Today it’s a little like traipsing along a woodsy path—pleasant enough, but dense with fallen logs criss-crossing the way in front of you, leafy branches smacking you in the face, foggy rainy mornings sometimes lasting all day.

Strangely, you don’t mind the journey because you like being outside and you get that nature is a little wild. Then suddenly, there’s this clearing full of sunshine and blue sky and you think—oh, yeah, I’ve heard about clearings. (Not that fog doesn’t have its place or that you mind rain when it’s gentle and cleansing; even storms bring a certain excitement.) But these clearings, they’re a nice change with the shrubbery over to the side, less in your face, less trying to trip you up. It’s like you’re somewhere, rather than just hacking your way through brush, hoping for the best.

You can’t see how the path winds and turns from there, and you’re probably right in supposing there’ll be more damp leafy debris waiting up ahead—hills and valleys—massive fjords even—but it doesn’t matter because when you’re in that clearing, the purpose of the journey makes absolute sense—and in that moment, that millisecond, whatever’s up ahead only feels welcoming.

And so you continue…

Someone once explained to me that abstract art wasn’t merely a matter of blobbing paint on canvas, which, I believe, may have been my unfortunate description of it at the time. Any artist worth their pigment, I was told, would have an understanding of the fundamentals of structure, balance and light, and would have studied the classic and most difficult subject—the nude—regardless of their own unique and personal style.

It stands to reason then, I thought, that all art must have its own version of the nude, the essential discipline that provides a foundation to which the artist—whether painter, writer, sculptor, chef, musician—is anchored; the percipient vantage point from which they may let imagination take over, adding distinctive colour, texture, words, flavour and melodies.

From Shakespeare to Alice Munro, literature serves as the writer’s nude, the form we study. But merely to read, to admire the body, isn’t enough. We have to know what’s beyond the shape, the words, to look past the skin at the fundamental structures that exist in every story—the style, wordplay, rhythm, the cycle of romantic, tragic, ironic and comedic modes—to find the musculature that gives it the ability to stand on its own before it’s dressed with the details of the action, character and dialogue.

One paints the nude not merely by seeing the obvious, but by appreciating the whole while dissecting its smallest components in order to understand what makes it live, breathe and move.

As writers, reading is second nature—reading the literary nude, however, is a whole other dimension. And until we’ve mastered it, there’s a very good chance we’re simply blobbing words on paper.