Writing as Art

 

In a Wilderness of Dunes, in my impressionistic style of painting 

I view my stories, like my paintings, as art. I write and paint to bring something new into the world. To create. I also try to make it good, though I am the sole judge of what is good, and what falls short of being good enough. I try to be critical of my work. I don’t expect to succeed all the time, or indeed, most of the time. I expect to always fall short of total success. Masterpieces are masterpieces because they are very rare. However, I don’t get discouraged by falling short of perfection. Falling short is part of the process – especially if you, like me, are exploring an art form on your own rather then by the book or in class. We must expect to learn by trial and by error. And mostly error. We have to be honest with ourselves about our shortcomings. And yet, be happy enough with our little successes to try to fix our shortcomings the next time we set out to create our art. It’s a journey, not a destination.

Big Pine Bend in my watercolor style of painting

For me, the criteria I judge my writing and painting on, are my own tastes. Period. Everyone else is welcome to their opinion, but for me, my opinion is the only one that counts. I will often come across writing advice that says that you need to get other people’s input, which I do. My wife will tell me if something seems wrong. But they also advise one to hire an editor, because you, as the writer, are too close to your work to see its flaws. This advice comes from a particular, and often unsaid mindset – that you are writing to reach a commercially viable audience – or at least you should be. A good editor knows what is selling in the fleeting moment, and will shape a manuscript to conform to the current tastes of the target audience so as to increase the chances of the book selling enough copies to make publishing it turn a profit on it. Which is all fine and dandy. Makes sense. Book publishing is a business, and business have to make money if they are to continue to be one.

Misty Morning in Crofthaven, in my impressionist style

However, I am not in the business of publishing books. I’m not in business at all. I’m terrible at business. As I said, I’m an artist. And what I seek to do is to bring my imaginary people and places to life in the imagination of other people through words and paintings. In doing so, I take the same approach to writing as I do to painting. I try to be critical of my work, and release the best book I reasonably can. Reasonably, in the sense that there are a hundred different ways of saying anything in English, and that on any given day, I know that I’ll prefer one way over the other ninety-nine. This means that I can never read more than a few pages of mine without wishing I’d said something better. However, if you are ever going to share a story, at some point you have to say, enough is enough. It is what it is. Release it, and hope to do better the next time.

Cealanda in my watercolor style, though in this I used acrylic paint on canvas

In addition to deciding when I’ve reached the point where I could fiddle with it forever without making it appreciably better, I also make decisions about what I want to tell, and how. Since I am not in the business of writing, I’m not concerned about how to make my stories appeal to the most people. Instead, I tell the stories the way I think my first person narrator would tell them. For example, in A Summer in Amber, I have two chapters devoted to weekend trips – a bicycle tour and an overnight sail. Neither chapter advances the main plot one iota. At best they can be considered world building. However, they remain in my story because I enjoyed writing the character Red Stuart, who is featured in those chapters, and secondly, because my narrator, Sandy Say, is writing essentially a “what I did on my summer vacation” story, would certainly have include those adventures in his story, since they were part of that memorable summer. All of my stories have that same priority – they are told by a character in that story, and told in a manner that character would tell the story. As such, they include things that the character would include in his telling – regardless of what an editor employed to take a creative work and make a product out of it, would think of it.

Crescent Park Study 2 in my impressionist style

And perhaps I should add here, that I write, as I paint, by instinct and, I would like to believe, talent.  I am always amazed when I hear authors talk about their books as engineering projects, with all sorts of standard components placed in standard patterns. Every component of the story is engineered to produce a desired effect. Not that I'm criticizing that approach, I'm just saying that I can't think of a story in that way, at least not in the detail they work with. I take a much more organic approach to a story. 

However, writers, like myself, live in a sort of golden age. Ebooks, the internet, and self publishing has allowed me and millions of other people to tell our stories. Now, many, but by no means, all, of those stories are written as products to sell. And many, if not most of those products, are really bad products. Still, as I said, there are those of us who simply have imaginary stories that we want to bring to a life outside of our imaginations. And judged on that basis, there are no bad stories. What counts is that journey from our imagination into the world, not the number of destinations it arrives at. Being creative is what matters.

Side Note

I've illustrated this post with several of my paintings in my two main styles of painting. I started painting regularly (50 paintings a year or so) using ink and watercolors 1992. They are of an imaginary country, Cealanda, that I, as the painter, rambled around in painting what I saw. I suspect that my paintings in this style are several times (or more) more popular than my impressionist paintings. I turned to oil and acrylic paints when I started selling paintings in 2003, as they command more money than watercolors. I found it hard to paint in thick paints, and at 53, I didn't have time to start over again. Luckily I always like impressionist paintings, so I adopted that style as my own. I think my impressionist works are better than my watercolors. I've painted a thousand of them, even though maybe only one person in a hundred (who appreciate art) really appreciates them. Like in my writing, I get to decide what is good and want isn't. Not the market. And the best of them are good.