How Being an Artist Shapes My Fiction Writing

The blank paper stares back at me. Empty. Waiting.

But here's the thing about staring at blank surfaces: whether it's a sketchbook or a cursor blinking on a white screen: you learn to see what isn't there yet. You learn to trust the process of making something emerge from nothing.

This is where my fiction starts. Not with plot outlines or character sheets. With the artist's eye I've spent years training to see beneath surfaces, to catch the moment when reality tilts just slightly off its axis.

The Eye That Sees Everything Wrong

In my teens, I spent hours hunched over graphite studies, frustrated that my lines weren’t matching the shadows in front of me. A mentor said something that rewired my brain:
“You’re drawing what you think is there, not what you actually see.”

I was encouraged to stand up and walk around my subject. To study it from all angles, not just the one I could see. That lesson didn’t stay in the studio.

When I write threshold fiction, stories that sit between the known and the uncanny, I’m using that same trained perception. The discipline of looking closely. The ability to notice subtle distortions. The instinct to trust what feels visually “off,” even if I can’t articulate why.

The moment in Reality’s Endgame when Bianca realizes her reflection is moving independently came from years of studying how mirrors lie. Artists know that reflections are imperfect, haunted things. Fiction just lets me push that wrongness until it breaks.

Structure Before Beauty

Here's what art school beats into you: composition matters more than small details. You learn to see the skeleton beneath the skin, the underlying architecture that makes everything else possible.

This translates directly into how I approach narrative structure. Before I worry about beautiful prose or clever dialogue, I'm thinking about the anatomy of the story. How do the scenes connect? Where are the weight-bearing elements? What happens if I remove this section: does everything collapse?

Visual artists work from multiple angles, constantly stepping back to see the whole. Writers should do the same. I'll write a scene, then "step back" and examine it as if it's a painting. Is the emotional weight distributed correctly? Are the visual elements working together to create the intended mood? Does this scene serve the larger composition?

The Physiology of Seeing and Writing

There's something most people don't realize about artists who write: we've literally rewired our brains to process visual information differently. Years of training your eye to catch subtle variations in color, shadow, and form creates neural pathways that enhance pattern recognition across all mediums.

When I'm writing, I'm not just imagining scenes: I'm constructing them with the same attention to lighting, atmosphere, and visual flow that I'd use in a painting. The result is prose that doesn't just describe; it evokes. Readers don't just understand what's happening; they feel the weight of the air, the quality of the light, the texture of unease.

This is why my fiction tends toward the unsettling. Artists learn early that beauty and comfort are two entirely different things. The most powerful visual art often makes you slightly uncomfortable, forces you to see familiar things in unfamiliar ways. I apply that same principle to narrative.

Drawing from the Masters of Unease

My studio walls are covered with artifacts and images most people would find unsettling: ethically collected animal skulls, anatomical diagrams, fragments of old medical illustrations. They’re not decorations. They’re research, tools I use to understand form, tension, and the thin line between the familiar and the uncanny.

When I was building the emotional landscape for The Banished, I wasn’t looking at traditional fantasy references. I was studying the visual language of isolation: the way a lone figure feels in a vast space, how negative space can swallow a body, how scale can make a person appear fragile or insignificant. I pulled from my own drawings, old sketches, and the compositions that have always fascinated me those where the environment itself feels like a silent antagonist.

The influence moves both ways. Sometimes I make visual art specifically to solve a story problem. I’ll sketch a character repeatedly, changing small details—posture, tension in the jaw, the weight of the gaze—to track how their inner world is shifting. Drawing through their unraveling helps me write it. Sometimes I sculpt an object from a story just to feel its physical presence, to understand the texture of a world that doesn't technically exist.

These acts aren’t side work. They’re how I think. How I observe. How I translate the unsettling into narrative form.

The Artist's Relationship with Control

Here's what years of art-making teaches you: you can plan, sketch, and prepare all you want, but the moment you start creating, the work takes on a life of its own. Your job becomes less about imposing your will and more about responding to what emerges.

This has fundamentally changed how I approach plot. I don't force my characters through predetermined actions. Instead, I create the conditions: the world, the conflicts, the psychological pressures: and then watch what happens. It's the same process I use when painting: establish the structure, then let the piece evolve.

The result is fiction that feels genuinely unpredictable, even to me. My characters surprise me the same way a painting sometimes develops in unexpected directions. This isn't lack of control: it's a different kind of control, one that trusts the process over the plan.

Where Art Ends and Story Begins

The boundary between my visual art and my fiction isn't a line: it's a threshold. Sometimes I'll start with a sketch that becomes a character. Sometimes a story will demand to be painted before it can be written. The mediums inform each other, push each other toward stranger territories.

My readers often ask where my ideas come from. The answer is everywhere and nowhere. From the way light falls wrong across a familiar room. From the moment when you catch your reflection doing something you didn't do. From art that makes you look twice, makes you question what you thought you knew.

The artist's eye sees fractures everywhere. Fiction just gives me the tools to explore what lives in those cracks.

Step into the spaces between what you see and what you know. Start reading today.