The Art of Writing

Today’s post at Romancing the Blog got me thinking about stereotypes, cliché’s and the ability of some writers to get away with things that others just can’t.

The consensus seems to be that it’s all in the execution. One person can write about a green-eyed red head virgin widow with a fiery temper in love with the tough but tender local sheriff – and it will be a bestseller. Someone else can do the same thing and be laughed out of the editor’s office.

Why? It’s in the execution. It’s just like other art forms, like painting, for instance. I tend to go for more traditional talent in painting – the old masters who captured a landscape or a face in striking detail. Someone who can paint every detail of a lace collar on a Victorian lady’s dress has talent. But there are plenty of artists who seem to literally throw paint at a canvas and are making money selling spatters and swirls that look like something a four-year-old could do in preschool. [No offense to modern artists of course. Some of those spatters and swirls are remarkably nice to look at and they evoke images and emotions just as well as the old masters can.]

Along the same lines, I’ve seen sculptures so lifelike you’d think the could come alive and I’ve seen formless blobs on display in museums and galleries as well. What makes the difference? Why can one person jam a rusty pipe in a lump of clay and call it art, and someone else must spend a decade chiseling away at a ton of marble to produce a masterpiece?

It’s the same with writing. It comes easy to some. They can throw words on a page, draw characters from a vast repository of those that have gone before them and somehow manage to make them new and interesting and infinitely entertaining, and others will get knocked off the horse for having their heroine be a blue-eyed blond. It’s all in the execution.

How does one become one of those people who can spatter paint on a canvas so to speak and create a novel that sells? How do you become the ‘executioner?’ Is it an innate talent that some people will just never have? Does it come with time and lots of practice? Is it trial and error?

Anyone want to share their artistic secrets?