An Idea, an Image and a Feeling

After a hot and dry summer here in the Comox Valley, it’s indoor writing season. Time to drag out the notebooks with point form ideas and see what I can make of it all. I’ve spent some of the summer thinking about the things I have learned so far about the craft of Short Story Writing. I’ve learned that successful writing creates strong images in the reader’s mind. And who better to learn about creating strong images than a visual artist.

Painting by David Hockney

I’ve been inspired by the painter, David Hockney’s two collaborations with Martin Gayford, Spring Cannot Be Cancelled and A History of Pictures. Most of you will know David Hockney, the British modernist who’s shacked up his converted farmhouse in Normandy painting variously on his iPad and also with more traditional media–acrylic, ink, charcoal.

Martin Gayford is the art critic for The Spectator and has known Hockney for twenty-five years. The discussion format of the Spring Cannot Be Cancelled via shared emails and telephone calls between the two makes for informal and informative reading. The book is illustrated in hopeful, energetic greens and blues of rural spring scenes, trees budding or blossoming in partial abstraction.

A History of Pictures is an excellent survey of art history from the shared point-of-view of an artist and a critic. It was a great journey for me guided by the opinions and knowledge of these experts. From each discussion, I learned more about what to look for, what to see and how to see what was absent. And I think the same could be said about learning how to write fiction. It is an exercise in learning how to create effective mental images in scenes, learning what to put in and what to leave out.

There are several discussions about what makes a good painting. I would like to paraphrase and summarize what I think they were saying and apply the comments as a method for making a good short story.

Writing like Painter – Some ideas

Painters and writers can still get better at any age. This is reassuring to a late starter.

Don’t get filled up with ideas of what you think you should do or what someone else thinks you should be doing.

There must be a sense of something that has happened before the work and something that is going to happen after. (I love this one. A good short story has a past and a future)

The reader is looking for motion but they need to know who is doing what and where.

A single Point of View (POV, vanishing point in paintings) may not be the best choice. Consider parallel POV. Hockney is mad about parallel POV.

Consider the empty side of the table. Think of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper here. The fourth wall in theatre. Should you have a narrator or character that talks to the reader?

Characters need to be clothed in subtle costumes with credible postures and emotions. This requires understanding ambiguity

Each scene in a story must create an image.

And what is in that image?

There must be layers of light and shadow and movement.

Some movement is central and some movement is peripheral.

There should be structure and repetition.

Some things are revealed and some things are partially concealed.

The image must evoke a feeling.

The feeling must have meaning to the character and the reader.

The meaning provokes memory in the reader that will deepen the experience of reading.

When the work has layers, each re-reading of the work gives the reader a deeper experience.

So going forward

I’m looking forward to a productive writing “season”, thinking of David Hockney’s ideas and re-working my own.

What short stories am I reading?

My new short story crush is David Barthelme. It is quirky original stuff with great structure. Here is a link to his piece The School

I’m reading Australian writer, Shirley Hazzard’s collection of short stories and studying her contrasting sentences.

And, last spring I read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which is George Saunders’ close read of four Russian novelists. It’s loaded with wisdom I have yet to understand and requires multiple re-readings.

Happy reading and writing.