Nancy Springer's Blog: Last Seen Wandering Vaguely - Posts Tagged "creativie-writing"
HOW TO PAINT, HOW TO WRITE
I TRIED AND FAILED TO POST AN IMAGE OF MOM'S PAINTING HERE. PLEASE FIND IT POSTED AND "PINNED TO TOP" ON MY FACEBOOK AUTHOR PAGE.
When I was thirteen, my mother gave up her studio and her art career to help my father make a new start. We moved to a rural area south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to run a small motel. This kept everybody busy.
A few years later, though, Mom set up her easel and a large canvas at the back window and undertook an oil painting of the fields and hills. She told me that she had always liked green too much and depended on it, so she wanted to do a landscape without using any.
As a young writer, I consciously tried new ways to use point of view. Later, I thought I depended too much on dialogue, so I gave myself an assignment to write a short story without it. I made my main character mute. The result was “The Boy Who Plaited Manes,” the most honored and anthologized of all my short stories. Later, I challenged myself to write a novel for kids who did not like to read. I ended up with TOUGHING IT, an Edgar winner.
As it was autumn, with russet and gold tones dominating the landscape, Mom’s no-green challange was not too difficult. She focused on the corn shocks just beyond the barbed wire fence. Yes, back then there really were corn shocks, those teepee-like symbols of harvest that have since gone the way of haystacks. Mom loved them. She also loved the round-topped (Gettysburg!) hills in the distance. But in the middle distance, between corn shocks and hills, what Mom painted, while evocative of rural Pennsylvania, was not the same as what she saw out the window. Instead, she selected aspects of it to form a pleasing composition.
The yin and yang of writing are detail and structure. All day every day we experience, observe, and remember details upon details to use in our writing. But when it comes to actually writing, we must select from our stash of memories for the sake of a pleasing composition, a book structure that works. In the words of a Bob Seger song, “what to put in, what to put out?” Should Mom have painted the electric lines running alongside the farm lane? No. It’s best to focus and build on the details we love (the corn shocks!) and leave out anything that doesn’t “go with.” Sometimes we writers must even leave out details we love, saving them for another book.
Mom included some cedar trees in her composition, and very nicely she did them, too, with sunbeams lancing between them – but hey, aren’t cedar trees green? Yes, but obeying her self-imposed no-green rule, in order to give the impression of green she mixed ochre and navy blue on her brush as she painted the cedar trees.
Your editor wants you to include more description in a scene. Your concept of good writing does not tolerate dollops of description, but you know that you must do something with the scene, because if the editor senses a problem, there IS a problem. So you figure out what it really is and how to deal with it. You don’t add description, but you focus on sense of place and you speed up the pacing. Your editor is delighted. You have mixed ochre and navy blue, but your editor sees what s/he wanted: green.
As I recall, there were some interestingly scraggly, wind-beaten, lopsided trees in the field beyond the corn shocks, but to my disappointment, Mom chose to paint her own trees, well-behaved trees, lollipop trees as simple and upright as her worldview.
I find it interesting to study graphology, both handwriting and pictures. When asked to draw a tree, I draw a thick, knotty, scarred and convoluted bole with bulging, grasping roots but only a suggestion of the existence leaves up above, somewhere off the picture. This way of drawing a tree, I am told, means I am all about emotions. Surely this is a good thing for a writer. My mother was just the opposite; she was all about “nice.” She wanted to paint nice trees, not twisty trees. Quite rightly so; rampaging trees would have detracted from her focal point. Her painting is about the corn shocks and the view, not eccentric, individualistic trees. Also, her tree trunks resonate with the nicely detailed posts of the barbed wire fence in the foreground.
A few days after she said she was finished, Mom changed her mind and decided the painting needed a rustic red building along the lane, so she put one in. I thought (to myself only) that it ruined the painting. It looked like a shed, but if it was a shed, then the lollipop trees were the size of rose bushes; the proportions were all out of whack. I think Mom saw this and tried to make her shed into a barn by putting an impossibly huge and heavy door on it, although there was no room for hay inside. Besides, the barns in our area were bank barns, with their big double door on the uphill side. No proper barn looked like Mom’s painted effigy. So what was that red thing, a sharn? I wished Mom had let her painting alone.
Mom always told me that the test of a true artist is knowing when to stop. I thought in this case she failed, but now I see the problem was just that she was in a hurry and didn’t think. She knew what a real barn looked like, or a shed.
Recently I was writing about a character crossing the British Channel on a ferry. I researched to find out exactly what such a ferry looked like, even though my time and effort contributed only one line to the book. I’ve concluded that Mom’s shed would have been an excellent red accent if she’d taken a her time to get it right.
My first editor told me that the worst failures in creative writing were not failures of technique; they were failures of imagination. In the haste of afterthought, Mom failed to completely imagine her red building.
Mom took weeks to do this oil painting. It’s an impressive accomplishment and a very attractive work of art. I’m probably the only person in the world who ever found fault with the commonplace trees and the red shed/barn. And now, the justice of the universe being what it is, I am turning into nearly a clone of my mother. Criticizing her, I criticized my future self.
Take comfort in this: unless you happen to have a daughter like me, just about no one, anywhere, is as critical of your writing as you yourself are.
When I was thirteen, my mother gave up her studio and her art career to help my father make a new start. We moved to a rural area south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to run a small motel. This kept everybody busy.
A few years later, though, Mom set up her easel and a large canvas at the back window and undertook an oil painting of the fields and hills. She told me that she had always liked green too much and depended on it, so she wanted to do a landscape without using any.
As a young writer, I consciously tried new ways to use point of view. Later, I thought I depended too much on dialogue, so I gave myself an assignment to write a short story without it. I made my main character mute. The result was “The Boy Who Plaited Manes,” the most honored and anthologized of all my short stories. Later, I challenged myself to write a novel for kids who did not like to read. I ended up with TOUGHING IT, an Edgar winner.
As it was autumn, with russet and gold tones dominating the landscape, Mom’s no-green challange was not too difficult. She focused on the corn shocks just beyond the barbed wire fence. Yes, back then there really were corn shocks, those teepee-like symbols of harvest that have since gone the way of haystacks. Mom loved them. She also loved the round-topped (Gettysburg!) hills in the distance. But in the middle distance, between corn shocks and hills, what Mom painted, while evocative of rural Pennsylvania, was not the same as what she saw out the window. Instead, she selected aspects of it to form a pleasing composition.
The yin and yang of writing are detail and structure. All day every day we experience, observe, and remember details upon details to use in our writing. But when it comes to actually writing, we must select from our stash of memories for the sake of a pleasing composition, a book structure that works. In the words of a Bob Seger song, “what to put in, what to put out?” Should Mom have painted the electric lines running alongside the farm lane? No. It’s best to focus and build on the details we love (the corn shocks!) and leave out anything that doesn’t “go with.” Sometimes we writers must even leave out details we love, saving them for another book.
Mom included some cedar trees in her composition, and very nicely she did them, too, with sunbeams lancing between them – but hey, aren’t cedar trees green? Yes, but obeying her self-imposed no-green rule, in order to give the impression of green she mixed ochre and navy blue on her brush as she painted the cedar trees.
Your editor wants you to include more description in a scene. Your concept of good writing does not tolerate dollops of description, but you know that you must do something with the scene, because if the editor senses a problem, there IS a problem. So you figure out what it really is and how to deal with it. You don’t add description, but you focus on sense of place and you speed up the pacing. Your editor is delighted. You have mixed ochre and navy blue, but your editor sees what s/he wanted: green.
As I recall, there were some interestingly scraggly, wind-beaten, lopsided trees in the field beyond the corn shocks, but to my disappointment, Mom chose to paint her own trees, well-behaved trees, lollipop trees as simple and upright as her worldview.
I find it interesting to study graphology, both handwriting and pictures. When asked to draw a tree, I draw a thick, knotty, scarred and convoluted bole with bulging, grasping roots but only a suggestion of the existence leaves up above, somewhere off the picture. This way of drawing a tree, I am told, means I am all about emotions. Surely this is a good thing for a writer. My mother was just the opposite; she was all about “nice.” She wanted to paint nice trees, not twisty trees. Quite rightly so; rampaging trees would have detracted from her focal point. Her painting is about the corn shocks and the view, not eccentric, individualistic trees. Also, her tree trunks resonate with the nicely detailed posts of the barbed wire fence in the foreground.
A few days after she said she was finished, Mom changed her mind and decided the painting needed a rustic red building along the lane, so she put one in. I thought (to myself only) that it ruined the painting. It looked like a shed, but if it was a shed, then the lollipop trees were the size of rose bushes; the proportions were all out of whack. I think Mom saw this and tried to make her shed into a barn by putting an impossibly huge and heavy door on it, although there was no room for hay inside. Besides, the barns in our area were bank barns, with their big double door on the uphill side. No proper barn looked like Mom’s painted effigy. So what was that red thing, a sharn? I wished Mom had let her painting alone.
Mom always told me that the test of a true artist is knowing when to stop. I thought in this case she failed, but now I see the problem was just that she was in a hurry and didn’t think. She knew what a real barn looked like, or a shed.
Recently I was writing about a character crossing the British Channel on a ferry. I researched to find out exactly what such a ferry looked like, even though my time and effort contributed only one line to the book. I’ve concluded that Mom’s shed would have been an excellent red accent if she’d taken a her time to get it right.
My first editor told me that the worst failures in creative writing were not failures of technique; they were failures of imagination. In the haste of afterthought, Mom failed to completely imagine her red building.
Mom took weeks to do this oil painting. It’s an impressive accomplishment and a very attractive work of art. I’m probably the only person in the world who ever found fault with the commonplace trees and the red shed/barn. And now, the justice of the universe being what it is, I am turning into nearly a clone of my mother. Criticizing her, I criticized my future self.
Take comfort in this: unless you happen to have a daughter like me, just about no one, anywhere, is as critical of your writing as you yourself are.
Last Seen Wandering Vaguely
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