Artist: Jan Steen (1625/1626–1679)
Title: Beware of Luxury (“In Weelde Siet Toe”)
Date: circa 1663
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: height: 105 cm (41.3 in); width: 145 cm (57 in)
Collection: Kunsthistorisches Museum
What I love about this painting:
Jan Steen lampoons family life in this riotous scene. Mother is taking a well-deserved nap, and the family is running wild, drinking to excess and partying like it was 1599. Grandma ignores the rumpus and instead, she is lecturing the Reverend on doctrine. The house is trashed, and the dog is on the table eating the pie. The baby is playing with the mother’s pearls. The oldest daughter’s suitor is sitting with his leg over her lap is a visual nod to promiscuity. “Getting his leg over her” was slang for premarital canoodling.
Although each of the many characters and every element of set dressing is realistically depicted, we know this is not a portrayal of a real moment in the artist’s life. We are presented with a theatrical drama here, a situation that is staged and satirized for our entertainment.
The Age of the Puritan had swept across Europe and while it was waning in the mid-seventeenth century, puritanism had a large influence on life in Holland as much as elsewhere.
This painting is a wonderful visual exhortation reminding the good people to live a sober life. Steen himself was not a puritan, as he was born into a family of brewers and ran taverns and breweries off and on throughout his life. But he did need to sell his paintings as he was never a successful businessman, and his allegorical paintings were quite popular.
About the Artist, via Wikipedia:
Jan Havickszoon Steen (c. 1626 – buried 3 February 1679) was a Dutch Golden Age painter, one of the leading genre painters of the 17th century. His works are known for their psychological insight, sense of humour and abundance of colour.
In 1648 Jan Steen and Gabriël Metsu founded the painters’ Guild of Saint Luke at Leiden. Soon after he became an assistant to the renowned landscape painter Jan van Goyen (1596–1656), and moved into his house on the Bierkade in The Hague. On 3 October 1649, he married van Goyen’s daughter Margriet, with whom he would have eight children. Steen worked with his father-in-law until 1654, when he moved to Delft, where he ran the brewery De Slang (“The Snake”) for three years without much success. After the explosion in Delft in 1654 the art market was depressed, but Steen painted A Burgomaster of Delft and his daughter. It does not seem to be clear if this painting should be called a portrait or a genre work.
Steen lived in Warmond, just north of Leiden, from 1656 until 1660 and in Haarlem from 1660 until 1670 and in both periods he was especially productive. In 1670, after the death of his wife in 1669 and his father in 1670, Steen moved back to Leiden, where he stayed the rest of his life. When the art market collapsed in 1672, called the Year of Disaster, Steen opened a tavern. In April 1673 he married Maria van Egmont, who gave him another child. In 1674 he became president of the Saint Luke’s Guild. Frans van Mieris (1635–1681) became one of his drinking companions. He died in Leiden in 1679 and was interred in a family grave in the Pieterskerk. [1]
Credits and Attributions:
IMAGE: Beware of Luxury by Jan Steen, ca. 1663. Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Jan Steen 004b.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Jan_Steen_004b.jpg&oldid=617576422 (accessed November 15, 2024)
[1] Wikipedia contributors, “Jan Steen,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jan_Steen&oldid=1249713624 (accessed November 15, 2024).
I’m like everyone else. I can’t write creatively when life is too stressful. But I can always write a blog post, which is how I keep my writing muscles in “fighting form.”
The second piece of wisdom is a little more challenging but is a continuation of the first point: Write something new every day, even if it is only one line. Your aptitude for writing grows in strength and skill when you exercise it daily. This is where blogging comes in for me—it’s my daily exercise. If you only have ten minutes free, use them to write whatever enters your head, stream-of-consciousness.
Authors must overcome roadblocks in their personal life. Everyone has times of trouble, and they affect our ability to be creative. During the years I was raising my children, I had three failed marriages, worked three part-time jobs as a single mother, and struggled to find time and the energy to write.
The story is the goal; everything else is a bonus.
The well of inspiration runs dry and they quit. Many will never attempt to write again, although they will always consider themselves secretly a writer.
The first one is one I developed when working in corporate America. Frequently, my best ideas came to me while I was at my job. If your employment isn’t a work-from-home job, using the note-taking app on your cellphone to take notes during business hours will be frowned upon. To work around that, keep a pocket-sized notebook and pen to write those ideas down as they come to you.
Every obstacle we throw in the path to happiness for the protagonists and their opposition shapes the narrative’s direction and alters the characters’ personal growth arcs. As you clarify why the protagonist must struggle to achieve their goal, the words will come.
Finally, let’s talk about murder as a way to kickstart your inspiration. Some people recommend it but I suggest you don’t resort to suddenly killing off characters just to get your mind working. You may need that character later, so plan your deaths accordingly.
Artist: John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
The writer of true science fiction must know the difference, especially when creating possible weapons. Superweapons and superpowers are science-based. Think 
Magic works best when the local population in that world accepts that it exists and has limitations. When you think about it, magic should only be possible if certain conditions have been met. It should follow a set of rules.
Conflict forces the characters out of their comfortable environment. The roadblocks you put up force the protagonist to be creative. Through that creativity, your characters become stronger than they believe they are.
However, neither science nor magic can support a poorly conceived novel. Science, the supernatural, and magic are just tropes, tools we use to help tell the story. Strong, charismatic characters, mighty struggles, and severe consequences for failure make a brilliant novel.
On October 28, 2010, I was scrambling, trying to find something I could write, but my thoughts kept returning to the old man’s story. The innkeeper had referred to him as the Great Knight, stupidly brave but harmlessly insane. Had he always been that way? Who had he been when he was young and strong? Who did he love? How did Julian end up alone if the three of them, Julian, Beau, and Mags, were madly in love with each other?
I suggest writing a short synopsis of the story as you see it now. This will be as useful as an outline but isn’t as detailed. It will allow you to riff on each idea as it comes to you and is a great way to develop the storyline.
Fortunately for me, my writers’ group is made up of industry professionals, and one in particular, 
The protagonist will find this information out as the story progresses and only when they need to know it. With that knowledge, they will realize they’re doomed no matter what, but they’re filled with the determination that if they go down, they will take the enemy down, too.
The novel I intend to finish this year is set at the end of the first millennium, while last year’s effort was set in the second century after the cataclysm canonically known as the Sundering of the Worlds. This means the world is very different. The forests and wildlife have had a thousand years to rebound, and while some areas are still struggling to recover, most of the west is lush in comparison.
I live only sixty-five miles north of Mount St. Helens, so I have a good local example of how things look after a devastating event. I also can see how flora and fauna rebound in the years following it. 
When you create a fictional world, you create a culture. As a society, the habits we develop, the gods we worship, the things we create and find beautiful, and the foods we eat are products of our culture.
A hand-scribbled map and a calendar of events are absolutely indispensable if your characters do any traveling. The map will help you visualize the terrain, and the calendar will keep events in a plausible order.
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 