[Note : For the purposes of this article, a ‘writer’ is someone whose artistic expression takes the form of stringing together words, and an ‘artist’ is someone in whom it takes the form of manipulating various media in an attempt to create a specific visual image. ]

As a writer, for a long time, I have envied artists. From my admittedly biased and self-centred point of view, it has always seemed to me that they have it a lot easier than us poor scribblers.

The biggest advantage they have is in convincing someone to experience their work. They can just point at their painting or sculpture and say “Hey, look at this!” and the moment people do, bam, they have experienced the art. They might love it or hate it, they might understand it or completely miss the point, they might ‘get you’ or totally misunderstand you, but damn it, they have experienced your work, so you have at least cleared that hurdle with relatively little effort.

We writers don’t have that luxury. Even the most succinct of us, the poets, have trouble convincing anyone to read our work. Reading something is just way more of a commitment than just looking at something. Looking at someone’s carefully constructed image takes a moment. Reading your friend’s poem… that takes time. Minutes! Maybe even a whole bunch of them!

Plus, the levels of involvement and intimacy are, in general, radically different between art and writing. Love it or hate it, the experience of looking at someone’s painting or sculpture will be a brief and fairly undemanding experience. It’s over fast, and for the most part, does not penetrate deeply.

But with writing, you are going to be spending time with the piece. You have to accept it into your mind fairly deeply in order to make sense of it at all, and that means that not only are you asking people for their time, but asking for access to their brain in a way that artists do not need to worry about.

And that’s a heck of a lot to ask of a person, even if they are your friend.

In our society, people are saturated with images. They are quite used to the visual medium, as it is all around them at all times, and so one more thing does not seem like much to ask of them.

But, as hard as it is to imagine for a lifelong reader like me, a lot of people barely read at all. A lot of people, in fact, consider reading anything more than a road sign to be a onerous and despicable chore to be avoided with the fervor and zeal a child uses in avoiding eating their vegetables… and largely for the same reason. At some critical age, they were forced to read, and it put them off it forever.

So not only are you dealing with asking someone to spend a fair amount of time with your writing and let you into their brain to boot, you are also facing the possibility that someone is not only not someone who reads for pleasure, but who actively avoids reading in all forms and considers it a good day when they didn’t have to read so much as a sign on a rest room door.

Obviously, you can’t spend a day without looking at things. Not if your eyes work.

Now I know that these observations are only part of the story, and there’s a lot of down sides to working in the visual medium that writers do not, in general, face.

For one, the visual medium takes a great deal of technical skill that does not come standard with a modern education. Nearly everyone in the modern democratic world gets a firm and early education in the basic skill of writing. It’s called literacy. Most people are literate. But most people can’t draw more than a stick figure.

Also, the ubiquity of the visual medium often causes people to completely devalue it. No matter how much work and talent and sheer artistic hell went into the making of an image, a lot of people will just shrug and say “So? It’s just a picture. What’s the big deal?”

The written word, on the other hand, is more valued because people can more easily see the effort involved. They might not grasp just how hard it was to get that specific shade of blue out of watercolors, but they can at least understand that writing something 1000 words long took a certain amount of time.

Still, with the provincialism of all specialists, I can’t help but envy the visual artists for the ease with which they get people to experience their craft.

And I really want to thank you all for letting me into your brain by reading this entire article!