I don\u2019t remember exactly when or where I saw Stephen Sondheim\u2019s musical, Sunday in the Park with George. It was most likely at the Seattle Rep in the late eighties or early nineties, but I\u2019m unable to fact check that at the moment. Maybe one of my SERs (sharp-eyed readers), the folks who are always happy to notify me of typos appearing in my books or blogs, can step in and track that one down for me.<\/p>\n
Be that as it may, I did see the play. It recounts the history of a guy named Georges Seurat, a post-impressionist painter from France. He was born in 1859 and died in 1891. Until I looked him up just now, I had no idea he was only 32 when he died. The fact that he passed away at such a young age may well have been an important component in the plot of the play. If so, it went right over my head. My takeaway from seeing Sunday in the Park was something else entirely.<\/p>\n
Seurat\u2019s preferred art form is called pointillism, which is to say, he painted with tiny dots of pure color. For him, every image consisted of literally thousands of individual points of paint, placed on the canvas without mixing any of the colors together. That way, the mix of color happens in the viewer\u2019s eyes rather than one the canvas. One of the major pieces of music in the play is a song called “Putting it Together.” I believe the Seurat character sings the song as a means of explaining what he was doing to an umbrella carrying young lady in the park. (As far as I know, his various portraits of the Umbrella Lady are considered to be his most iconic paintings.)<\/p>\n
I trust you\u2019ll forgive me for not remembering many of the play\u2019s plot details, because the moment I heard the song \u201cPutting it Together,” I was too gobsmacked to pay attention to the story. Instead, once I heard the words, I sat in the theater covered with goosebumps and completely thunderstruck by the realization that I do exactly the same thing. I don\u2019t create paintings by putting thousands of individual dots of color on a canvas. I tell stories with my kind of paint\u2014by keyboarding thousands of individual words into my computer.<\/p>\n
I always thought that somewhere in the song the singer made mention of starting with a piece of sky. But I googled the lyrics just now, and no mention of the word \u201csky\u201d is anywhere to be found. I\u2019ve tried adding the link to this post, but it doesn\u2019t work. If you look it up yourself, be sure you\u2019ve got the Stephen Sondheim version of the lyrics. When you read through them, you\u2019ll see that the song isn\u2019t only about putting colors on canvas. It\u2019s actually about creating any work of art\u2014a book, a painting, a musical comedy, a play, a statue. You do it bit by bit, one piece at a time, and that\u2019s what I\u2019m doing this week\u2014I\u2019m putting the first points of color into the next Ali book.<\/p>\n
When an artist painting with oils screws up a canvas, he or she can use Gesso, a paint that reconditions the canvas by erasing everything that was there before\u2014an artistic version of what used to be every secretary\u2019s best friend–old-fashioned White Out. My personal Gesso is the delete key on my computer keyboard. Actually, that\u2019s not quite true. When I first started writing I belonged to a writer\u2019s organization called Seattle Freelancers. Betty McDonald was gone by then, but her surviving sister was a member in good standing, and she told us more than once that the most important thing Betty had taught her about writing was this: Never throw anything away.<\/p>\n
When it\u2019s time to Gesso something in a manuscript, I cut and paste it and move that passage or passages to my \u201cExtra file.\u201d After all, there must have been a good reason for my writing it in the first place, and maybe there\u2019ll be a spot later in the manuscript where this bit or even tiny pieces of it will fit back into the story.<\/p>\n
This week, while writing the Prologue for Collateral Damage, the next Ali Reynolds book, I met a character I\u2019d never encountered before, an airport shuttle driver by the name of Hal Holden. As I said, this was the first time I met him, and as soon as he started telling me his life story, I started liking him more and more. Unfortunately, by the end of the Prologue, he\u2019s been in a terrible traffic accident and is on his way the the ICU. Is he going to make it? I don\u2019t know because I have yet to get to that particular bit.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, I\u2019ve got 15,512 words that feel like they\u2019re going in the right direction. 79,488 to go.<\/p>\n
Or, as someone else once told me, \u201cBy the inch it\u2019s a cinch.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don\u2019t remember exactly when or where I saw Stephen Sondheim\u2019s musical, Sunday in the Park with George. It was most likely at the Seattle Rep in the late eighties or early nineties, but I\u2019m unable to fact check that at the moment. Maybe one of my SERs (sharp-eyed readers), the folks who are always […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[148,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ali-reynolds","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-CK","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2402"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2404,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2402\/revisions\/2404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}