accurately see. Like the stroke of the chalk on paper, words either add
to or detract from the description of truth, and one of the most frequent
errors that writers make is in using the wrong word, a word that approximates
but doesn’t quite catch their exact meaning. Very often, the reason is they haven’t
imagined their story clearly enough to “see” the right word. Being a good
observer is crucial.

Besides teaching me to see more clearly, pastels also taught me about what I call the “work” of art. Being creative and letting the impulse flow from muse to fingertips is great, but usually there is a stop along the way known as “technique” or work. Art is a construction project. To create we need brushes, paper, chalks,
light, pencils, erasers, a subject, an inspiration, and the willingness to
spend as many hours, days, or weeks as it takes to turn that inspiration into
reality. In art, we use color, line, and texture; we compare this shadow
against that to see degrees of light and shade. We compare the length of this
line against that to see form.

Written works are similarly constructed, but instead of physical colors and papers, our tools are words, grammar, computers, keyboards, imagination, inspiration and a willingness to work long and hard to get our book out of our heads and into the
world. We construct our book using theme, motive, character, dialogue, plot,
subplot, and climax. We weave emotion and action into the picture and use words
as paint to illustrate our thoughts. Although we might like the whole thing to
flow from mind to matter without effort, that isn’t usually what happens.

I learned one more really important lesson from my artwork—that the more you work on it, the better it gets. At one point I was pretty happy with my efforts. The baby looked like a baby; the colors were beautiful. But it bothered me that it
didn’t quite look like MY baby, so I kept at it. I must have erased that little
face and reworked it fifteen times. It took weeks. And then, there it was: My
own baby girl on the paper. It was miraculous. Translated to the art of writing,
it comes down to that old adage: writing is rewriting.

Writing, painting, sculpture, music; it doesn’t really matter. In art as in life, God is
in the details. If you want your work to progress from an approximation to an
incisive illustration of truth as you see it, you have to see clearly, master
your tools, and work on it until it shines.