I don’t know about others, but I can’t just sit down and write a story. And I don’t mean that I need to do what most people talk about – plan a story with 3 acts, character biographies, fresh and detailed worlds, conflict, climax, resolution etc etc. No, I mean I need to feel the story before I can write it.
Instead of words, I start with sketches. Characters emerge on the page as I’m sketching lines and contours. It doesn’t take much – a couple of curves, a few marks for eyes and a nose, and my brain is engaged, much like, I imagine, a sculptor may be as they respond to the changing shape of the stone that sits otherwise inanimate in front of them.
As someone who admires writers, this often feels like a failure. Shouldn’t I just be able to use words to imagine and create these worlds? But then, occassionally, I come across others who seem to work like me; people searching for an image that gives them the ‘essence’ of the story (as Hayao Miyazaki says in the documentary 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki).
Searching for the essence of a story through drawing has always felt like a hack – a band-aid solution that masks my inability to write well – but I’m becoming more comfortable, day-by-day, in finding my story through marks of pencil on paper, which, at the end of the day, is what a writer of words is doing anyway.