Different Strokes

Different Strokes

Recently I had the opportunity to watch a talented artist who is a friend of mine paint in my community. He set up his easel, fastened a large canvas and began to work. I was fascinated by his technique. He began by putting in a rough sketch of a single house. Next, he opened a fishing box jumbled full of tubes of acrylic paint. He chose four colours and squeezed out liberal dabs onto his palette.

He stepped back to take in the scene, ran a palette knife through the mounds of paint and scraped a mixture of colours diagonally across the canvass. A rock cliff magically appeared behind the roughed in building. In a similar manner, he picked up blobs of blue, green, and white to conjure up a textured sky.

The process looked almost random. His actions were so quick it seemed that a haphazard mixing and application of hues was miraculously creating lifelike illusions.

I phoned another artist friend of mine and asked if she would like to watch this painter at work. Her creations couldn’t be more different than his. She paints with fine brushes and creates figures of almost photorealistic quality. After they met, they chatted, and it was obvious that each was impressed by the other’s work. I don’t think either one of them could do what the other did.

Writing and painting are both artistic endeavours, but they differ in many ways. I felt some jealousy toward these painters who could create in the outdoors with people milling around watching their work and asking questions about their technique.

Like many writers, I work alone in a quiet room. I love music but can’t have it playing while I write. My work requires full concentration without interruptions.

But like these two painters, there are many differences in the way that writers work. I like to write in the morning after a run. Usually, I have a goal of how many words I want to get down in the morning. It is a rare day when I can write for more than three hours.

When I am editing drafts, I am careful to limit the time I work each day. It is important for me to be sharp and critical of every word I am looking at. If I edit too long there is always a danger that I will become complacent and decide that a word, sentence, or paragraph is “good enough”.

Like my friends the painters, writers work in many ways. I know people who need music in the background or thrive on the bustle of a busy coffee shop for their writing.

There are writers who work at just about any time of day. I suppose we have various rhythms to our lives and different times when we are most capable of good work. No doubt some of our writing habits are simply a matter of routine. We start off with a way of working and it gets comfortable.

There is also a wide variation of how much writers produce in a day. Fifteen hundred words is an excellent result for me. I have times when I can consistently reach this goal for long periods at a time.

Michael Crichton wrote ten thousand words a day but claimed his real work was the editing. James Joyce complained to a friend that he had only written six words one day. When his friend tried to console him, he added that he wasn’t certain if they were in the right order.

We all have our own ways of writing. None of them are right or wrong. What we produce may look nothing like what other authors do, but every method and every style has its beauty.