I Wish There Were Good Subjects To Sketch Where I Live

2012_07-FireHydrant5_800Raise your hand if you haven’t heard this, or something similar said/written by someone in a sketching/art forum.  In the writing world the questions that authors joke about is “Where do you get your ideas?” and the answers run from horribly snarky to absolutely hilarious – often it’s hard to tell which is which.  But in the end, what authors explain is “Ideas are easy; it’s execution that is the hard part.”

And similarly, this “Where do you find good stuff to draw?” question should get a similar treatment in my view.  I don’t mean the snarky part but the truth is, the best way to find good stuff to draw is to stop looking for good stuff to draw.

2012_04-RailroadSiding800.Just like a writer’s ideas, finding good stuff is the easy part; it’s the execution that is important.  I think people spend so much time looking for the perfect scene because they believe that a ‘perfect scene’ does great art make.  I say that’s not true, though I confess, I’m not much of an artist so maybe I’m wrong.

         

But I do know one thing for sure.  Trying to do a drawing of the Taj Mahal or the Grand Canyon that doesn’t look like yet another picture of the Taj Mahal or Grand Canyon is MUCH harder than creating a meaningful drawing of something that the viewer hasn’t seen in a gazillion photos before they see your sketch.  Don’tcha want to show people what they’re missing, not what they’ve already seen?

2012_07-Lampost800

50Think about the famous painters and what they found worthy of their time.  Monet painted in Paris but instead of a steady stream of Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe paintings, he painted gardens, smoky railroad stations, fishing boats, and water lilies.   Van Gogh painted peasants sitting around a table eating potatoes.  He also painted sunflowers.  Lots of sunflowers.  What made Monet and Van Gogh memorable wasn’t their subject matter; it is what they did with it.

And so it goes with sketching.  Everywhere, anywhere, and at any time, there are things to sketch available to anyone with a set of functioning eyes and a pencil.  Personally, I’m drawn to the mundane, mostly because I never noticed any of this stuff before I became a sketcher.  Once I became one I was amazed at how much personality fire hydrants, telephone poles, and lamp posts have and how, if one looks one can see ‘art’ in everything.

49I’ve scattered several sketches of mundane, readily available subjects from my town.  I never would have seen or sketched any of them if I’d been looking for the proverbial ‘great scene.’  So again I suggest, stop looking and instead sketch what is before you.  If nothing else you’ll be sketching and it’s that process that is the key to the smiles you see on sketcher’s faces.

The Internet Art Community Is Special Because…

… it’s full of friendly and talented people.  But more important, it’s like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.  And once in a while a piece of art shows up that causes one to feel…deeply.

And so it was when I first saw Dominique Eichi’s pen & ink drawing of her grand niece.  She so captured the wide-eyed and curious nature of young kids that I couldn’t help but stop and stare.  It’s sad that most of us have lost those feelings of wonder.  We go through our adult lives, in adult fashion, or as we believe adults are supposed to act, and we no longer “stop and smell the roses”, “take time to ponder”, or chase bubbles “just cuz it’s fun.”

Aldous Huxley once said, “Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.”  Wouldn’t our world be a better place if we all acted a bit more like children?

Dominique Eichi has a great blog called Dancing strokes.  I encourage you to go there, if only to look at this great drawing in its full glory.

What Can Antiques Road Show Teach Traditional Publishing?

I was watching the Antiques Road Show last week.  I love that show as there are so many stories presented in association with the antiques being discussed.  This night there was a guy who had some beautiful, old ledger books.  He’d fished them out of a dumpster simply because they were leather-bound, very large, and very cool.   Their exteriors suggested they belonged in a medieval monastery. These ledgers were from a company that manufactured buggy parts and dated to the early 1900s.  The books were, what’s the word?  KEWL!

But as nice as they looked on the outside, it was the inside that held the true gems.  Inside were hand-written entries of sales and delivery numbers for the various parts produced by the company.  The hand-writing was crisp and clear.  John Hancock would have been proud.  Sadly, we’ve lost hand-writing as a well-practiced art form.

What was interesting about the entries is that as you flipped through the books you saw that the company had transitioned from making buggy-parts to making car parts.  As I watched this I wondered how much grumbling went on within that company over the introduction of cars and the demise of an industry in which they were so heavily invested.  I envisioned dart boards with Henry Ford’s face.  The bottom line, however, was that not only had the company transitioned from one set of products to another, this company was still in business, throwing out their old ledger books of a century ago.  The major book publishers should have been watching Antiques Road Show.

Why?  I’m glad you asked.

The book industry is in the middle of same sort of shift that the transportation industry experienced when cars replaced the horse and buggy.  It’s moving from a high-cost print-based product to a lower-cost eBook product.  On its face this should be easy for publishing companies as only the container for their product (i.e. – words) has changed.  In the process they can quickly eliminate many of their printing, distribution and returns costs from the red side of their ledgers.

The problem, however, is that the companies who should be leading this industry change, the big publishing companies, aren’t.  In fact, they’re more concerned with protecting their shrinking legacy industry than participating in the newer eBook industry in spite of now reporting that 20-25% of their revenues are coming from eBooks while also reporting large declines in paperback and hardcover sales.

It should be Random House and Macmillan competing to see who has the best eReader, not Barnes & Noble and Amazon.  But the large publishers are not only not in the eReader business yet, they are pricing their eBooks in ways that limit sales of their books to consumers who do own eReaders, iPads, iPhones, etc.

Harper-Collins should be inventing innovative ways for libraries to use and distribute eBooks.  Instead they have produced a limited lifespan model that is completely unworkable given the modern ways in which libraries interchange books with one another to serve the public.

And so the Internet debate lines have been drawn and we are constantly bombarded by indie vs traditional model blog posts.  eBook advocates call traditional publishers names, some becoming justified by the very actions traditional publishers, agents, etc. are taking in attempts to retain their jobs and their way of doing business.  Those on the traditional side of the debate are firing back, largely embarrassing themselves as they twist reality into a pretzel as they voice their denial that anything has changed.   Much of this denial, I believe, comes from the fact that the large publishers have never viewed readers as their customers and they’re having a hard time coming to grips with that.  They’ve always viewed bookstores as their customers.

In the end, however, readers are learning a whole new way to books, without the “big six” being involved.  Readers are learning how limited their choices have been, caused largely by the large publishers wanting to make more and more money from the sales of fewer and fewer book titles.  Readers are learning more about small publishers than ever before.  Independent authors are selling lots of books.

Authors are happy because they are more free to express themselves and because they’re making more money than ever before.  They’re able to make their older works available, works that were largely abandoned by the large publishers after a 60-90 day run in bookstores.  Readers are happy because the selection is great and generally prices are lower.

And while this is happening the buggy-makers haven’t figured out that they need to start making car parts.

I’m An Author – I Make Stuff Up

One of the great things about being a fiction author is that you get to make stuff up, or as Lawrence Block put it, “you get to lie for a living.”  We create worlds, or recreate existing worlds, sculpt characters and provide them situations.  We’re limited only by our imagination.

As authors we’re told to “write what you know” but I write mysteries without having murdered anyone, or even been near a murderer.  I doubt that those writing about knights fighting dragons have experienced their words either.  We make stuff up.

But occasionally this comes back to bite an author.  Sometimes readers believe that we “write what we know.”  And such was the case when my brother and his wife Kathie came to visit (see here for some coverage of that event).  They had both read Her Book of Shadows which made their visit particularly fun.  The setting for my mystery series is Quebec City so as we wandered the town, seeing the sights, I could point out the various scene locations of the book.

Then it happened.  We were walking along my river, the St. Charles River and the topic of cooking came up.  Kathie said, “I need to get your recipe for broccoli chicken.”  Because I’m old and have a hard time remembering my birthday, it took me a few beats to figure out what she was talking about.  Then the light went on.  She was referring to this passage from Her Book of Shadows.

 

From Chapter Seventeen: I chopped the broccoli into small bits, using only the tops of the flower heads. I threw them into a bowl, grated Parmesan into it, added bread crumbs, lemon juice and some olive oil, creating a broccoli paste. I poured myself a glass of wine and added some to my mixture, adding more bread crumbs to maintain the paste consistency.

I sliced into one side of each chicken breast and filled the slot with broccoli paste, closing up the slot and holding it together with a couple toothpicks. I basted the exteriors with a bit of olive oil, sprinkling them with tarragon and a bit of pepper and I set the oven at 350F.

My protagonist, Scott Riker is making dinner for his family and one of the minor themes of the book is that he’s a decent cook.  The problem here is that this “recipe” was a figment of my imagination.  It wasn’t following that advice to “write what you know.”  I was “making stuff up.”  And so I was a bit embarrassed to admit that I’d never made stuffed broccoli chicken, though I was inwardly thrilled that it had seemed so believable.

But I like Kathie a lot.  She likes broccoli and so do I.  So, here’s how to make Riker’s famous Broccoli-stuffed Chicken.  And while I never measure anything when I cook, I did so in this case to provide some quantities:

Ingredients

chicken breasts (3-4)

broccoli (1 cup of broccoli buds)
parmesan cheese (2 tablespoons)
bread crumbs (1 tablespoon)
lemon juice (1 tablespoon)
olive oil (enough to turn the rest into a loose paste)
* I also mixed bread crumbs, parmesan and tarragon for use in coating the exterior of the chicken

The Process

I mixed the broccoli paste in a small bowl.  It doesn’t become a tight paste because of the broccoli but this result can be spooned into chicken breasts that have had a pocket sliced into them.  I apologize that my kitchen isn’t set up for high-quality photography but here’s a photo of the paste to give you an idea of its consistency.

I spooned the paste into the pockets and  basted the chicken breasts with olive oil.  I sprinkled the bread crumb coating* on top.  The chicken was transferred to a lined baking sheet that I’d painted with olive oil so they wouldn’t stick.  This is how they looked as I  stuffed them into a 375F oven.

About 45-minutes later, this is what they looked like.  Within half an hour they had disappeared and my family was all smiles.

I admit that I do cook, so maybe when I’m making stuff up about Scott Riker cooking, I’m also “writing what I know.”

 

Getting A Writing Fix – What’s The Big Deal?

It’s said that writers don’t just want to write.  Rather, they need to write.  I’m always skeptical of this sort of stuff as, to me, writing is like any endeavour.  You do it or you don’t.  It’s likely that you procrastinate over it, look forward to it, and enjoy or hate it, all at different times.  At least that’s what I’d like to believe.

But I have to confess that I feel soooooo much better this afternoon than I have for the past couple weeks.  We’re in the middle of renovations that I’ve talked about here in the context of said renovations getting in the way of my writing.  Sunday, though, we got to a stage where we could actually start storing our sofas and TV in the living room rather than having them fill the kitchen.  I literally danced around the kitchen floor when it became available again.  Eating nuked frozen meals, grilled cheese sandwiches and hot dogs is not my style so getting the telephone and coffee maker off the stove top was a watershed moment.

So, what does this have to do with writing?  Absolutely nothing, which is the point.  All this has kept me from writing except for a couple of short blog posts – until today.  We decided to ‘take the day off’ which manifest itself in my wife and daughter going to a strawberry farm to pick strawberries, one of the pleasures of living in Quebec.

I stayed home, all alone, well almost.  I had my laptop and Scrivener, so I did some outlining and some WRITING!!!  It felt soooooo good.  I wrote only a couple thousand words but the spring is back in my step and maybe, just maybe, there’s something to that ‘writers need to write’ stuff.