Dream Artist - the Premise of the Story

I touched on an early blog about my difficulties in writing the Dream Artist (DA). I thought I would expand on this, looking at the underlying issue and a way forward.

To say I will be happy to finally be done with DA is an understatement. This book has been one of the most difficult for me to write. I realise now part of the problem was the rules I set myself in writing this novel.

I started it on Christmas night 2013. The inspiration came to me as I lay awake in my parent’s house contemplating the portrait ‘Dream’ by Vittorio Matteo Corcos in the book ‘Some Call in Kitsch,’ that had stood on one of houses many bookcases for years.

I had used another Corcos portrait- Paolina Clelia Silvia Bondias my visual model for Cassandra one of the main characters from a previous manuscript - Cassandra.

Wouldn’t it be fun to write another book, I thought? I had spent the previous few years achieving an MBA in Procurement and with all the time spent in studying and writing essays now vacant I returned to writing again. I set myself a challenge that night while reviewing the portrait. I would write a book with two rules.

1. Each character in my new novel would be based on a portrait from a famous artist.

2. The reader would first encounter the character in the pose they struck for their portrait before that scene would dissolve.

For my main character I selected a young Rembrandt self-portrait. For his psychiatrist I selected Dr. Gachet, for Rembrandt’s love interest, the portrait – Dreams. Billy Boy from William Dobell became Rembrandt’s supervisor, and so on. I set the story in Melbourne 2012.

The actual story from each of these portraits infused the story. The rules gave DA it’s quirky character but also led to structural problems.

As the second independent reviewer for DA noted, it was disconcerting placing Rembrandt, as well as number of well-known historical characters such as Dr. Gachet, in the in the middle of modern-day Melbourne.

I had a twist at the end of the book which explained this, but with this not telegraphed earlier, or at least not in an obvious way, most readers would give up at the incoherence of it all.

I’m now left with needing to break the rule I set for myself in the first drafts. I’m turning Rembrandt into Remy Remington Dr Gachet to Dr Gach. Echoes of their famous equivalence will remain, but they will have new names, hopefully that will change the dynamics of the novel.

Another issue noted by the second independent reviewer was the difficulty in believing Rembrandt as an artist. Rembrandt is the narrator of his story and there is very little descriptive passages one would normally associate with a painter. In the course of editing, I stripped away many descriptive passages and flights of fancy, that denoted Remy’s artistic perspective.

Also, in my description of the portraits as they first appeared, I tended towards literal and concrete description. Unfortunately, this coloured the entire manuscript. And the word coloured I used over 20 times.

As a counter to this I’ve read: ‘The Horse’s Mouth’ by Joyce Cary and seek to make my first-person narrative more dreamlike in descriptive passages. Make him describe the world as a painter would. Unfortunately I didn't find The Horse's Mouth a book I enjoyed or wished to emulate.

I will seek to loosen the language in the next draft. Make Remy more dreamlike in his view of the world.