Writing vs. Drawing
I have always been creative. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had a pressing need to make stuff up. I made up stories and worlds with stuffed animals, Legos, assorted rocks and sticks, and whatever I had. Despite this powerful need to invent, writing was not my first creative pursuit.
I started with art. Specifically sketching, I never liked painting or even coloring (we’ll hit on why in a minute) nearly as much as I enjoy grabbing a pencil and seeing what comes out of it. I drew on white paper; I scribbled in books (oops); I obliterated the side of every school assignment with an assortment of monsters and heroes and whatever else popped into my head. One time I tried to turn the various numbers (0-9 if you’re unfamiliar) into monster-ish characters and drew them chasing each other around my math work. It never seemed to go over well with my teachers, but at least I had fun. In late elementary/early middle school, I got a book or two about drawing Marvel comic characters. By 7th or 8th grade, Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z and the character art of myriad Squaresoft games converted me to an anime fan and took over my art style for good. I kept with it through high school, and then it tapered into nothing in college, and here’s why.
I am a perfectionist. From interviews with artists, authors, and other creative types, I know I’m not alone. When I look at a sketch I’ve done, a hundred people could tell me they love it, but I can ONLY see the flaws. The spots I know I messed up. The mistakes. This is reason I mainly stick to pencil—I can erase it. I’ve spent over an hour on a sketch only to erase the whole thing and start over. The minute ink touches the paper, it’s permanent—no going back. One slip of the pen and that oopsie is there until you crumple it up, throw it in the trash, and start over. Or don’t. And more and more, that’s what I did until recently. I just didn’t draw anymore. Even now, I’m back to mostly pencil. The pencil gives me near-unlimited chances to try and get it right.
Spoiler alert: you never get it right.
But I think that’s one of the things I like about writing. When I draw a picture, I am always LOOKING at it. I see the whole of what I’ve created for the duration of the process. This means every flaw and imperfection is right there, STARING at me and daring me to try and fix it. To some extent, this is true of writing. I could re-edit just about every single line in a novel any time I reread it. Every editing pass or even just a chance skimming to double-check something has me wanting to tweak words and rewrite dialogue, to scrub all the imperfections from the work because how could I possibly let something out into the world with SO MANY DAMN MISTAKES? The trick about writing, though, is this:
You can’t see your whole novel at once.
With a drawing, the whole picture is right there, but with a novel, all those mistakes or lesser words or whatever are pages and pages and pages behind you. You can’t see them. You can only see the piece you’re working on at that moment. Hopefully, you like that piece. If not, rewrite it, maybe. Or don’t. Just keep writing, and eventually, that piece will be behind you with the rest of it. And if you ever try to look at a page holistically, it’s hard for it to be visually offensive. It’s blocks of text in various shapes and sizes. If you look at a word, it’s just a word. When I type “fart,” it looks exactly the same as if you type “fart” (unless YOU type it in Comic Sans you MONSTER).
As I mentioned, I’ve gotten back into drawing lately. I’ve tried to force myself to use more permanent mediums to increase my comfort level, but the truth is that the permanence still scares me. What I HAVE gotten better at is letting less-than-perfect drawings just…be. Get them down, get them out, and then turn the page, and then they’re gone, and you don’t have to look at them anymore. And then, sometime later, if you need to, you can go back and fix, and edit, and erase, and improve. Or maybe you do need to burn some of them, and sometimes that’s ok too. The important thing is getting it out and turning the page because then you made something, and that’s more than a lot of other people can say.
