Archive for June, 2010
Writing as a visual art
I’ve been crafting stories before I could physically write on the page. I love words, I love the sound of words, how they look on the page–which is an entirely visceral reaction to seeing them on the page.
I am also trained as a graphic artist. I can tell you what’s so appealing about a certain piece of art to a finite definition.
Despite this, I really hate a few things about today’s trends in print. I hate when people rely on the visual to tell what’s going on in the story. When one writes, they rely on words, not the visual of those words to convey the story. I think it should be this way because when one puts “HE’S OVER THERE!” it’s not only repetitive, but it is a cop out on the grandest scale. The work of a writer is to string words together, not to make a visual composition on the page. It’s the job of the typesetter (typographer) to put the words on the page in an appealing way. That’s not the job of the writer.
I also think that when one forgoes italics and caps and bold that one is forced to make their writing stronger. When italics are used only for emphasis, it forces the writer to devise new ways of doing “thought speech”. Maybe it is the pattern of how one thinks at the other person. Perhaps there are new tags.
Maybe it is because I am classically trained as a graphic designer that I have a strong reaction to people not using the basic unit of what a writer works with… the word. I have yet to find an author that is not graphically trained that can typeset a cover decently, so why are they trying to pull tricks with their type? Why not learn and hone the art of stringing words together? That’s our art that no other art can claim from us. So I think we should learn to do this better rather than resorting to visual tricks to communicate our story.
New Gallery
I added a gallery since I tend to draw and do other things besides writing. I often also draw and do characters from the books I write. I like drawing clothes, jewelry, and designing various objects for my stories, so I thought I would post those with a few other images.