On Depicting an Apple
And asking how each artistic choice contributes to the overall effect
“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.” —Flannery O’Connor
Recently, over dinner with a friend who is also a story creator, the question came up: is storytelling an innate ability that we all have, or is it actually really hard to do?
My answer was immediately: both/and!
My analogy is that it’s like depicting an apple. If asked to draw an apple, most of us could probably grab the nearest scrap of paper and writing instrument and sketch a recognizable apple. Many kids in a kindergarten class could probably do this.
But could most of us paint an apple that should be hanging in the Museum of Great Apple Paintings, however we might define and curate such a collection? That would be harder. That could require a lot of trial and error, and take years to achieve, especially if we were trying to make an apple painting that felt uniquely our own and expressed something deeply meaningful to us.
And I think it’s similar for crafting really compelling stories.
If we’re asking ourselves what belongs in a Museum of Great Apple Paintings, or in our own mental library of the best stories we’ve encountered, it will probably go beyond depicting a recognizable apple or a story being about a series of plot points. It will be about the depth and artistry with which all of this is pulled off, about a seemingly infinite series of choices about how exactly to fill the canvas or the pages.
This is what I try to remind myself of when it’s taking a long time to write a story.
If I was trying to paint an apple that I thought was worthy of inclusion in a Museum of Great Apple Paintings, I would need to think hard about how each choice I was making contributed to the overall effect.
What do I want to highlight about my apple? Do I want it to capture the colors of an autumn harvest or the way the light falls through the kitchen window on a sunny morning? Do I want it to evoke the bruising and decaying of a body? Deconstruct it to emphasize the arbitrariness of category labels like “apple”? Play with it to subvert the logo of a popular tech brand and poke fun at pop culture?
I’ll have to decide what size canvas to use and what type of paints. I’ll have to create a color palette. And on and on. I’ll have to decide where I want the apple positioned and how much of the canvas I want it to take up, and what I want surrounding it within the world of the painting. Knowing that I’m painting an apple is just the first of many steps.
It could take years to build up the technique to produce an image of an apple that matches the most exciting visions I can conjure in my mind. Or to learn and innovate on the styles of other paintings I’m really drawn to.
And even once I’d developed a style, a painting might go through lots of “ugly baby” phases. I might start with sketches in a notebook. The lower layers of the canvas might be large scale color and shape blocking or marked up with grid lines. I’d have to trust that I could build it up layer by layer, ending with the more spectacular and fine-grained detail at the top.
For me, writing a story feels similar. Trying to write it sequentially, from start to finish, would feel like trying to fill a canvas by painting the left-most inch, then the next inch to the right, then the next, one stripe at a time. It makes much more sense to my brain to build the story up layer by layer, even if it’s mostly basic shapes and character arcs at first — perhaps a super rough sense of beginning, middle, and end, and the word count that I’m hoping to fit all this in — with more interesting fine-grained details and polished prose coming in later drafts.
In this analogy, emotional superstructure functions like a thumbnail image. It’s what I would want my painting to look like if someone walked in and saw it from across a long gallery. What overall composition, coloring, et cetera would I want to first hit their eye? What overall character, journey, and stakes would I want them to remember about my story after completing it?
Having those key elements captured in a single sentence — that can evolve at any time, of course — gives me a quick reference point whenever I’m stuck and trying to think through the solution to some smaller piece I need to create for the story. I can ask what it’s contributing to that overall whole and that usually gets some ideas going for how to best fill in the details I still need.
Let’s say I was trying to write a story about a woman who needs to pick up her dry cleaning on time because she’s been dropping a lot of balls lately and if she doesn’t get the outfits for their vow renewals before the cleaners close for the long weekend, her partner will conclude that she’s no longer invested in their relationship and gently end things for both their sakes.
This isn’t just a story about picking up dry cleaning. If we were just watching a character go through the steps of that, we would probably get bored pretty fast. The stakes set the vibe. And knowing what the stakes are, the early drafts of this story can simply be about brainstorming answers to all of the questions that arise from this scenario.
What other balls has she been dropping and when did this start? How many times have they talked about this as a couple and how do those conversations usually go? How invested is she in this relationship? How will her life look different because the events in this story happen? How does each event move her closer to or farther from her goal, whether that’s to stay in the relationship or get out of it or even figure out how she really feels? Where does she start from, home or work? What could each of these locations be doing to inform our understanding of the whole situation? Does she find herself dawdling more and more as she gets closer to the cleaners because every jerk who yells at her in rush hour traffic reminds her of her partner?
I could even end up changing dry cleaning entirely if a different errand better dramatizes whatever interests me about this relationship dynamic.
All of this is just to say that if you’re stuck on any part of a story, try articulating that story’s big picture character, journey, and stakes, and then asking how the part your stuck on helps us understand an important piece of that whole. If you’re filling in the details on one part of the apple, how are you hoping that section of the painting contributes to the overall effect you’re going for? That really zoomed out thumbnail sentence can be your guide, helping you break up the early work into smaller pieces and reminding you why each piece ultimately matters to your story.
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