Seeing vs Reading

I bought sketchbook for my Kindle Fire, and all last summer I messed around with it. I can’t say I made much progress. This Xmas, though, I took the kindle to Texas with me and because the weather was lousy I had much time to sit around with it. I was not happy with my work, so I began googling other artists to figure out how they painted the same scenes with better results. I started copying the stuff I liked, and what a difference it made!

This is a copy of a Rockport Center for the Arts ad, which is itself a clipped version of a poster by Al Barnes.

This made me realize how much harder it is to apply the same approach to writing, and how time-intensive and laborious reading is compared to seeing. I can spend two days reading a novel and at the end decide there is nothing I want to take away from it so far as technique is concerned. Whereas if I go to a mid-sized gallery, I can pick out the three or four pictures I want to pay attention to in half an hour. And if all that attracts me is the horse in the background, it doesn’t take more than a minute to realize it – and I can spend my sketching time focused on that horse alone.

Other folks have pointed this out, for instance in discussions of why it’s harder for self-issued books to succeed than for self-issued songs. It’s the difference between a three-day investment of time and a three-minute investment.

When I was younger, I was delighted to have a pile of new books. I wanted to be pulled into their worlds. Have I changed, or have the kind of fantasy books out there changed? When I read books that are lauded for their world-building nowadays, I feel so tired. There are all these social structures and multiple universes and diplomatic conflicts and political situations. Where’s the wonder? Where’s the beauty? Where’s the just plain living? And where’s the one thing I want to take away from it — well, it may be that description on page 342, and I will never get that far.

More and more, I depend on the author’s voice and on what is in those first five pages to tell me whether I will find anything I want in a book. Which means that more and more, I find myself gravitating towards short fiction. Which may be a very good thing, since it appears that nowadays there is a lot of short fiction and nobody is reading most of it. Perhaps this will be the year in which I read short fiction from obscure and unpopular magazines, and become educated enough about it to have something to say.

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