As the sitter for my two-year old, Sunny Neater never hesitated to set up elaborate games that caused chaos. Sunny was mentally prepared for the aftermath because teaching art had taught her it’s always possible to clean up.
We had things like finger paint and those big sheets of shiny paper you use for finger paint, but mostly when I was in charge, I didn’t pull out the paint. It was fun for a little bit, but Della’s “painting” usually ended up as a page full of uninteresting brown clouds. Plus, I lacked Sunny’s mess-cleaning fortitude.
I was happy that Sunny started to make a dent in our art supplies. I’d go off to work and come back to find sculptures made out of aluminum foil, weird drawings taped together in a long banner, and chubby ghosts sculpted from play dough.
Della’s finger paintings became more interesting. Instead of making representational work of urban smog, Della began to paint like Miro: three deft strokes of green, seven dots of blue, and a single circle of imperial red. I’d come home to find spare abstractions drying on countertops in the kitchen. Each stroke seemed well-placed and intentional.
One day Sunny and I had enough time at the changeover to talk. “What did you teach her that helped her produce this, or is she just doing it instinctively?”
“It’s all Della,” Sunny said. “She’s a great kid.”
She seemed content to leave it at that. I waited for more.
“How was your work today?” she asked.
“But Della used to paint scribble scrabble, a big brown blech.”
I had the feeling Sunny didn’t want to burst my bubble. She glanced away, a half-smile on her face.
“What?” I said. “What’s your secret?”
“It’s just…” Sunny shrugged. “You’ve got to know when to remove the paper.”
Della was putting her own fingers into the paint and smearing it onto the paper the same way she did when she was with me, Sunny explained. A few blue, a couple of red. Maybe a green streak or two. But forty-five seconds later, Sunny would slip the paper out from under Della and replace it with a new sheet. And repeat. And repeat. In the amount of time that I let Della paint a single sheet, Sunny encouraged her to paint ten.
In writing, we don’t have anyone sitting next to us yanking one page out and immediately replacing it with another. And so we just keep going on the same old piece. We decide we’ve got to put everything we’ve got into it, that we have to make this one essay, story or play monumental.. More blue, more red, more yellow, and before long, my artistic creation has turned into a blob that even I as the writer can’t find my way into or out of. It’s not enough for me to have the character leap over the puddle, I’ll think, let’s have him do it again and what’s more, let’s explain minutely what he’s thinking while he does it and then, let’s research the history of human puddle jumping and include some of that rich material in there and hey, what might be the future of puddle jumping, given climate change?
I don’t have someone like Sunny standing by to make the call of when a piece of writing of mine is done, and probably you don’t either. Just remember that not every piece we write requires everything we’ve got. That green streak? It may well be enough.
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