Back to the drawing bored

There are times in life when I wish that writing were a lot more like drawing. We all knew those kids who figured out, through some combination of innate talent and a willingness to ignore their teachers, how to touch pencil to paper and bring something to life. Or at least how to doodle something recognizable.

Every school had those kids. In my school, they were easy to find: they were every kid who wasn’t me.

I wanted to draw. Well, no. I wanted to be good at drawing, without having to draw much to get there. In this way, for a long time, drawing was precisely like writing.

However, writing was forced upon us kids much more than drawing was. I never had to draw a five-paragraph analysis of “A Tale of Two Cities” without reading it. In my quest to be good without the drudgery of practice, I wrote the bare minimum in every one of those five-paragraph essays, and I always wrote it with single-digit hours to spare. But I learned very quickly how to make it look like I was a good writer.

Looking like a good writer is simple:

1. Use dialogue tags and quotation marks correctly. This should be easier than it apparently is: “They should be used just like they are in every published book and competently proofed newspaper you’ve ever read,” I say.

2. Use a single format. I remember peering over at my classmates’ papers to see how much better than them I scored, and it struck me that their C grades had something to do with how their papers looked like archaeological excavations – different typefaces from one paragraph to the next, inconsistent spacing, arbitrary sentences in 14-point font. You could tell which strata Vince’s dad typed up on his work laptop, and which Vince pulled off the nascent internet, and it got real suspicious real fast when he started citing sources halfway in.

That’s it. That’s all I did to look like a good writer clear into graduate school. Teachers had to be so weary of commas floating outside of quotation marks (when there were commas at all) that they never actually read my papers. They let their eyes go soft, blurry, turning my consistent indentation into an impressionist masterpiece for a blissful moment before pouring two more fingers of scotch and marking up the next poor sap’s abomination of an analysis (that, more often than not, didn’t even have paragraphs).

I know no such way to fool anyone, let alone hardened graders, with my drawing, ahem, abilities.

This is how hard it is for me to draw: I sat down and contemplated writing this very piece using entirely with hieroglyphic-inspired images, like the Wingdings fonts, but custom-doodled. You know, just to do something different and give my editor a break from proofreading.

But then the self-judgment squiggle gremlin locked me up, and so I stalled on drawing by writing – the very thing I used to procrastinate from doing! 

True, I still procrastinate from writing. I once performed self-surgery on a wart, using my non-dominant hand, to put off writing. I’d rather excavate a blemish from my own body than write, and I’d rather write than draw. That is the severity of my drawer’s block.

If my drawer’s block had a face, it would not look like the image on this page, because I cannot accurately translate any of my thoughts into visual mediums. But if we call this rendering “abstract,” maybe I’ll get a pass.

You will notice the face of my drawer’s block has beady black eyes. This is because eyes convey expression, which I am unable to harness the moment I let my eye-drawings get to be anything more complicated than black beads. 

You will notice too that the face lacks hands despite going all the way down to some feet. This is because hands are notoriously difficult to draw well, or at all. This face’s hands are abstractly buried deep in its abstract fur. But I included toes, because those look so weird even on real people that they are valid no matter how they fall out of my pen.

Anyway. My therapist says, if not to me then probably to someone, “You need to spend more time being bored.” That’s the headspace I need more of if I want to learn to draw, even if only for my own enjoyment. It sounds like a good idea, at first – but that’s only because she says it using correct dialogue tags.