I have long accepted that being an INTP woman makes me somewhat strange. Not tragic-strange or romantically misunderstood-strange, more, out of step with ordinary social machinery.
INTP is a Myers-Briggs shorthand for someone naturally inclined toward introversion, abstraction, analysis, and an almost compulsive interest in how things fit together. In less flattering terms, it is a mind that regards a loose thread not as a nuisance, but as an assignment—useful in my work as an artist, less useful at parties.
Painting allows me to remain strange in private. I observe, arrange, imply, and let the work speak in its own language. Writing brings the arrangement to the fore. It reveals the Grand Canyon-sized gaps between what I know, what I say, and what another person can reasonably be expected to understand.
Painting is easier for me than writing.
This is not because painting is easy. It is not. Painting demands discipline, technical knowledge, patience, observation, taste, and the willingness to ruin a perfectly good oil-primed linen canvas. But painting allows me to work in the language in which my mind operates.
Writing wants me to translate. That is harder.
Painting Lets Me See First
When I paint, I begin with what is visible. I look at a face and notice the degree to which one eyebrow sits higher than the other, the turn of a mouth, the coolness at the jaw, the warmer light at the temple. I look at a sleeve and understand, through a few shifts in value and edge, how to show whether the fabric is silk, wool, linen, or, not unlike myself, pretending to be something finer than it is.
I do not need to explain any of this before I begin.
A painting can hold many conflicting ideas at once. That is my natural element. A subject may be beautiful and disappointed. A room may be gracious and oppressive. A gesture may be tender, evasive, accusatory, or all three. The viewer is coaxed to come closer and make something of it.
In painting, I can imply.
In writing, implication has to be earned.
Thoughts Arrive Connected
My difficulty with writing is that, in my mind, thoughts arrive already connected. I think in patterns and pattern recognition.
I can see the structure: the premise, the exception, the irony, and the ramifications three steps beyond the obvious conclusion.
By this point, I have usually also developed an objection to the premise, though that is perhaps another problem.
Anyway, it all seems self-evident.
When I speak, I am perfectly content to hand someone the conclusion and assume she can retrace the path for herself. She often cannot. Naturally, she cannot. I have omitted the path and then been privately irritated that she failed to take it.
Writing does not permit this. Writing requires hospitality.
The Reader Cannot See My Mind
The writer has an unfair advantage over the reader: she knows what she means. She knows why a man hesitated before entering a room. She knows that the harmless remark at a dinner table will matter two hundred pages later. She knows which memory shaped the heroine’s choice, why a sentence is funny, and why a particular detail is not decorative but fatal.
The reader does not know any of this.
She may be intelligent, observant, and entirely capable of reaching the conclusion. But she cannot follow a line of reasoning I have declined to put on the page because I found it too obvious to mention.
Writing becomes an exercise in humility when I distinguish between what is clear to me and what I have made evident.
Clarity Is Not Talking Down
For a long time, I confused clarity with over-explaining. I did not want to insult the reader’s intelligence by spelling out what she could surely understand. I called this subtlety. It was, more often, an unbuilt bridge.
I wanted room for inference, ambiguity, elegance, restraint. I wanted the pleasure of a reader noticing something for herself.
I still do.
A good writer does not drag the reader by the wrist through every emotional or intellectual development, but she does lay the necessary track. She gives the reader the detail, and the context. Then she trusts her to make the connection.
The reader should have the satisfaction of arriving at the conclusion. She should not have to manufacture the road.
Mystery Makes the Problem Obvious
A mystery depends on controlled revelation. The author knows the solution from the beginning, but the reader must be allowed to discover it at the proper pace. The clue must be visible enough to matter but not explain itself. The red herring must be plausible. The final answer must feel surprising, but inevitable.
The reader must be able to look back and see that the truth was there. She must think, Of course. I should have known. Not: Well, no one could have known that.
That is an elaborate act of hospitality. The author is making a promise: I will conceal things from you, but I will not cheat you. You can trust me.
Painting Permits Omission
Painting depends upon omission.
A hand vanishes into shadow. A line remains unresolved. The viewer supplies what is missing.
Writing has omission too, of course. Some of the finest writing is made of what has been withheld. I’m looking at you Patrick O’Brian. But a writer must know the difference between strategic silence and private laziness.
If I have not established the emotional stakes, the reader cannot feel the significance of the silence. If I have not shown the terms of a relationship, she cannot understand why a minor insult lands like a blade. If I have not built the sequence, the conclusion is unsatisfying and abrupt.
A painting can say, “Look.”
Writing must say, “Come with me.”
The Discipline of Making a Bridge
This may be why writing feels more exposing to me than painting.
A painting asks how well I see. A piece of writing asks whether I can make another person see what I see.
That is difficult. It is also good for me.