I started drawing before I began creative writing. I suppose that is the same with anyone, if they ever much get to creative writing. I make a distinction, though, between crude children’s drawings and when something sort of clicked in me, and I was trying to make a real effort. It happened when I was very young, somewhere around ten or eleven years old, and I saw a superhero comic drawn by my friend. Something about it just hit me, something in the aesthetic, the colors, and the fact that there were multiple panels telling a story. Yes, I had been exposed to professional comics and super heroes, but something about seeing my similarly-aged friend doing it sort of opened my eyes to the obvious – I could do it, too.
This was still crude, of course, and I had had no formal training or exposure, but I took some spiral notebooks, drew simple lines to divide each page into a landscape field of four relatively equal sections, and I began drawing a story. I was creative writing with pictures. And the funny thing is that I didn’t do any talk or thought balloons. It was all without words as dialogue or narrative; everything was told through the pictures.
I also ripped off movies. I suppose this is also pretty natural in the development of most creative people – they begin through imitation. I drew out the complete film Raiders of the Lost Ark. I also drew a James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me, I think it was (I’ve always loved that one). I guess I was story-boarding with no concept of what that was. It was fun, though I got in trouble for it on at least one occasion when my grade-school teacher got on my case for spending so much time drawing in my spiral notebooks. My grades were fine, and she knew it, so I am not sure what her problem was. She ended up giving me poor marks in conduct.
I progressed in both drawing and writing, but I eventually abandoned the drawing side. I never felt like I was good enough at it. It came naturally to me, like the creative writing, but where I had a drive to further my writing, you’d never have caught me in an art class. There’s really no reason I could not have done both, but I feel this has affected my writing style.
I draw with words, and I like that.
