I was just thinking about the difference between a writer and an artist.
A writer, of course, is a kind of artist, crafting their works with a pen instead of a brush.
And I’m going to make some generalizations in this column, so please bear with me.
It seems to me that art – the kind you make on paper or with a physical medium like sculpture, is more of a focused craft. It requires lots of concentrated time working on a single piece to get it right.
I enjoy drawing, and I’m pretty good at it, but I don’t have the passion for it, or the ability for such a sustained effory, that a true artist needs. While I’ve always considered myself very visual, a physical artist needs to be able to spend long stretches of time crafting their work, one brushstroke or one chisel at a time, until it feels finished. Maybe, like is the case with books, it never really does. But there comes a time when they have to let it go into the world.
Here’s where one of my generalizations comes in. I feel like artists in general finish their work on a shorter time scale than novelists. While this is certainly not always true, visual artists tend to work on one project at a time and bring it to completion, especially when working in an unforgivable medium like watercolor which requires them to move quickly and decisively. That kind of art requires a desire and focus that is alien to me.
As a novelist, my own work tends to develop over a much longer period of time – months or even years. I may be working on multiple stories at once, flitting from one to the other like a hummingbird hopped up on sugar water – and a lot of what makes my stories unique comes from those fallow downtimes, when my mind is mulling over what comes next.
It’s not a linear process. I don’t move smoothly from brushstroke to brushstroke, the way I’ve seen many visual artists work. I always admire their confidence as they place down each stroke of their art, knowing exactly where it should lie in their work.
My writing is not like that. It’s more akin to throwing spaghetti on the wall, the product of my complicated writer brain, which often adds unexpected twists and turns that make the plot more interesting.
As novelists, we carry these worlds around in our heads, trying to retain enough of them to allow us to keep them consistent, fascinating, real. We keep adding new bits moving them around at will, trying to create something vibrant and unique.
In a typical sci-fi story, I have to know each of the characters – all their little details, how they speak, what makes them tick. I have to know and remember the plot – past and future – and try not to make it too boring, too overly complicated, or too derivative of anything I have written before.
I have to know the environment, the religion, the culture, the government, the tech, and the society, and keep all these things spinning in the back of my brain like so many plates.
But my biggest challenge, as someone who has yet to achieve full-time writer status, is finding those moments every day to advance the story – remembering where I was as well as that great idea that I had at 3:30 the previous night – and somehow keeping it all rolling in a way that’s both entertaining and cohesive. Each book is a dozen paintings, each one of them representing a character or an idea.
I need six hands to keep it all going. But alas I only have two.
As writers, we do the best we can, knowing that it’s never going to be perfect.
We’ll fix it in edits.
And maybe that’s what’s fundamentally different about the written arts versus the visual arts. With visual art, there is no edit (another genrality). Sure, you can keep tinkering for a bit around the edges, adding more to the piece (or subtracting if we’re talking sculpture, but short of restarting it (or maybe collage), there’s no wholesale reworking once you’ve gotten going.
The writer mind is perfectly suited to the written arts. It’s a chaos generator that is happy living in the unknown, in finding out new things on the fly, and somehow keeping all the disparate pieces moving together like train cars on a roller coaster.
I will never be a Picasso or a van Gogh, or even a Warhol.
But that’s okay. There will also never be another Coatsworth.
Or another you, my dear writer friend.