September Shorts: When to Stop

When my little girl was three or four we did a lot of painting. Here's what happened. She'd start carefully, holding a brush in a tiny fist and slashing a colourful line across the page. Then a second and a third. It'd be looking pretty good.

Then she'd go back for more paint, splotching blue, red and yellow together; more lines, blocks of colour bleeding into each other. She'd add some black, throw some more purple down. The paper would begin to soak and wrinkle. Eventually every painting ended in the same place: a deep brown splat, utterly indistinguishable from every other splat she'd produced.

Art is as much about knowing when to stop as it is about knowing how to start. As much about what you leave out as what you put in. Guess that goes for stories too.