Real and Not-Real

What Beethoven, Rembrandt, The Heroes of Telemark and playing Peekaboo can tell us about how fiction works and how to write yours.

This post is a piece of thinking aloud and not even a fully-resolved idea, but I wanted to share it with the Itch’s supporters in the hope that it’s helpful when you’re trying to figure out what you’re up to with a writing project, or feeling your way towards understanding what your kind of writing really is.

It starts with the idea that I explored years ago in full in The Desirable Difficulty of Sleeve and Paint: that part of the power of Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride is created by the tension - or rather the dynamic to-and-fro - between seeing the man’s sleeve as a sleeve, and seeing the astonishing, glittering paintiness of the paint. For the full effect you need to stand before the painting itself, but if you zoom in on a high-resolution version you can get the idea.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

More recently I’ve been thinking a lot about stop-motion animation: the Wallace & Gromit and Coraline kind of animation where physical puppets are physically moved to tell the story, and also the 2D kind made from hand-drawing or paper cut-outs. The short videos on this animator’s Instagram are a lovely example: the rabbit breathes! - but our mind also knows that his head is made of newspaper papier-maché and his ears are wire, and someone’s hands have made them, and set up a camera, and then made him move… As viewers, even as we wonder what the rabbit will do when he gets up again, we know that this is a made thing.