Todd Nelson, Writing Like Picasso

At the parent-teacher conference, Jonathan’s mother explained the cause of his struggles with my assignments: “He writes like Picasso. When he sees a page of text, it’s like a canvas. It’s not a sequence of words to him. It’s more like a mosaic, a picture.” I thought to myself: How will I get Picasso ready for expository writing next year in high school? Writing moves from left to right, top to bottom, subject-verb-object. High school English teachers want journalists, not artists.

I had been giving this student-Picasso low grades. My instructive comments in the margins of his essays and descriptive paragraphs were not inspiring him to improve his sentence structure, awkward phrasing, illogical organization of ideas—the pedantic values of writing for in English course. Nor did he know how to make use of the model sentences and paragraphs I selected from famous writers, shared with the class to inspire unpedantic, fresh ideas. My lucid explanation of levels of generality and how to add descriptive details (“show, don’t tell”) were lost on Jonathan. He kept turning in mosaics, which I kept reading, from left to right, with difficulty. Refrigerator poetry magnets would have been more effective writing tools than pen and lined paper for him.

His dilemma made sense, once I imagined Pablo Picasso’s approach to 8th grade writing class. The artist might recognize a top and bottom to the page, but not a starting and ending point. Syntax might have more to do with texture or line, than grammar. Forget conventional spelling. Several planes or dimensions could be visible at once. Simultaneity, not sequence, would dominate, organized by a palette of words and shapes for sentences. There might be great rhythm and motion and a flow of abstraction, but not necessarily rationality or logic. Picasso’s book report would make a terrific book cover or mural, but satisfying a requirement to “summarize the plot” could be a stretch; beginning, middle and end—very frustrating. However, it would be a Picasso, after all: full of vitality, unconventionality, verve, feeling…art.

It was a difficult impasse for me and my student. For an eighth grader, Jonathan had terrific ideas, a deep understanding of words and the thoughts of real writers. He created arresting images, terrific patches of color and texture, but nothing approaching narrative or an organized, linear flow of information or detail. He saw an essay assignment, or paragraph of descriptive writing, as a block, a three-dimensional object, and, like Picasso, his writing defied the two dimensions of the page. In other words, it didn’t make sense—according to the conventions for eighth grade essayists.

Thank goodness. Helped by his mother’s analogy, I could now see that Jonathan’s writing made perfect sense—and my teaching approach did not! His writing had a cohesion and continuity of its own. In fact, I could begin to appreciate how little cohesion and continuity there was in my style of instruction, at least for a student like Jonathan. To him, I spoke a foreign tongue. I was busy teaching him to write like other people by giving him assignments to write “by ear;” he was busy sculpting and painting with words, writing “by eye.” And he was following his own muse, writing like himself. We were two writers divided by a common language, to co-opt Churchill. Jonathan was working like Paul Klee, who said that drawing was “taking a line out for a walk.”

He read like an artist too. In class discussions, he oftentimes made imaginative leaps, found connections and felt relationships in the plot that eluded classmates. It is ironic to me that he could be so adept at understanding the creative content of other writers, yet so unstructured in his own writing. Observing him made a difference to me in how I viewed the process by which his classmates were learning, or not learning. I started to understand more about an individual’s manner of organizing the meaning of language they were reading, through the language they were writing. I have come to believe that we are all either storytellers or picture makers: the fundamental way that we organize the world is by narrative, or by visual image.

Or both. John Steinbeck used to hang his paragraphs on clotheslines, like so many socks and shirts, moving them around until the writing assembled itself in a useful order. Anne Lamott writes:

. . . I took my three hundred-page manuscript and began to lay it down on the floor, section by section. I put a two-page scene here, a ten-page passage there. I put these pages down in a path, from beginning to end, like a horizontal line of dominoes, or like a garden path made of tiles . . . I walked up and down the path, moving batches of paper around, paper-clipping self-contained sections and scribbling notes to myself on how to shape or tighten or expand each section in whatever necessary way. (Lamott, Bird by Bird, 87-88).

How do you solve a problem like Picasso? Imagine a classroom criss-crossed with clotheslines, or dominoed with paragraphs! And yet, perhaps such “laundering” unlocks narrative for the picture maker, the Jonathan-Picassos attempting to organize meaning on the formidable, static, two-dimensional page.

What if his powerful images and sensitivity to relationships in the story could be expressed mosaically, in words and pictures, in a manner which the reader could logically assemble? Wouldn’t that accomplish the crux of writing? Lamott says, “an author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. . . I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.” A student makes you notice too. This young Picasso revealed more about the structure and order of teaching, and I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.

And I’m preparing for the day when I may have a student who writes like Jackson Pollock.