It doesn’t matter if you make perfume, write books, play music, dance or paint, you name it, all forms of communication need some form of interruption of the story you are telling, some drama or unexpected occurrence that makes the narrative interesting and the audience curious enough to give a damn about what you made (especially in today’s oversaturated world).

And while writers have known this fact since before the Bible was created (remember Abraham and Isaac), the idea of perceiving a painting as a story with a narrative doesn’t really come that naturally. But the best artists knowingly or even unknowingly incorporate this fact into their work process and by doing so are able to create the masterpieces we all know and love.

We should all think about how the storylines of our artworks are structured. Even the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock has a narrative, albeit a much simpler one than René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des images). But observe how Magritte created drama in his famous work; the painting is no doubt of a pipe, but the artist wrote under the image, that it is not a pipe. Such a small yet genius interruption made all the difference, because it gives us a profound insight into our perception of reality with only a few pieces of information.

So, next time you work on a piece, why not stop a few times in-between and think about what your work is communicating? And if it seems to you like not much more than a mediocre painting of pipe, take a minute or two, or a day, a year if you need to, and try to create some drama inside the work. You can even leave it unresolved if you like, or give it a happy ending. The main point is, happy, sunny landscapes have their place, but are extremely boring. It’s just much more interesting if the corn fields are burning and the sky is full of UFOs.