Why I write, rather than draw

I saw a piece of art in a restaurant the other day that reminded me of why I am a writer and not an artist. The artist had created a bit of naive, folksy art, a clock in a glass box surrounded by an abstract miniature of a pier: bits of wood shaped and colored into planking, hand-carved seagulls and a small painted life-ring, all wrapped in twine in ways that suggested the ropes and lines of sailing vessels. The background was the appropriate blue and white.

If I had tried to make something like that, I would never have finished it. I wouldn't have seen the picture that I had made. I would have seen all the bits: the pieces of wood that I bought from a hobby store for a few pennies, the line of twine from a five&dime. I would focus upon the mistakes: the visible nicks, the places where the wrapped twine wasn't even. I would have angsted over the choice of font for the face of the clock.

When I write, I'm reminded of a quote by the rock star Sting: "I never finish a song. Eventually, I abandon it." I feel much the same way about my writing. I never finish a story. I write a story and decide if it has at least a complete plot with a denouement of some kind, and then I twiddle with it. Over and over again. Eventually, I abandon it. If it's complete, I let it sit for a while, then revisit it one last time six months later to try and catch every typo, and then I post it.

Sometimes I post it too soon. I found three typos in the Separate stories (Separate Electricities, Separate Responsibilities, and Separate, Together) and I'll upload the bugfixes later today.

When I draw, I don't see the face, or the room I'm drawing, or the building facade (when I'm outside I especially like to draw building facade's, as they're usually easy and have fascinating plays of light and texture). I see the lines. I see the mistakes. I see the places where I've marred the picture and debate giving up. I rarely finish a drawing.

I'm looking at my complete Journal Entries collection, all 346 episodes, a ridiculous number of which are labeled "incomplete," and I know that someday I might actually finish those. The only reason I'll finish those is because the delete button on a computer is absolute, and I can always start over. I know I can produce a thousand words faster than I can draw a picture. Whether other people will get it quite so acutely is still something I can't answer.

Where Ideas Come From, Part CXXXVI

I've often considered it a failing of mine that I can't draw. It's not that something that comes naturally to me. I see the world in terms of shapes, colors, perspective, but that sort-of comes naturally, so much so that it's hard to translate to the page. Instead, I believe I see the worlds in the terms I least understand, because those are the terms that I spend the most time thinking about: the motivations, especially the romantic motivations, of other human beings.

I've often wondered if other people have ever made this connection: artists make art about that aspect of the human condition they least understand. To me, the fact that people find one another and stick it out together, especially when there is no particular reason for them to do so, fascinates me, and so I write about it, circling the subject, taking it apart and putting it back together again, asking myself, "Does this make any sense at all?"

I think that's one of the reasons why science fiction appeals to me as a setting: aliens and robots have different motivations from human beings, and I get to put humans and xenos into the same room. The xenos let me take away something that is usually found in the human character and then I get to ask myself and the reader, "Is this still human enough to make the story work?" That's also why I have more women than men in my stories: men are easy to understand, women not so much. Although as I and my peers get older, that seems to be changing: the women are becoming easier to grasp (in more ways than one), the men less so.