Writing tip 13? Become like a painter... or an actor..

I'm no artist, but I did try my hand for a while when I was writing the first draft of my first (and only, so far) novel, faces mainly, and a little bit of landscape with figures in relationship to the landscape. The big problem to overcome when transferring what you see to paper is overcoming your own perception, and the struggle to eliminate interpretation (what you think is there as opposed to what is there). I don't think it is possible, or even desirable to completely eliminate interpretation, but I do think that the struggle is important.


My father's painting 1971

What happened when I began painting was that I started to imagine how I would depict the things I saw in a painting, and I began to notice light in a new way - how it fell on objects, and faces - and the sources of light. I started to see light and shadow as a series of patterns.

Light and shadow as a series of patterns

Something similar happened when I was doing acting classes years ago. I started to see movement and gesture differently to the way I had seen it before. The small things began to take on more significance than they had before. I don't do it all the time, but when I am in writing mode, this could be my mantra:  Observe. Deconstruct. Imagine (daydream). Creatively reconstruct to create the work of fiction.

I think that both painting and acting filtered into my creative writing in a number of ways, but just two things that the experience has taught me is to look for what visual artists call the negative spaces, and what my most influential director called playing opposites. This helps in the search for the bits that a cursory observation of people and events misses. It is a way of getting behind my own preconceptions and prejudices to see how things might appear from someone else's point of view. It doesn't mean I have to throw out dearly held values, but hopefully it does help me to widen my view. It also taught me to entertain the possibility that I might be wrong in how I saw situations, and that I was almost always missing something.

There is a theory in psychology called Personal Construct Theory which suggests that we all form theories and beliefs about the world and other people, and that the older we get, the more entrenched these beliefs become, and the less likely we are to admit new information or evidence that contradicts our pre-existing theories (especially if they work for us). Seeing things from another perspective takes courage, because it can temporarily destabilise our own carefully constructed platform. But by shaking up our own perceptions and theories through our writing, by 'playing opposites' to see what we can discover, the writing will be so much more interesting and it will help to uncover our own blind spots and move us beyond cliché.

Writing Prompt

Identify a scene in a piece of your writing that is not working well, and experiment by rewriting the scene from another character's perspective, or by adopting an opposite emotional state to the one underlying the current scene.

Use what you can from this exercise (all or some) to incorporate into the current scene.