God in the Distant View and the Detail

Photo Author's Own

Are you a detail-oriented writer, or do you prefer a broad-brush approach to your writing style? What do you draw on for inspiration?

Imagine you’ve got the window seat in an aeroplane, coming in to land.  If it’s England, you will at first see a patchwork quilt made of many different shades of green and brown (that’s if you can see the land at all for the rain clouds!) Then, as the plane descends, you can pick out roads, buildings and finally cars. 

An artist of the broad-brush variety might paint an impression of a landscape, much like seeing it from this distant view, whereas another might paint in such painstaking detail that it’s hard to distinguish from a photograph. There’s room for both approaches. I’m fascinated by how art, music and literature mirrored each other through the ages. Just think of the paintings and music of the Baroque era (detailed, orderly and harmonic), compared to the  Impressionists, where the music escaped the harmonic structures of past centuries, and the paintings gave an idea of a scene rather than a detailed depiction. 

All the arts feed into and inspire one another. I’m a great admirer of the contemporary historical fiction writer, Tracy Chevalier.  She famously used Vermeer’s painting ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ to imagine a story about a servant girl in 17th-century Delft.  She described daily life in such detail that it was like she had been there herself. In his August MTW blog, John Stevens referred to a book called ‘Golden Hill’ by Francis Spufford. Intrigued, I borrowed it from my library app, and like him, I’m blown away by the writer’s ability to imagine life and language in 18th-century New York. What a delightful romp of a book! I’m looking forward to finishing it. Other writers of fiction take liberties with the truth and reality of life in the time they are depicting, using the setting as a vehicle for their story. 

For my own novel, I’m struggling to imagine the details of life in London as a servant two hundred years ago, but I have the work of people who were there at the time, such as  Dickens, to inspire me. I can also draw on modern writers who have done the historical research around those times and places. The author of ‘The Tin Ticket’ has done exactly that, creating a semi-fictional account of what it was like to be a female convict transported to Australia. Her detailed research has given me rich pickings. 

Photo Author's Own

God is in the detail, and He is also in the distant view. Both matter - the narrow and the wide focus. I love looking at a picture that gives me a vague impression of a subject. It’s no less truthful for that. I also love one that gives me a lot of detail. As I write, I’m looking at a 20th-century oil painting by an artist called Ken Turner, bought by my parents in the 1990s.  It’s just an English hedgerow with some birds. But I love the way the painter has depicted it so realistically. People might wonder what I see in it. But that’s the beauty of creativity, isn’t it? Each of us can take away something different and find inspiration in the most unlikely quarters.