On Writing and Drawing

As an artist and occasional writer, I often wonder about what makes a craft. It’s in our interest to understand the process and idiosyncrasies involved, to get better at what we do, and to be able to ‘hack’ the process when necessary. This first article is an attempt at covering some ground on what, to me, are some of the more interesting elements of the mediums we choose to create with. It’s a start, and by no means covers the full extent of my thoughts, but it’s what I’ve managed to formulate so far. I chose to start with writing and drawing, because I am most familiar with these.

So what are the elements which make up these crafts? What do you have to deal with when writing or illustrating a story? What is the process? What does the artist go through? People are very reluctant to compare different forms, “It’s just not the same thing”, but my interest lies in finding patterns in things where you would typically not think there are any. So here are a some of my observations.

I. The elements of writing and drawing

Writing’s biggest trait is its continuity. That is, it has a beginning and an end. Where a drawing merely represents a moment, writing happens in time. The only way drawing can mimic this is through multiplicity, but we’ll deal with that another time. The other trait of writing is its very unique impact on each reader, because what you are transmitting must first be interpreted before being experienced: The words themselves don’t contain any information which can be sensed or felt, you derive meaning from your own experience associated with that word. And meaning is imperfect knowledge…

Transmitting meaning to someone else is a lossy process, I like to think of it as listening to a shitty song recording, compressed to a 16 kbps MP3, playing through your mobile phone speaker. We can only transmit meaning through other vehicles, such as spoken and written word, at least, until we figure out telepathy, which should remove the middle man. So experiencing writing is a two step process, which involves more thought than senses, and for that reason, I consider it to be a 2nd degree form.

How about the process of writing? Writing is sort of all or nothing. It is a form which I don’t consider very granular, meaning the smallest elements of expression you can work with aren’t that small. Even a single word might have too much meaning or carry baggage you don’t want. These are the things you have to deal with when writing. I think of it as assembling trivial meaning into greater meaning.

Sentences have a very rigid structure you have to respect—you can’t just put any words in them in the order which pleases you; it’s quite common to rewrite a sentence, just to accomodate a new word. Poetry offers a way to break out of this. It gives the author more control, at the expense of being more abstract, and I’ll talk about that later.

Writing cannot be experienced through the senses. You might appreciate typography by looking at font characters, but unless you read the words and know what they mean, you won’t get to experience anything. This is one of the reasons why I think it is harder to find flaws in your own writing. Your analytic brain is too tightly coupled with the language you use in writing. The other reason is that writing isn’t the representation of anything concrete. There is nothing to compare it to. Writing is abstract. It doesn’t exist in a meaningful way outside of our minds.

Structured thought is not to be found in nature. Writing is something you imagine in your head, it is experienced through thought. Words are only there to trigger those thoughts, sometimes combinations of thoughts which have never been experienced before. That is where the power lies.

Drawing is the artists interpretation of the world. Notice that in the case of writing, the reader’s interpretation is most important. Drawing is a 1st degree form. Drawing is about seeing things as they truly are, not how they appear to be. We tend to see things the way they make the most sense to us. I bet that if mice could draw, they would draw us with huge feet, because that is their perspective on the world. Drawing is in a way, the flip side of writing. It is not tied to language or interpretation like writing is. It just is. When you draw a chair, you must forget everything you know about chairs, and just think about the different shapes which form it.

Language is a dangerous tool, because it closes us in a symbolic world. By putting words on to meaning, we lose the ability to see meaning. When you look at a chair, what you see is not the chair, but the meaning you created or associated with the word ‘chair’. So drawing is about unlearning a lot of things, and short-circuiting the interpretation, while writing is about finding the right combination of words, which you hope, will trigger the emotion, or meaning you want to express.

In the next part, I’d like to delve into the mental process involved, and how we can hack it.