Telling Stories with Paint by Sarah Wisseman

Recently I had the wonderful experience of a week-long oil painting class at Arrowmont arts and crafts school in TN. My instructor was Sandy Miller Sasso, and she was terrific. Our subject: “Evocative Still Life.” That means going beyond fruit and flowers, setting up a still life with objects that carry special meaning for you, the artist.  Sandy described the process as rather like being a stage manager: you control background, lighting, and placement of important objects. Things in the foreground are painted in more detail; things in the background blur a little, fade into the distance. You create a mood, and hopefully a story.

Here is one of Sandy’s paintings:

She told us the pendulum symbolizes constancy and steadfastness in a world of chaos.

I have already found much refreshment from painting. It is also the perfect activity when my writing is blocked. I think working with color, shape, and texture in a physical sense uses a different part of the brain, but the creative process is similar. You start with a plan, but the plan changes as you work, and it’s important to let serendipity, or even mistakes, take over at times. Just like a character starting a conversation in your head, the paintbrush can have a mind of its own.

Although we were invited to bring objects from home, we also improvised with objects around Arrowmont’s studios.  I fell in love with a bone, and this is what happened when I painted this still life two days after the election:

 What does it mean? Perhaps how ephemeral things are, especially favorite pets like the little cat (made of wood, so not permanent in the archaeological record) or the African seed pod (the tall brownish-red object turned on a wood lathe into a vase). But bones, in the right environment, can last a very long time…

I look forward to incorporating these experiences into my fiction writing.

Choices and More Choices, by Susan Oleksiw

One of my side jobs is helping to manage a small gallery in the Sawyer Free Library in Gloucester. I'm one of a committee of three that select artists to exhibit each month, and one of us participates in the hanging of the show. We choose artists in all media—oil, acrylic, printing, photography, multimedia, and small sculptures or dioramas. For many artists this is their first juried exhibit, but far more are seasoned professionals. But every one faces the same problem—choosing what to exhibit.

I spent Thursday morning working with our current artist. I kept thinking how similar selecting work for an exhibit was to shaping a manuscript. In each work, the artist or writer has to choose what to keep and what to omit. The artist can’t hang every single work unless he wants the exhibit to look like a nineteenth-century salon. And the writer can’t include every special turn of phrase, every quirky or interesting minor character, unless she wants to turn her traditional mystery into the farce subgenre (and even then, there are limits).

Each choice brings with it limitations on what is still available. Does the artist choose by subject matter—landscapes or portraits? Does the writer choose by setting—a gritty urban tenement or a quiet suburban neighborhood? After the first question come others, and more limitations. If the artist has three large but superior pieces, do those take over half of the limited space? If the writer has one major character around whom all the action swirls, does she cut away the subplots involving other, minor characters? Does the artist choose five paintings that show variation on a theme? Does the writer choose a group of characters, such as a family or the guests in an isolated farmhouse? Each choice shapes the work.

The joke among college writing instructors used to be about beginning students who signed up to write the great American novel. This is akin to buying an easel and canvases to prepare to painting the great American scene. There is no one story, no one great character, in American life, just as there is no one great image that captures all of the United States.

My choices as a writer shape the kind of story I will tell, and those choices in turn determine the readers I will attract. No one story will appeal to everyone, but each story honed carefully will reveal the clear, definite direction the author has chosen, and the craft of creating the story will come through.

You can view the artwork of Nancy Molvig at the Matz Gallery in the Sawyer Free Library during the month of October.

You can read my choices in When Krishna Calls, the newest Anita Ray, and Come About for Murder, the newest Mellingham Mystery.

Writer’s Block or Creative Procrastination?

For me, it is not always “writer’s block” that stops my production. Often, it’s just a case of poor concentration because my mind refuses to focus. The brain is half-busy with something else, or the body seeks a way to procrastinate…

A true “block” is when I’ve been writing intensely and am exhausted or just not satisfied with my work. Usually the remedy is a brisk walk outside or doing something that requires a different part of my brain for an hour or two (this is often the only way my house gets cleaned). Being outside and moving around improves my mood and jump-starts new ideas. Solutions percolate below the surface, so I am not always aware that my mind is still working on the writing problem until I return to my computer.

Gardening, or observing the results of gardening, can be restorative. This year, thanks to seeds provided by a nurse who came to my house to give me an insurance physical, I planted Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia). Just as she promised, the Monarch butterflies came, along with many other kinds of butterflies, hummingbirds, finches, and bumblebees. 

Another favorite diversion (procrastination?) is testing my memory on what I planted last year. Where is it? Has it spread, or has it died? Will I recognize it if I see it? (Answer: write it down, draw a diagram, and take pictures. Duh! Better luck next year!).

Poor concentration may mean I really don’t want to write, I want to be creative in another realm: painting. Although sometimes I’ve set myself the exercise of creating an image that could be a future book cover, usually what I want is to play with color and shape. Here is a mock cover I did for The House of the Sphinx, and the final cover chosen by the publisher.

                         

I discovered my love for painting when my small children were enrolled in a Saturday morning art class. When I heard that just down the hall, the art school was offering painting for adults (three hours of no demands on me by family or telephone), I jumped at it. Now, painting is a crucial part of my life, and the painting group I found provides a wonderful new set of friends.

Painting refreshes the writing part of my brain so I can go back to the problem that stalled me and discover a solution. The same is true when a painting is not working; I go back to writing for a while, rest my eyes, and return with new ideas. The two activities feed each other. 

What do you do when your brain refuses to work?

Just How Crazy Is the Marketplace Today? by Susan Oleksiw

I was casting around for an idea for my monthly contribution to Author Expressions when I thought I’d settled on something timely—the topic of whether or not writers should give away their work. An article in the New York Times by Tim Kreider on just this issue had sparked a lot of debate on various lists. The topic appealed to me because when a friend, Ann Perrott, and I founded The Larcom Review I insisted that we pay every contributor, even if it was only a nominal amount.

Those who write well enough to be published deserve to be treated as professionals; they should be paid. Ann agreed, and we paid every contributor (writer, poet, interviewer, reviewer, photographer, artist) a modest $25 plus one contributor’s complimentary copy. The amount is pathetic but it’s better than nothing.

Today thousands of writers blog for free (like me, right here), put their novels and short stories on line for free (I haven’t done that), and contribute stories and articles to anthologies for no money at all (I haven’t done that either) and no free copy. It is so much the norm now that fewer and fewer people are arguing that writers should never write for free. It is argued that this is unrealistic—there are simply too many writers willing to fill the screens with their ideas and beautifully wrought sentences, hoping someone will offer them a paying gig.

This isn’t just a problem for midlist writers like me and most other mystery writers. It’s common knowledge that the writers who made Huffington Post worth purchasing were paid nothing for their contributions. They got nothing from the sale of the online newspaper. That doesn’t make anyone feel any better, but it does remind us just how widespread this problem is—writers should write for free and be glad of the opportunity to have their work disseminated. The marketplace for writing is out of whack.

So, how out of whack is the marketplace today?

While I was searching for a book by Mavis Gallant I decided to take a vanity detour and check out my own list, to see if the new covers were now on the Amazon site. They were. I scrolled down to admire them, and noticed that various issues of The Larcom Review were mixed in with the book titles. And then I took a better look.

I’m used to seeing paperbacks at $0.01, with the total cost being the shipping plus a few pennies. But I was not ready for the price I saw on one issue of The Larcom Review. The spring/summer 2001 issue was priced at $2,350.70. (Seventy cents?) The cover price is $10.

I remember that issue. In fact, I had just given a copy of it to a friend as a hostess gift when she invited me to dinner. The issue contains 61 works in prose or poetry and 15 artworks, including photographs, line drawings, and prints. The issue includes an interview with Andre Dubus III by Rae Francoeur, a poem by Erika Funkhauser, one by Rhina P. Espaillat, two prints by John Martin, and a cover photo by Robin Paris, among other items. Is all this worth $2,350.70?

I’ve emailed the bookseller to find out what is so special about this issue that he’s charging over $2,000. After all, I still have several copies in storage I’d be glad to sell. I have't heard anything from him yet, but I'll let you know if I do.

And now you can see how out of whack the publishing business is right now. I’ve forgotten my topic and where I was going with it. The ludicrous amount of money being offered for one issue of The Larcom Review has completely thrown my brain off kilter. What more do you need to know?

To purchase copies of The Larcom Review at a normal price, email me. To read Tim Kreider’s article, click on the link below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/opinion/sunday/slaves-of-the-internet-unite.html?hp&_r=1&>

Susan Oleksiw is the author of the Mellingham/Joe Silva series and the Anita Ray series. Her books can be found on Amazon, Nook Press, and Smashwords. For more information, go to www.susanoleksiw.com