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A long time ago, I used to draw as well as write. I took up this occupation when my oldest daughter was an infant because I was going crazy waiting on her all day. I needed something interesting to keep me busy. Writing took too much concentration and didn’t lend itself to frequent interruptions, but art was ideal. My first attempt was a portrait of the baby. It was to be a gift for my mother, and as it progressed from an approximation of a baby to a fairly creditable baby to an actual portrait, I learned a great deal about myself and about art in general.

One of the most important things I learned was that art requires a good eye. You can’t draw it if you can’t see it clearly. This is true no matter what your medium. Whether you paint in pastels or words, you cannot accurately portray what you cannot accurately see. Like the stroke of the chalk on paper, words either add to or detract from the description of truth, and one of the most frequent errors that writers make is in using the wrong word, a word that approximates but doesn’t quite catch their exact meaning. Very often, the reason is they haven’t imagined their story clearly enough to “see” the right word. Being a good observer is crucial.

Besides teaching me to see more clearly, pastels also taught me about what I call the “work” of art. Being creative and letting the impulse flow from muse to fingertips is great, but usually there is a stop along the way known as “technique” or work. Art is a construction project. To create we need brushes, paper, chalks, light, pencils, erasers, a subject, an inspiration, and the willingness to spend as many hours, days or weeks as it takes to turn that inspiration into reality. In art, we use color, line, and texture; we compare this shadow against that to see degrees of light and shade. We compare the length of this line against that to see form.

Written works are similarly constructed, but instead of physical colors and papers, our tools are words, grammar, computers, keyboards, imagination, inspiration and a willingness to work long and hard to get our book out of our heads and into the world. We construct our book using theme, motive, character, dialogue, plot, subplot, and climax. We weave emotion and action into the picture and use words as paint to illustrate our thoughts. Although we might like the whole thing to flow from mind to matter without effort, that isn’t usually what happens.

I learned one more really important lesson from my artwork—that the more you work on it, the better it gets. At one point I was pretty happy with my efforts. The baby looked like a baby; the colors were beautiful. But it bothered me that it didn’t quite look like MY baby, so I kept at it. I must have erased that little face and reworked it fifteen times. It took weeks. And then, there it was: My own baby girl on the paper. It was miraculous. Translated to the art of writing, it comes down to that old adage: writing is rewriting.

Writing, painting, sculpture, music; it doesn’t really matter. In art as in life, God is in the details. If you want your work to progress from an approximation to an incisive illustration of truth as you see it, you have to see clearly, master your tools, and work on it until it shines.

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*Deborah Greenspan is a professional writer and the publisher of Llumina Press. She is the author of several books including Spirals, The Connection, Kids' Day, The Healer, and Mirror Mirror all of which are available at www.llumina.com.