Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
To think creatively, to invent new things, to see new patterns, we need to turn things upside down, on their heads and have a fresh look.
You can learn about writing by studying the masterpieces in art because every masterpiece, whether it’s a piece of music or literature or visual art, has essentially the same ingredients.
I learned how to write by going to art school and becoming a visual artist. Color, light, perspective, scale—I use these same visual tools in my writing. But of all the practices I use as an artist, the practice of using objects has helped my writing most.
TV is no longer the second cousin to film; in many ways, it’s become the higher art form. And to a great extent, television has become society’s barometer—it shapes and tells us more about who we are than almost any other medium.
The responsibility to organize what we see, to take the randomness of life and reconstruct it into a new form that has meaning, lies squarely with writers and other creative people (scientists and mathematicians alike).
What is the function of the artist and writer in a troubled society? What is our role in these uncertain and precarious political times?
Most writers I know have amazing verbal skills. They became writers because they fell in love with reading books. But as Joseph Conrad suggests, writers are equal parts visual artists. We paint pictures with words.
Almost everything I know about character development, I learned by studying the portraits of Alice Neel, who painted portraits in the mid-20th century at a time when the art world considered portrait painting nearly irrelevant.
The information age has left us mired in details. Unable to see the big picture, we suffer from shortsightedness. We can’t discern the connections between actions and consequences, or recognize the pattern that shows we are all connected as one.
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