The Squint Test
Hello friends!
No new chapter this time. No new parallel either. I know, what’s going on? A thought occurred to me. A rather obvious one if I sat there and thought about it long enough.
Does being a painter help me write?
I’ve been running Parallel Lines for quite a while now (albeit not very consistently). In that time I’ve mapped all kinds of art things to writing things, nailed down two full chapters of BELOVED, built an outline I believe in, and started to find Kizzy’s voice. But I haven’t stopped to ask whether the parallels I’ve been drawing are the reason any of that happened or whether I would’ve just done everything the way I had anyway.
So let’s do the thing they tell illustrators to do when a painting feels off. Let’s squint.
Where the Parallels Held Up
Some of these connections weren’t just silly comparisons. They actually changed how I approached the work.
Refining.
The idea that revision in writing is the same muscle as refining shapes in a painting gave me permission to write badly on purpose. I already knew that a rough thumbnail has more energy than a stiff final. Applying that to writing meant I could barf out a first draft without shame because I knew the refining was where the magic happened. That side-by-side process is something I do every day when I sit down in the evening to paint. Translating it to writing made revision feel a little less scary.
Movement and pacing.
This one surprised me. When I wrote Chapter 1, I wasn’t consciously thinking about leading lines or contrast placement. But when I looked at what I’d done (the clipped sentences, the time jumps, etc) I realized I was doing exactly what I do in a painting: controlling where the eye goes and how fast it gets there. Short sentences are like hard edges. They stop you. Longer, rolling ones are like soft gradients. They carry you. I don’t think I would have articulated that without the painting framework, even if I was doing it instinctively.
Composition as beat arrangement.
Thinking about big shapes vs. small shapes helped me feel the rhythm of the story physically. Big emotional moments need space around them the same way a large shape in a painting needs breathing room. When I was working out the outline and trying to figure out where the tension should land, I kept thinking about it spatially: is this section too cluttered? Does this moment have enough negative space around it to land?
Where the Parallels Broke Down
Here’s where I really had to take an honest look at things.
Value and plot structure.
I said these were equivalent and I still think there’s something there. But the truth is I spent three posts talking about value (notan, contrast, unity) and during that entire stretch I didn’t write a single word of BELOVED. I was researching Save the Cat and Andrew Stanton, and none of that research came from my painting background…it came from Google. The art side of those posts held up because I could show my own work. The writing side was basically just me summarizing other people’s frameworks. That’s not a parallel! That’s two separate lessons mish-mashed together LOL
Focal point and theme.
I mapped these to each other but I’d already talked about focal point in the value and composition posts. By the time I gave it its own entry, it felt like I was circling. And honestly? Figuring out the theme of BELOVED didn’t come from thinking about where to place contrast in a painting. It came from sitting with the question of why I’m writing this book at all. That’s a deeply personal thing, intit? No amount of squinting at a notan was going to answer that!
Perspective and POV.
The word maps perfectly. The mechanics don’t. Camera angle changes shot to shot. Narrative POV is a commitment you make for an entire book. They’re both choices about vantage point, sure, but the way you make those choices and what they cost you are pretty different. I think I forced this one a bit because the word “perspective” was too tempting to resist.
What I Actually Learned
The biggest thing painting taught me about writing isn’t any single parallel. It’s this: I already know how to build something from nothing.
Every painting starts with a blank canvas and a vague intention. You put down marks. Most of them are wrong. You refine. You step back. You squint. You go back in. The fear of the blank page that paralyzes so many writers? I’ve already beaten that fear a thousand times over with a paintbrush! Or rather, when I muster the courage to conquer that fear I’m successful a good portion of the time, which helps just in general. But the muscle of starting ugly and trusting the process to get you somewhere is the same muscle in both disciplines and I still struggle with it when I paint traditionally XD
What painting DIDN’T prepare me for is the emptiness of writing. When I paint, I can see progress in real time. A shape appears. Color fills in. The image takes shape right before my eyes. With writing, I can stare at a paragraph for an hour and not know if it’s any good. There’s no visual feedback. No color to hide behind. Just words and the hope that they’re doing what I think they’re doing. Critique groups are important ya’ll. That’s all I’ll say about that.
The other thing painting didn’t prepare me for is how much writing requires you to think in time instead of space. A painting is all there at once. You can see the whole thing in a single glance. A story unfolds. It has a before and after. The reader can’t see page 200 while they’re reading page 3. That sequential, unfolding quality is something I’m still getting used to.
Oh, and one last thing that holds true whether you want to be a singer, a dancer, a comedian, or an actor. YOU HAVE TO DO THE THING. And that’s one thing I’m extremely guilty of neglecting. I wrote the first two chapters of BELOVED, sure, but that was weeks ago. Haven’t touched it since then. I have the outline so I can’t even hide behind that anymore. I need to get to barfing on that page and keep the momentum going someway, somehow! Just like I make time to paint everyday I need to start small. If it’s not working on BELOVED then it’s writing in my journal for 5 minutes, or fleshing out another picture book story idea, or f*** at least watching a YouTube video or listening to an audiobook about the craft. Every teeny weeny step counts towards your creative bank account. I think I’ve improved in writing from where I started, if only incrementally hahah
What’s Next
I still have parallels to explore: color, texture, edges. Excited to dive in but I wanted to take this beat, step back from the canvas, and be honest about what’s working and what I was maybe forcing.
Because that’s the other thing painting taught me. You have to be willing to scrape off the paint that isn’t working, even if you spent a long time mixing it. Or if you paint digitally, double tap that screen haha
Until next time!