I've been following painters on YouTube for a while: Sandi Hester and Jeannine Close in particular. And I'm getting to know a few of them on Substack too (Elisabeth Theo comes to mind).
I'm in awe of painters. Particularly I'm in awe of the way they share their processes so freely. Truly, they will show you when they are painting, they will show you the notebooks, the failed attempts, the way they corrected themselves, and you can find a lot of them explaining why and how they changed things, what they are trying to do...
You can feel what being in their heads feels like. Which is such an underutilized pedagogical tool. (I could rant here about how the internet is too formal in its pedagogy but I'm trying to keep it to one topic here). Their generosity has been an ENORMOUS help in my own practice.
It's also exacerbated one of my ongoing frustration with writers.
I spend a good deal of time listening to writers talking about their work. Or rather, I'm TRYING to listen to writers talking about their work. And I guess that's the thing with writing, because it's about ideas, writers tend to speak about them rather than processes.
Which is fine and makes for interesting conversations. But it's not a great tool to learn.
In fact, as I'm saying this, I'm thinking (maybe wrongly though because I'm shooting from the hip), that writing has A LOT to learn about freeing itself from the way painters have freed themselves from form and norms.
It's very rare for a writer to share the actual process of writing: what they think about while doing the writing, why they used that word there, what they changed, how they edit... There's hardly any content online that shows that. Rarer still to see it happening live.
Recently, I was ecstatic to see Visakan Veerasamy sharing a bit about how he renamed the subtitles of his substack articles. I spend a good amount of time looking at the picture.
It seems to be the norm for painters. But there still seems to be a sort of 'cloaking' of the writing process. To keep it mysterious? I don't know, it's probably not intentional. But it sucks.