Bowl of fruit

As some of you know, I’ve been taking art classes. Mostly because it forces me to use a completely different part of the brain. I’d got to a point in writing where I was SO tired nothing worked to rest . Not sleep. Not vacation. My mind was still fully occupied by whatever story had taken possession. (And sometimes it does feel just like that. They move in.)

One of the things I like about art class — other than being able to write again when I come out — is that it gives me some insight into how writing works, particularly for when I’m trying to teach others. Because, you see, I started so long ago that I’ve forgotten the process. In a way I’ve always been telling stories. (No, seriously. Ask my mom.)

Like… contrast. I’m a contrast wuss in art, which is apparently normal for beginners. It’s the same in fiction, if you think on it. Beginners avoid the extremely dark and the very light and PARTICULARLY avoid the very dark and the very light in close juxtaposition. Real pros, let alone the real artists use it all the time. Read your Shakespeare if you doubt me.

Of course, contrast is essential because an art work – or a book – without them reads bland. It’s all the same tone/color. Even if otherwise very well executed, it makes you feel like it’s forgetable.

Within true confessions, I’ve ONLY just learned to put in the light parts – the dark come naturally to me – because I used to think they were "irrelevant." (Just meaning the last 4 years.)

Anyway, with that in mind, I first laughed when I heard the teacher and the model (who is also an art teacher) talking and one of them said "A man, a mountain, it’s all a bowl of fruit." Of course, what they meant is that it was all about capturing light and dark, the varying shadings, the forms. If you can do it with a bowl of fruit, you can do it with a man or a mountain and do it well. (The gentleman in the back row can stop giggling now. This forum has standards, it does. And we don’t do double entendres. Sometimes we manage single ones.)

I’m not going so far as to say that writing fiction and non fiction is all the same thing. That would be rather on the order of saying that a pencil and a pen are the same because they both write. True, of course, at the very basic and mechanical level. You need to know grammar to write ANYTHING. And if you write good non-fiction you’ll write clean prose. But that’s at the very basic level. Stuff like KISS (meaning Keep It Simple Stupid, as a clarification for the eager young lady in the front seat. Does anyone have a wipe for lipstick?) and making sure that you’re not saying something in such a convoluted way that the reader comes to a complete stop and has to think about it.

However though there are differences in technique and different grace notes you MUST hit, if you can write one type of fiction, you can write it all. It might take some retooling but you can write it all. A friend of mine, Kate Paulk, aka the Winch Wench (It’s a joke from Baen’s Diner. Don’t stress it.) was recently almost driven insane by being ambushed by a fantasy with a mystery structure/subplot. (I believe it waited for her in a backalley on the way home and jumped out when she least expected it. Happens to us all the time.) The thing is, she had the basics solid. Interesting character and setting, terrible happenings and funny bits. (Demon funny bits. You’d have to be there. I believe they’re dried up and hanged from a rear-view mirror in the next book. [Yes I know about verbs, but would YOU use that form there?]) The point is that once she’d done the first pass and read up some on writing mysteries, she could go back and weave through the mystery points, much more easily than if this had been her first book. Because the basics were sound and she knew the basics. She knew how to draw her bowl of fruit.

So, of course, the art teacher was right. Though I now confess that while I’m taking this class – Life Drawing, this time. I took portraiture last semester – I keep thinking "Bowl of Fruit" with er… interesting mental results.

I’ll post more tomorrow and there’s also a group blog with better authors than I in the offing. But for now, off you go to contemplate your own particular bowls of fruit and try to get the pineapple right.

For your amusement I’m posting one of my projects from portraiture. It is called Monsieur D’Artagnan and while it’s not PRECISELY the D’Artagnan of the mysteries (yes, I am SURE you’d like me to explain, ladies, gentlemen and lab rats. But possess yourselves in patience and it shall all be revealed in time) it COULD be. Close enough, at any rate.

And meanwhile this writer will go back to struggling with the …

apples. (You really thought I was going to say bananas, didn’t you?)