Drawn

I never learned how to draw.

 Which is kinda bad, because now I am in a school program with a very heavy focus on drawing, and SHOWING your drawing to other people for critique. I guess I imagined that I could be an architect without showing my drawings to anyone, or maybe that, if I went to school, things that were in my brain would just transfer their way onto a medium that others could see and understand without me using my hands, and that’s not how it is going to work, so I am going to nervously babble about it for a while with the goal of coming around to reasonableness.

I don’t want to be bad at anything, and that’s a problem. I view the pains of the learning process as failures, which they are, they totally are, but only because I am concentrating on the end goal while ignoring all the steps it takes for get there.

Here’s my process: Need to draw things, need to draw things today, need to draw things yesterday, buys pencils, buys sketch books, buys more pencils and more sketch books, reads about drawing, watches videos about drawing, buys drawing table, buys painting supplies, need to draw even more things now, writes about drawing....and here we are.

I did this for writing as well, of course. I have many unused, or barely used notebooks. I had so many such notebooks and bits of scrap with writing on them describing half baked, or over baked writing ideas that, before my third-to-last move, I sifted through and scanned everything, organised it into folders on my laptop, backed it all up on a hard drive and shredded it. I still have lots of notebooks, though, and lots of pencils. I still don’t use them, but I do write a lot now.

 Writing is something that has come easy to me, not the actual writing, just the ability. I’ve had to work hard to initiate and perpetuate the process of writing, and I still do. I have also had to give myself a reason to write that wasn’t something like “being a wealthy published author” as if it’s as easy as climbing through the wardrobe and stepping into Narnia. I always wanted to do that, by the way, I still do, and I’m still not sure if I’d come back.

I was never bad at writing; I was just bad at writing assignments. One of my worst problems with writing assignments was word count, and outlines, and topics, and writing properly structured sentences and paragraphs. I get it, I get the rules, or I did before I kind of forgot them, but they sunk in, and I know how to English. But word counts were always a problem. If I was told to write 600 words on a topic, I would tetris words together in order to not go over the word count by more than a handful of letters, during which time I would reconfigure my outline to make sure it looked as if it was for the same piece.

Outlines. I use an outline now, and it looks like this:

1)Sit your ass down and fucking write something.

2)You actually have to start writing something.

3)Write the next thing that enters your mind and keep going.

4)End when it’s done, and not after.

 This blog has been the best thing for me. I put it off for so long because I watched too many videos about monetising and niching down(or up, I really don’t know which one is better), and there’s no fucking way I can fit my writing process into something that somebody else wants, because I can’t express myself honestly if I give a flying fuck what you think when I’m doing it. I do like that you are here, in my thought collector, reading my mind, though. This is the kind of socialising that I enjoy.

One advantage that I have when writing, is that I write stories, and you can’t argue with a story, not unless you’re one of those people that can argue about anything, and if you are one of those, go get a life. I don’t know how to tell a story with a drawing unless I am drawing letters, but the muscle control is so much different, it’s wide and wild compared to drawing letters, and it freaks me out.

I shared my misgivings with my eldest, who is wildly talented artistically. They have also been to art school, but that is definitely beside the point. They told me that I need to learn to scribble with style, and not focus on the end result for a while. I broke down and cried when I read that because it reminded me that I am ALLOWED to do small things. I am actually REQUIRED to do small things. I am supposed to make a mess, I have to leave the graphite on the page, and the shavings on the floor, then clean it up, and possibly burn it all as a sacrifice to the gods of the pulp and paper industry, then buy more pencils, and do it some more.

Scribble with style. I like that. I’ll probably start with just scribbling.

And as for the wardrobe, if you know me now, I did come back.

I came back to be with you.