So I promised you all a post about the art side of writing, even though it’s not really in my wheelhouse. Why do I do these things? (Actually, you’re probably going to get a couple of related posts, because I turn out to Have Opinions. I am sure this comes as a great surprise to all of you.)
A week’s worth of rather varied reading and research on the subject has led me to the conclusion that the only halfway-correct definition of “art” is the exact same one that works for “science fiction,” i.e., “Art is what I’m pointing at when I say ‘That’s art.’” Or to put it another way, “I know it when I see it.” Everything else ended up going in circles or getting lost in a lot of jargon like “creative ideation” and “multi-modal writing,” which could be accurate if I understand the phrases properly, but which is no help at all to an actual writer trying to write stuff.
There were a few things that cropped up repeatedly when people talked about defining art. Creativity and imagination top the list, followed by skill and emotion, followed by purpose, but nobody really seems to have any idea how they fit together. Practically everything I ran across started with a vague, handwavy, we-all-know-what-this-is definition and then jumped straight into techniques like metaphor and simile and mimesis. All of which are certainly useful, but they’re more part of the craft side, to my way of thinking – they’re part of how you end up with art, but throwing a bunch of metaphors into a story doesn’t make it art, even if they’re really cool metaphors.
And then I ran across this, which I think gets to the root of the problem:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” – Steve Jobs
Nobody really understands how creativity works, going forward; they can only look at the results and then try to connect the dots to show the path by which somebody got there. This is like trying to come up with a computer model that predicts the stock market. People have formulas that can produce a really, really close match to the graph of the way the stock market has moved for over 100 years, pretty much back to when it was founded…but that perfect match falls apart the minute they try to project the formula into the future. It only works looking backward.
The art side of writing is the reason that every story, play, or poem is different, even if you’re looking at something that follows a rigid formula, like a sonnet or one of the old Harlequin Romances. It’s also the reason why following a formula like the Hero’s Journey or one of the currently-popular “beat sheets” is not enough, all by itself.
Art starts with craft – musicians start by practicing scales, artists start by drawing lines and circles, potters start by shoving clay around on a wheel until they can control where it goes. You have to have certain craft basics burned into muscle memory so that you don’t have to think about how you are doing the thing you are doing, and you can instead concentrate on what you are doing and whether it is producing the effect you want. And once you get to that point … you have to take that leap of faith and trust. You have to believe that the dots will connect when you get to the point where you can look back at them.
Leaps of faith are hard. Leaps of faith are scary. Leaps of faith are not something you can control or predict, and they don’t always turn out the way you hoped and believed they would when you made them.
To create art, you have to be willing to fail.
You have to know that, accept it, and jump anyway. Because until you get where you’re going, all you can see are bits and pieces – dots – and if you spend too much time studying them and trying to fit them together logically, you’ll miss the path that’s only visible in retrospect.
There is no recipe that will work every time; I don’t think there’s a recipe that will work at all. Sonnets and formula fiction work because of what writers do to and with and within the restrictions of the form, not because following the formula guarantees that art will result.
The other thing about art – any art – is that it is very, very personal. The music, the pictures, the statues, and the stories that draw me the most are often not the same ones that draw my family and friends – and even when they are, when we talk about them, we often discover that we don’t like the same parts or aspects of it. Stories mean different things to different people, and they can also mean different things to the same person at different points in his/her life. Folk tales get worn smooth by countless retellings, and then re-imagined and embellished to reflect changes in culture before they start getting worn down again.
And if that’s true of people who look at and read and listen to and experience different art forms (and it is), it is even more true of the people who create it.
“The music, the pictures, the statues, and the stories that draw me the most are often not the same ones that draw my family and friends…”
I think the key to something being art is, as you say, that they “draw” the audience. They evoke a reaction, emotional or maybe intellectual. Which brings up a dilemma. (I hope mentioning this helps.)
I’m not terribly knowledgeable about modern art, but from what little I’ve learned, it’s that a lot of it is, so to speak, riffing off what has gone before. Art historians can go into raptures about a lot of modern art, whereas casual viewers may say the proverbial, “My kindergartner could do that.”
This comment isn’t really about modern art, though, it’s about “drawing” readers. If you write something which will only have meaning to people who’ve read Joyce’s Ulysses or Shakespeare’s more obscure sonnets, you’re not going to “draw” a lot of readers. You won’t have mass-market appeal.
On the other hand, if you write something utterly generic (“Greetings, kitchen scut! I am Wise Mentor Figure, here to tell you that you are The Chosen One, prophesied to be the only one who can defeat The Dark Evil Ruler…”), you might “draw” some readers on a shallow level, but they’ll have forgotten the whole thing a week later.
Appealing to a large number without being forgettable is the tough part. Producing a masterpiece with mass appeal is a million times tougher. And for that there can be no recipe.
Thank you for this post. The path-which-only-exists-in-retrospect very much fits my perception of how I inadvertently wrote some of the neater aspects of my own fiction (“How did I know to include that detail?! I definitely wasn’t thinking about its future plot or theme implications while I was writing that scene…”), and, maybe weirdly, also fits my process of coming up with ideas for my (geology) dissertation. (I’m fairly sure my committee wouldn’t be happy to hear that, but I don’t think I’m alone in occasionally reaching an apparently-cool idea for an experiment or an analysis step by unplanned mental zigzags and then needing to backtrack to figure out whether/why that plan makes any sense.)
Replying to Kevin Wade Johnson: hmm. I tend to think of art as the aspect of writing where one is trying to make the story function beautifully as the story that it is/wants to be, even if that story has a probable audience of only one or two people, and then I think of deliberately appealing to an audience (and/or trying to expand that audience) as part of craft (and/or marketing), but from the enthusiastic debates about art-versus-getting-published within my critique group, that’s a *very* personal definition… (Also, I would totally read and remember something that began “Greetings, kitchen scut!” if it continued to openly make fun of cliches.)
That’s a perfectly reasonable definition. If I could define art in a way everyone accepted…I can’t even think of how to finish that sentence!!
Haha, maybe I’ll write that sometime; people have liked my past parodies. As long as it *is* parody, of course. I’ve run into some fantasy novels where the author didn’t seem to realize their novel had absolutely nothing new in it.
(Novels ought at least to have a new arrangement of old things. “Novel” means new, after all…)
K.M.D., you talked me into it. Or something like that. I’ll post The Lost Heir of Generica the week of April Fool’s Day.
Looking forward to that!
There was a story in _Analog_ once, in which the wizard showed up to tell the guy in the boring office job (I think) that this wasn’t his proper place, he belonged in another world full of heroes and adventure and things. And transported him there, where he found his True Destiny: mucking out the stables.
You could always have something like that as a Chapter One, protagonist stolen from the castle as an infant and hidden among the peasantry. And once he finds out his true identity, he could be either eager to assume his place in the world, or terrified of leaving the nice safe stables where the worst that could happen is a horse steps on his foot.
Or both.
Or alternating.
Those are good ideas!
The first draft is already done now; once I got going, it went fast. And it’s only a short story. I can sustain humor longer than that, but if it feels like work…I’m retired now. And embracing it! 🙂
Yay!
My son, with a BFA degree, once asked me, “Well, what is art?” And I said, “Art is the means whereby a person tells other people, ‘This is how I see the world.'”
And my son, who under most circumstances will argue endlessly about whether the sun came up this morning, was silent for a moment and said “You’re right.”
I think this applies even to Mapplethorpe’s photo of a crucifix in a beaker of urine: that was how he saw the world.
And I think this applies even to fantasies about dragons and unicorns, if the story of the dragons and unicorns reflects how the writer sees the world.
I like that as a description of what art does, but I’m currently imagining a politician describing their view of the world during a debate or campaign ad or speech, and regardless of whether or not I agree with the politician’s interpretation of the world, I’m really reluctant to describe every campaign ad or speech as art. (Some speeches definitely count as spoken art, but, at least for my taste, most don’t. At all.)
Maybe art is (at least sometimes) what conveys the artist’s interpretation of the world in a usually-not-perfectly-literal way? (But that would exclude photographs, and I’m not prepared to exclude photography from art. This is why I don’t enjoy trying to define stuff…)
That said, I think your definition works *much* better than the description offered by one of my creative writing professors. If I remember correctly, she said that fiction should say or show something about the human condition. My story for that class was about dinosaurs; they weren’t very interested in the human condition, so, as the author, neither was I (for the space of that story, at least).