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by Broken_Hippo 2417 days ago
Yet... it does go like this. Art is similar: You cannot simply change a watercolor that much in the middle of painting, for example, so if I have some surrealist scene in my head, I need to at least have the concept laid out before starting to paint. I can do this with acrylic to a point and to a lesser point, oils.

Same thing with writing. Yes, you are literally making things up and inventing new things, but that doesn't mean that one is writing freely and not needing to edit along the way. Outlines give framework, and editing gives time to reflect and plan things that might not have been planned in the beginning. I'm not saying that no one works this way - just sits and writes, or does freehand paintings (I do this last one, even with watercolor, and accept a certain failure rate) - but how one works doesn't really reflect on their creativity nor how their creativity works.

1 comments

I would quote Frank O'Hara at this point, his poem "Why I Am Not A Painter" is a brilliant discussion of stimulus and revision across art forms.