The difference between writing and painting

The great thing about painting is that I can accomplish a lot in one day, many of my old paintings were done in less then three days at a time. The not so great thing about writing is that it cannot be accomplished in anything less then 6 months or so and that is if you have a lot of unintrupted time to work with. It is equally easy to visualize a painting and a novel in your mind, it’s the details that are a bit fuzzy. If I want to do a painting I may make a sketch or three, then a small color rough to see how possible things are and then finally commit to painting a large illustration. Thankfully it is over in a few days and I can see if I have succeeded or failed. With a novel I generally do an outline, though not a very detailed one, usually less then 10 pages, so there are a lot of unfilled-in spaces. The real great fun is in the writing, I get to see how events and the character interactions play out over the course of the work. The bad thing is that I only get to see about 5 to 10 pages of it a day. It would be nice to be able to read through it faster but it takes forever to get through the book that way. Writing is just slow motion painting.

I guess it seems funny that I am just like someone reading the book for the first time. The sad thing is that I don’t always stick to the outline, a lot of strange events can happen along the way and I am not in complete control of my characters and action. They have minds of their own and they take sidetracks from the main flow of the novel on occasion. It is something that I have finally learned to live with gracefully. My first book, (Field Trip, now out on Amazon Kindle), eventually turned out to be more or less what I expected, the details were somewhat different but it finally stayed on track after I moved the action back 40 years. I fought a lot with my characters then, before I learned to let them have their way most of the time. Because of this, the second book unexpectaly turned out to be something more of a love story, and not with my two main characters. This came as a bit of a surprise, a pleasant one, but still a surprise. The third book was supposed to be about ecology and climate, but that didn’t happen either because the characters had other agendas. I have no idea where my 4th and current book is going. I guess I will have to keep writing and see that place where it will eventually take me to. In the end there is always the delete key, but I tend to visualize my characters standing there frowning their disapproval every time I try to use it and it is very hard to argue with all of them.