What I love about this painting:
It seems like a good time to revisit Vermeer’s famous painting, known as “the Milkmaid.” This is lovely look into the past, a window into daily life of 1657 – 1658. I love the realism, the way the maid carefully pours the milk into the bread.
All of Vermeer’s known works illustrate how the quiet moments in life can be the most profound.
Wikipedia has many things to say about this painting.
About Johannes Vermeer, the Master of Light (from Wikipedia)
Johannes Vermeer (October 1632 – December 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. He was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime but evidently was not wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings.
Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, and frequently used very expensive pigments. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.
Vermeer painted mostly domestic interior scenes. “Almost all his paintings are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women.”
He was recognized during his lifetime in Delft and The Hague, but his modest celebrity gave way to obscurity after his death. He was barely mentioned in Arnold Houbraken‘s major source book on 17th-century Dutch painting (Grand Theatre of Dutch Painters and Women Artists), and was thus omitted from subsequent surveys of Dutch art for nearly two centuries. In the 19th century, Vermeer was rediscovered by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Théophile Thoré-Bürger, who published an essay attributing 66 pictures to him, although only 34 paintings are universally attributed to him today. Since that time, Vermeer’s reputation has grown, and he is now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age. [2]
About the featured painting, The Milkmaid, also from Wikipedia:
Despite its traditional title, the picture clearly shows a kitchen or housemaid, a low-ranking indoor servant, rather than a milkmaid who actually milks the cow, in a plain room carefully pouring milk into a squat earthenware container (now commonly known as a “Dutch oven”) on a table. Also on the table are various types of bread. She is a young, sturdily built woman wearing a crisp linen cap, a blue apron and work sleeves pushed up from thick forearms. A foot warmer is on the floor behind her, near Delft wall tiles depicting Cupid (to the viewer’s left) and a figure with a pole (to the right). Intense light streams from the window on the left side of the canvas.
The painting is strikingly illusionistic, conveying not just details but a sense of the weight of the woman and the table. “The light, though bright, doesn’t wash out the rough texture of the bread crusts or flatten the volumes of the maid’s thick waist and rounded shoulders”, wrote Karen Rosenberg, an art critic for The New York Times. Yet with half of the woman’s face in shadow, it is “impossible to tell whether her downcast eyes and pursed lips express wistfulness or concentration,” she wrote.
“It’s a little bit of a Mona Lisa effect” in modern viewers’ reactions to the painting, according to Walter Liedtke, curator of the department of European paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and organizer of two Vermeer exhibits. “There’s a bit of mystery about her for modern audiences. She is going about her daily task, faintly smiling. And our reaction is ‘What is she thinking?'” [1]
Credits and Attributions:
The Milkmaid, by Johannes (Jan) Vermeer ca. 1658 [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
[1] Wikipedia contributors, “The Milkmaid (Vermeer),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Milkmaid_(Vermeer)&oldid=853243011 (accessed August 31, 2018).
[2] Wikipedia contributors, “Johannes Vermeer,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Johannes_Vermeer&oldid=854172655 (accessed August 31, 2018).
Some people call this writers’ block. I think of it as a temporary lull in my creativity.
Sometimes, the problem is that your mind has seen a shiny thing, a different project that wants to be written, and you can’t focus on the job at hand. If that is the case, work on the project that is on your mind. Let that creative energy flow, and you can reconnect with the first project once the new project is out of the way.
In my real life, getting our house ready to put on the market saps my creativity, but I am muddling along. Boxes here and there, getting rid of this and that—it’s exhausting. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to write.
When we daydream, our brain is free to process tasks more effectively.
When I begin writing a first draft, I try to approach writing each scene as if I were shooting a movie. We know that each conversation is an event that must advance the story, but it must also give us glimpses of who each person is.
Having the fundamentals of the conversation to work with sharpens the scene in my mind, enabling me to frame it properly. Once I know what they are talking about and have the rudimentary dialogue straight, I add the scenery. Then, I insert the props and add the speech tags. The interaction grows, shedding more light on their relationship.
My above sample is not perfect, as it is from the first draft of a short story I never actually finished, but you get the idea. We learn more about the characters’ relationship with each other and see their place in this environment. The layers that form this scene are:
Set dressing (the props you place in the scene) shows the immediate environment. Having characters interact with props provides opportunities to insert hints that a deeper backstory exists. However, only have them interact with props that are organic or crucial to the story. This eliminates the problem of 
By beginning with the conversation and envisioning each scene as if I were filming a movie, I can flesh it out and show everything the reader needs to hang their imagination on. The reader’s mind will supply the details of the immediate setting depending on the clues I give.
Every writer knows the backstory is what tells us who the characters are as people and why they’re the way they are. At the beginning of our career, it seems logical to inform the reader of that history upfront. “Before you can understand that, you need to know this.”
But knowing this and putting it into action are two different things.
Be aware: if you are writing from an omniscient POV, this can be tricky and lead to “
Romance novels average 50,000 to 70,000 words. In shorter novels, there is no room for sweeping, epic backstories. Instead, information and backstory are meted out only as needed through conversations and internal dialogue/introspection.
Even with all the effort I apply to it, my editor will find things that don’t matter. She will gently take a metaphorical axe to it, highlighting that which doesn’t advance the story or add to the intrigue.
In many thrillers and cyberpunk novels, the faceless behemoth of corporate greed is the overarching antagonist. It can be represented by characters who are portrayed as utterly committed to doing their job and loyal to their employer. In many cyberpunk novels, the antagonists tend to be goons-in-suits, enforcers who work for the corporation.
Level 7 is a 1959 science fiction novel by the Ukrainian-born Israeli writer 
This type of psychopathic antagonist is explored exceedingly well in George Saunders’ brilliant sci-fi short story, 
When evil is a behemoth on the order of a mega-corporation or a military coup, the villains who represent it all have reasons for their loyalty. They’re like the hero; they care intensely, obsessively about something or someone. They have logical motives for supporting what we are portraying as the enemy. Our job as authors is to make those deeply held justifications the driving force behind their story.
Artist: Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902)
Volume control is a crucial part of the overall pacing of your story. “Loud” deafens us and loses its power when it’s the only sound. However, like the opening movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, the entire range of volume can be effectively used to create a masterpiece.
Dark emotions, such as depression, can be shown through a character’s reactions to things that once pleased them. Perhaps they no longer find beauty in the things they once enjoyed.
Visceral reactions are involuntary—we can’t stop our face from flushing or our heart from pounding. We can pretend it didn’t happen or hide it, but we can’t stop it. An internal physical gut reaction is difficult to convey without offering the reader some information, a framework to hang the image on.
Conflict keeps the protagonist from achieving their goals. Significant conflicts and emotions are easy to write about. But in real life, our smaller, more internal conflicts frequently create more significant roadblocks to success than any antagonist might present.
In real life, we are drawn to certain people and get to know them better through conversations.
Good conversations and mental dialogues bring written characters to life and turn them into people we want to know, our closest friends.
Internal dialogues (rambling thoughts) are often a thinly disguised info dump in my first drafts. I seek those out in the second draft and either cut them to a line or two or eliminate them entirely. I try to avoid italics if possible, so this is how I write thoughts nowadays:
However, I have no problem understanding an accent and visualizing a character as foreign when the author consistently uses one or two well-known words that a non-native speaker might use, such as si, ja, or oui, in place of yes. Most English speakers recognize and know the meaning of these words when they see them. All it takes is a straightforward word to convey the proper foreign flavor.
The laws of grammar sometimes break down on the quantum level in conversations with our friends. This is also true of written exchanges.
Rule 3: Commas—Do not place a period between the closed quotes and the dialogue tag. Use a comma because when the speech tag follows the spoken words, they are one sentence consisting of clauses separated by a comma: “I’m here,” he said.
Conversations, both spoken and internal, light up and illuminate the individual corners of the story, bringing the immensity of the overall story arc down to a personal level.
In his book, 
Batman is a 
Apollo 13 (April 11–17, 1970) was the seventh crewed mission in the 
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 