Understanding Fiction through Art

Late in 2007, I attended an art exhibit at the Wexner Center by William Wegman (pictures shamelessly borrowed.) He has always held a special place in my heart after spending the first eighteen-odd years of my life in a house with Weimeraners. His pictures of the dogs went a long way to popularize the breed.

What really impressed me, however, was not his better known goofy pictures. Instead it was a different medium he worked on - postcards and paint on canvas. The pieces were intriguing and made me think about my own method of expression -writing. He took random postcards that he found like the ones below:

From these seemingly unconnected images he created a landscape which brought them all together in seamlessly:




With a little work, these individual pieces are melded together, and connections drawn in, and we can see one larger picture.

The building blocks of any work of fiction are scenes. If you're doing your job correctly, most everything will take place somewhere and something will happen. That's a scene. They can be a few sentences or paragraphs - a character buying a newspaper, or a pages - a climactic meeting of two enemies. The actions in these are the postcards. We fill them with characters, places and ideas that overlap. We see people interact, we see them going from place to place, and ideas come up again and again. This is the painting that ties them all together.

A work of literature, say The Great Gatsby, is made up of a couple hundred scenes. The scene where Nick realized Gatsby hasn't read any of of the books in his library, the scene where Gatsby runs over the woman, the scene where Tom talks down Gatsby. A few hundred moments in the life of the characters. In this example, we see the rise and fall of Jay Gatsby, destroyed by a society that loves his money, but will never accept him as one of their own. Every scene shows us a little more about the characters, advances the plot a little more. Different people, different times, often seemingly unconnected. But they are. All these individual moments work together to build one cohesive story.

Have you ever heard someone tell you a story and include every mundane detail, or throw in huge asides that don't do anything for the overall story? That isn't interesting or required. A well-told story does not begin with "He was born..." and ends with "...and he died." with every thing that ever happened along the way. Important events and details are given, and the rest is filled in by the reader with all the extra information they are given. If we are doing our jobs as authors, then filling in the gaps is easy.

When writing fiction, we take these scenes in our heads, often only half-formed when we begin, and we make a larger work out of them. A series of times, places, and people. Each one doing just a little and working with the others to create more than just the scenes. In The Heart of Darkness, we don't see every inch of the river, we just see a few of the stops on it. We see a series of strange and savage actions that gives us an overall picture of what that time and place was in that piece of fiction. The connections are built in how they are arranged and in the narration between scenes. After reading those hundred-odd pages, we are able to put into place the pieces that are left out. We can imagine what it would be like to travel up that river ourselves. A world is created that exists beyond those snippets.