“We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone… and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something.”—Sandra Day O’Connor
For many years, I’ve considered layering in writing as a process much akin to that in the visual arts. A friend who teaches painting in Florence once described his battle to teach layering when his students were in a rush to get from the start to the finish. I thought then that the practice he explained paralleled the same one in writing. Substituting words and ideas for paint or whatever physical medium the artist is working in seemed to me then as the perfect way to create a rich, nuanced plot peopled with vivid, complex characters. But I realized along the tortuous path from the beginning to the end of a novel that the layers were not quite as I’d imagined them. I’d seen something reminding me of the ‘layers’ in a photoshop file, stacked like transparent colored sheets of glass you could see through to the sheets below, fully adjustable until you finally merged them together when you could no longer change them but would appreciate all of them affecting each other. Continue Reading
