Why Paint-by-Number Writing Never Works

Before I began putting my stories down on paper, I absolutely loved to spend long hours drawing and painting. Since both my great-grandmother and my uncle were talented amateur painters, my parents had some inkling how to encourage me. So from an early age, there were pads of paper, watercolors, brushes and even a couple of art lessons and an easel.

Then they clapped onto the idea of buying me some of those nifty new paint by numbers that were still quite popular in the early Seventies. The idea, I'm sure, was that ladling the "correct" colors into the numbered spaces would not only making painting a "masterpiece" easy, but would teach the child (or adult) creativity.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I found them horribly disappointing. The end result looked flat and lifeless, and I didn't get any real satisfaction from the dumbed-down task of coloring in someone else's drawing with someone else's choices.

Paint-by-number writing, where writers attempt to blindly follow a formula for creating marketable fiction (often genre fiction) without making it their own, doesn't work any better. Without creative choices, without that most important, least-quantifiable ingredient, love, swirled into the mix, the work comes out as flat, lifeless, and in many cases condescending as the worst of the boxed art kits. The reading audience instinctively knows when it is being talked down to, and agents and editors are particularly good at sniffing out this sin... and issuing lightning-swift rejections.

But a writer aiming for a particular marketing niche can go too far with creative choices -- so far that the painting spills far beyond the frame. That's why it's so important to read, read, read recent examples of the type of book you're writing. If you don't, you'll fail to absorb the basic audience expectations. You can bend, tweak, twist, and play with these parameters, but ignore them at your own risk.

So if you're writing toward a particular market, try to ferret out the boundaries. But paint with those distinctive colors that only you bring to the process, and don't be afraid to bump playfully, joyfully, or even defiantly against the borders of your frame.