Art on Paper Ain’t Easy

Heavy rain forced me to abort an important 2018 mission to Philadelphia, a mission planned carefully through abbreviated texts and quickly erased voicemails, a trip to acquire and transport a particular piece of artwork to the city of Lancaster.  My contact was to meet me at Suburban Station at 11:00 am, but downpours and the threat of continued storms forced me to send a kill message.  He would have to connect with the seller, cancel the deal, and risk his reputation within the Philadelphia art underground.  In other words, I called my friend Aubrey Brown, told him I didn’t want to travel in the rain, and he had to tell his girlfriend Maisie O’Brien I couldn’t come to get one of her ink on paper trees.

This series of intricate drawings evoked the archetypical tree of life, a motif found throughout mythologies and faiths about the interconnectedness of all living things.  My wife found a great deal of meaning in the tree of life, and I felt one of Maisie’s drawings would make a great birthday gift.

The way my new plan with Aubrey unfolded made Maisie’s print all the more meaningful.  The two of them visited Lancaster in August to visit Aubrey’s family.  During these visits, Aubrey often returned for a few lessons at Kim Studio of Tae Kwon Do where I teach, and this offered a perfect opportunity to make the exchange.  I expected Maisie to bring a finished work to the studio, but she walked trough the door just before a Saturday morning class with drawing paper and an armload of art supplies.  She set-up shop in our studio office.  During the course of a Tae Kwon Do class– one hour– she created a new “Tree of Life” from scratch.

One hour.

In one hour I had in my hands a beautifully drawn tree of life with spidery roots and fine branches a person would need a magnifying glass to count. An artist creating an ink and paper drawing cannot erase a mistake, which means each line had to be perfect or near perfect in its first and only rendering.

Did I mention she created this in one hour?

The more I thought about Maisie’s incredible feat, the more I realized this piece of original art was not really the product of 60 minutes, but years of training, practice, experimentation, drafts, and revisions so she could produce this image in any location in a matter of minutes.  The “Tree of Life” created in Kim Studio’s Office was a return on an investment of hundreds upon hundreds of hours.

Art on paper ain’t easy.

The same is true of writing.  For more than ten years, my novel stared at me as a desktop icon. Running a Tae Kwon Do studio on top of teaching middle school, increasing care needs of an aging mother, and nurturing relationships kept me from doing little more than clicking the icon every now and again to make sure the document could still be opened.  The day came eventually when I discovered my operating system could no longer launch the application needed to open it.  Months went by before I upgraded my computer.

Then, on a hot July day in 2017, I sat before a new laptop and passed its cursor over a just-transferred copy of my novel.  The document flashed open.  I gazed upon a Paleolithic horror: jumbled points-of-view, clunky dialogue, ill-paced scenes, and an overall need for more narrative breaks for the reader just to name a few major needs.  My draft was a giant monster with ugly teeth.

Twelve years in my hard drive was a long time.

Years spent developing other writing projects, attending conferences, and reading everything from Earnest Hemingway to Lee Child had changed my craft.  My novel draft, its style, structure, and mechanics, looked nothing like my current writing.

So began the first of several page-by-page rewrites.  I intended the first to improve point-of-view and bring the reader closer to the characters.  The next rewrite injected what I hoped would be a more mature style, a more smooth and transparent approach to storytelling, so the reader experienced the story rather than word choice.  Years of practice and, yes, bad writing, had informed these rewrites.

What writers and artists seem to create so “easily” and “quickly,” represent many unseen hours of learning, practice, and failures– experience. Just as Maisie’s Tree of Life drawn in Kim Studio’s office really wasn’t created in one hour, a writer’s prose reflects the sum of experiences, good and bad.  From all of this, I have learned to keep stringing words together with the single-minded goal of tomorrow’s writing being just a bit better than today’s writing. With each passing day, experience grows, past mistakes are avoided, words flow more quickly, and style takes root like Maisie’s tree.