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Kamila Zeman Miller

The Sun Room

I'm working on creating a new space for my house under the deck, a sun room with a concrete floor painted with vines and a golden medallion. It'll have a tin roof so the rain makes music. The walls will be windows. It'll be full of plants that I can water with the hose because it'll just drain off to outside space. It'll have my father's easel that he made with his own hands, and a sewing table, and a big mirror on one wall. Shelves will hold painting supplies and art books. It'll smell green and wet and the wind will whistle through the cracks, and it'll be cold but not freezing in the winter, and hot but not boiling in the summer. The sun room will be a half-tamed living space, not quite indoors, not quite out, where the seasons will always touch me.

Sometimes I can't contain myself, and I certainly don't want you to contain you. Let's talk about writing, painting, whatever.

Writing has helped move me from a blob of meat to a place where I have a soul. Painting has brought me back to the meat, reminding me that what I do with my hands is just as vital as what I create in my mind.

I've thought a lot about the comparisons between painting and writing. There are more similarities than you'd expect in the processes. I invite you to play with some of these ideas with me.

I try to work with many elements to create a complete work. In writing, great dialogue, or wonderful descriptions of setting, or deep, insightful narration, or intense action can't stand alone. It's better to weave these elements together. In painting I try to weave composition, color, detail and saturation/hue.

In both arts I try to find insightful and constructive feedback.

I try to continue to learn, expanding my skills by instruction and practice.

I keep exploring outside my comfort zone.

I try to commit myself to projects that I'm passionate about.

It's best to work with a variety of emotions. Some projects or aspects of projects make me laugh, cry, feel anger or caress me into a state of bliss while others frustrate me or make me feel reflective or meditative. If I focus too much on one emotion and I wind up wallowing.

In painting instructors often caution students against making mud. In writing, instructors talk about something becoming overworked. It's the same problem. Mess around in one place too long and all the color and contrast and vibrancy of your work gets muddled into a brownish gray. Try to polish and refine with a light touch, or just start over rather than mucking about until the page is worn through.

Don't 'pet' the page. Petting in painting is a reference to hesitant strokes rather than committing to a direction and strength of movement. Instead of creating a line with a single motion, it's petted and cajoled into existence by multiple passes and erasures. In writing, the author toys endlessly with the language instead of reaching into the heart of a scene. A symptom of writing via petting is the presence of an open thesaurus and a list of saidisms.

There are other comparisons. I challenge you to find them. Think about detail, perspective, and communication with audience among other things. Have fun!

An epic adventures isn't born from a daunting challenge. It requires an indomitable will to meet that challenge. When I write I like to write characters that won't give up, or if they start to, they have good friends that inspire them to keep going. I love writing about friendships, and beautiful places, and people who are in conflict because they have an equal amount of passion for opposite aims, and both are a little bit right, and a little bit wrong. I like writing about evil, accepting its existence without judgement, and fighting it to the bitter end.

Writing has always been for something. I think it's important to figure out what you're writing for. Each project is for something different, and sometimes what that something is isn't on the page, but in the lines between, where my heart peeks through.

I don't try to be who I am. I try to be who I want to be.

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