Paint Yourself Into a Book
Living in an old house provides lots of opportunity for devising plots, particularly when the task at hand is painting a room. As I slathered yet another coat of paint over the neon blue bedroom walls, I got to thinking about how painting and writing require similar processes.
When painting a room, the first step is to visualize what color you want on the walls. What color can you live with? What hue will brighten the room, make the area look more inviting, larger, perhaps? Or, if the ceilings are high, maybe you want to make the room feel more cozy. What kind of a finish you do want? Textured, faux finish, more than one color?
When sitting down to write a book, first you choose the genre, then the characters and setting. If your book is a romance, you want to choose your hero and heroine and an antagonist who will try to keep them apart. For a mystery, you will choose the problem, who did it, and then create a sleuth to find the solution. Setting includes the time period as well as geographical location. Understand your characters’ goal, motivation, and conflict, and make the goal worthy of the journey.
The next step in painting a room is repairing the defects, including holes in the walls. Painting over the defects will serve merely to amplify them. A little spackle here, a little filler there, perhaps some drywall work where serious problems exist.
When writing your book, you want to come up with a plot line. Most often, you’ll find that the first thing you think of for a plot will be the easy point. To create a compelling story, you must think beyond that first idea, and ask more “And then what?” questions. Come up with the plot, then go back and fill in the holes in the plot. Don’t let your hero off the hook too easily. Make the antagonist worthy of your hero—a weak antagonist will make for a weak plot.
Unless you want your entire room the same color, you’ll likely tape off areas to protect them. You may cover windows with paper, or put dropcloths on the floor and over furniture. Perhaps you’re going for a striping technique, or you want to later paint a contrasting border, so you’ll use tape to mark those areas.
In painting, the tape marks the borders. In writing, your outline, synopsis, and elevator pitch will keep you on track. There are few things as frustrating as sitting down to write a book and then you find out halfway through that you’re not writing THAT book, but the story has taken on a life of its own and gone in a completely different direction. This usually happens because you didn’t really know what the story was about before you started writing. For seat-of-the-pants writers, who will say that writing an outline steals the joy from the process, you don’t have to write a ten-page outline. Even an elevator pitch, fifty words or less, can keep you on track. And for those who love to outline, the joy still emerges when a character says or does something you weren’t expecting.
Finally, after all the preparation, now is the time to paint. But you can’t just take a bucket of paint and throw it at the walls. No, you must have the proper tools. A good paint roller, a quality brush, perhaps a paint pan if you’re using a gallon of paint, or a paint screen if you’re using a five gallon bucket. Then you patiently dip, strain, and apply the paint in even strokes, one coat at a time, taking care not to miss any spots. Keep a damp rag to mop up any spills.
Writing requires tools, as well. Included in your toolkit will be something to write on, usually a computer of some sort. You will need a notepad and pen, a space where you can write, some software, and patience. You might want to set some daily or weekly goals for your writing, such as how many words or pages you want to produce. Occasionally you might want to read over what you wrote the previous day and make a few changes, the equivalent of make sure you didn’t leave any bare spots. Just as with painting, writing a book takes time, patience, and commitment. Keep your outline in front of you to keep you on track. Review your characters’ GMC to make sure your character is changing and moving toward their goals.
And last but not least, in the painting process, you need to clean up, including washing your tools, securely closing the paint can to protect against spills, removing the tape and dropcloths, and returning your room to a usable condition. After all, what’s the point of painting the room if you don’t get to enjoy it?
Once you write “the end” on your book, you still have work ahead of you. You’ll want to go back and do some revisions, looking for passive voice, point of view slips, overused words, stilted dialogue, and plot holes. You’ll need to check for those nastly –ly words, for consistency in character description, and for grammar and punctuation issues. Read through your book. Was this a joy or a chore? Were there some spots where the story slowed down too much? Did you give your readers a chance to catch their breath? Do you need to plant some more clues and foreshadowing? Does the story still fit the genre and market?
Sometimes I fool myself into thinking I can paint a room in a couple of hours, forgetting all the preparation and clean-up to make the job truly complete. Just as painting a room doesn’t begin and end with a single brush stroke, writing a book takes a lot of preparation, process, and finish. But it can be done. I am living proof of that. I’ve painted many rooms and written a number of books. You can too!
