A View From the Throne… It's About Perspective

Sometimes you need to flip things upside down to understand them… right-side up.

Been working on remodeling the bathroom for the last month and a half. Long overdue, no doubt.

Just like the kitchen remodel, we took it down to the floor joists and built it back up properly. And by we, I mean my son and me.

The bathroom was kinda tricky, since it’s our only one.

And well… you know.

Laid new vinyl tile flooring, painted the walls, installed new cabinets.

And wooden chair rail and trim.

I finally hung the amazing mirror Mary bought… 14 years ago.

Don’t ask, LOL.

Anyway, the project was finally done except for hanging the artwork back up on the wall.

And that’s where the idea for this article hit me…

On the “throne,” of course.

That’s some artwork our daughter Stephanie painted for us. She created the work when Mary and I were in Little Rock for Mary’s transplant surgeries.

A beautiful handmade welcome home gift from the heart.

The technique is called “drip painting” and one way to create one is by pouring the paint at the top of the canvas. Then you let it, well, drip down the surface.

The technique expresses movement, spontaneity and fluidity over controlled, disciplined brush strokes. It was popularized by Abstract Impressionist Jackson Pollock,

I like it.

We placed them on the wall after we got home from Little Rock, but took them down when we painted the bathroom walls.

Originally, I’d hung them horizontally, like this.

But something always seemed a bit off to me.

Well, after we’d finished all the other work and a few touchups, I sat down on the “throne” to admire my work.

That’s when the inspiration hit me.

(Inspiration often happens in the… throne room, LOL.)

The old art layout still bothered me. But…

what if I was hanging it wrong in the to begin with?

Eureka!!!

Beauty… and perspective… really is in the eye of the beholder

When I first asked my daughter how to hang them, she told me there was no right or wrong way. It was up to Mary and me.

Rehanging the art for the second time was different.

First, the “environment” had changed… a bunch.

The worn out linoleum flooring, hidden by a carpet, was now adorned with a marble-like tile. The “beautiful” speckled pink (read… ugly as heck) wall tiles from the 60’s morphed into white beaded wainscoting with a glossy wooden chair rail trim.

And the dark blue wall above it was replaced with a light blue hue.

It was all more open, airy… even oceanic.

So I got out all the artwork: the two large drip paintings, a smaller square one with tracings in gold of our granddaughters’ handprints, and various decorative renditions of fishes.

When I got done rearranging, the painting and fishy décor took on a whole new look and feel. And in a very personal way, it spoke to me deeply.

At first, it seemed “unobvious.”

But sometimes, unobvious is exactly what you’re looking for.

In writing… and in life… it’s the same

Without a doubt, we live in a topsy turvy world. As writers, we’re sometimes called upon to interpret what’s going on around us.

And how we do that often… maybe always… depends on our current point of view.

Our perspective, if you will.

Sometimes it helps us become better, more honest writers if we change our perspective about the way we look at any one particular event or narrative.

Where we are in relationship to what goes on around us definitely colors our perspective. And while we may be right… what if we aren’t seeing the event or idea in its fullness?

What if we flipped the narrative upside down? Looked at the other side of the coin.

I wrote a little bit about conflicting viewpoints in the article about The Parallax. About how two people can view the same thing and still come away with different ideas on what was seen or understood.

In my opinion, if you write about something after looking at only one perspective, you’ve only done half the work. Your writing will be incomplete… at best. Particularly on national and world events.

Turning it upside down…

It begins with your research on a topic. You won’t necessarily find an opposing view. But often you’ll find the angle that nobody’s talking about.

If you use a GPT as a research assistant, you can build that into your prompt. For example, I have a research criteria prompt creator I use to vet the type of content research I want to find.

It’s called my Research Methods & Guidelines.

Baked right into that prompt creator is the “unobvious” angle:

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Non-Obvious Insight Discovery

• Look beyond surface-level information to uncover hidden connections and counterintuitive truths

• Identify what authoritative sources aren’t saying - the gaps, assumptions, and unspoken realities

• Challenge conventional industry wisdom with real-world field experience

• Connect disparate concepts that technical documentation keeps separate

• Recognize the difference between “how it’s supposed to work” and “how it actually works”

• Find the insights that only 36+ years of hands-on experience can reveal

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And while this works pretty well for artificial intelligence, I challenge you to take it one step further and use it for yourself as a human.

Don’t be satisfied with taking things at face value.

Sometimes you really do need to…

turn things upside down to understand them right side up.

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Coming up next week (yeah, I’m back in the saddle again… finally):

Along with authentic research, you really need to write authentically, too.

So I’ll be starting a series on finding your authentic writing voice and what “voice” really means.

Talk to you then!

Steve M.

P.S. Oops… my bad. I left you hanging, didn’t I.

Here’s how the artwork arrangement finally landed. Two parent (or grandparent) fishes and their school of young’uns, swimming amongst the “right-side up” sea grasses. :)

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Hey, I’d love to hear your process for researching a topic.

Do you check out the various angles, including the unobvious ones?

Or do you stick with just one, obvious even mundane point of view?