“Paint what you see, not what you know”
Tony’s feedback circled around my mind: “too telly.”
“Paint what you see, not what you know,” Tony said, the smell of oil paints and turpentine rags mingling with the laundry detergent scent I’d grown to associate with the Bianco family.
I was a thirteen-year-old wannabe artist and Tony Bianco, a local painter who made a living creating art, had agreed to give me lessons at his home studio down the road from my house.
Rather than painting each individual branch and leaf on a tree, Tony encouraged me to squint my eyes; blur the scene in front of me and reduce it to unfamiliar and abstract shapes. By painting those shapes the scene would re-emerge as a recognizable subject on the canvas.
“Paint what you see, not what you know.”
Twenty years later, his advice permeates my latest creative struggle: writing.
The more I write, the more difficult it becomes. Last year, I sent Tony a short creative piece I’d written and asked him what he thought.
“It’s good,” he said, “but it’s a little telly.”
His response put a lump in my throat. He was probably right, but I didn’t like it. Worse than that, I didn’t know what to do about it.
I’d recently spent over a month writing what was supposed to be my first book: Survival by Creative. Now that I’d reached the average length of a novel, sixty-thousand words, I couldn’t stand going back and reading it.
Survival by Creative? More like Slow Painful Murder by a Know It All. Almost the entire document came off as telly.
I let it sit in the cloud for a year, and whenever anyone asked me about it I told them it was a good experience, but I probably wouldn’t ever do anything with the manuscript, if you could even call it that.
*
I went camping with my family this summer, and one afternoon, as I lay sprawled in the crotch of a hammock, I cracked open the sixty-thousand-word document on my phone, to see if any of it could be salvaged. My eyes glazed over and I flushed with embarrassment.
Tony’s feedback circled around my mind: too telly.
What else? What else was wrong with it, and how could I fix it? What does it really mean to be too telly? Writing shouldn’t be this difficult. But is that true? Lots of great writers talk about imposter syndrome. I’m not the only one.
Maybe it was supposed to be difficult. Like Ryan Holiday writes (and he borrowed the idea from Marcus Aurelius), maybe “the Obstacle is the Way.” Thanks, Ryan, that’s so helpful.
But maybe it is helpful. Maybe being terrible at writing is the first step at improving.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” – Marcus Aurelius.
But what was the next step to get there? I’d already read a half-dozen books on how to write, I’d tried to apply the lessons, and I’d certainly been writing a lot more. I read one of the books a second time.
Okay, maybe I needed to talk to an editor.
I posted my problem to r/writing on Reddit while I lay crumpled in the hammock. It didn’t help – it only garnered advice from people who didn’t see the whole picture. Sitting next to an emberless firepit as my kids rode their bikes up and down the gravel laneways of Samuel de Champlain provincial park, I talked about it with my wife, Lydia, who has a knack for spotting obstacles and suggesting solutions; she’s also a good listener.
She listened, and I talked; she listened, and I thought and wandered and swung in the hammock; abstract shapes started to nest together and turn into oblique, semi-coherent pictures.
What did I love about Stephen King’s non-fiction book about writing? How was that book different than a lot of the other books which were great in their own way? What was it about myself that felt so disconnected from my writing?
Disconnected. Dissonance. Why do I struggle to make my writing truly reflect me?
My writing, my personality, the kinds of books I had read, the sixty-thousand words, and the spaces in which I find joy and meaning; they weren’t acting in harmony; they weren’t working together. Where I had big questions, I had filled them up with answers. Where I had doubts, I skipped rocks across the surface of faith. I had been writing from the shallow well of knowing, rather than the near infinite depth of seeing.
Without realizing it, I’d picked up the voice and style of non-fiction authors I’d been reading for the past ten years. I was writing like an expert, but what I wanted to do was share good, transformative stories.
That had to be it. That was the obstacle.
I started to feel a spark of hope; I probably didn’t entirely suck, I just wasn’t approaching it from the right angle.
I needed to squint a little.
Some of the non-fiction books I had read had magic flowing under the surface, something beyond the author’s authority that brought their writing to life. If that magic was independent of their expertise — or at the very least a powerful potion on its own — maybe I could be a magician without trying to be an expert.
Stephen King is an expert and a magician: an English teacher and a story wizard. In his book, On Writing, he wrote:
“I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn't to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety—those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot—but to watch what happens and then write it down.”
“…watch what happens and then write it down.”
King’s advice reverberated with Tony’s.
A know-it-all has no reason to go on adventures, or to see more; a know-it-all already knows. A know-it-all writes sixty thousand words in a month and is surprised that the writing isn’t all that good.
Observers are nudged by curiosity to adventure, to get a closer look – to see first, and then paint.
I’m learning to write what I see.
*
One final note: My failed book project is at least partly the fault of James Altucher, who wrote an article inspiring me to write a book in one month. I did what you said, James, and the book sucks. It’s not entirely your fault, but it’s not entirely my fault either.