Dear Student | On Cultivating a New Practice
When I recently enrolled in a workshop, Making Graphic Novels and Getting Them Published by Yoda Press, I had two motives: one was to explore the graphic form in addition to an anthropological monograph for disseminating my doctoral research. This was primarily for my respondents, whose limited literacy would make it hard to access writing mandated to comply with the linguistic conventions of academic publishing. My second intention, competing quite fiercely with the first, was to toy with some of my unpublished fiction/non-fiction to see if they could be lent to sequential art by combining text I had written several years back with images I had yet to learn to draw.
I soon realised the extent of my ineptitude while sketching panels to illustrate scenes from the story I was working on. Even though decades of going to museums and galleries had cultivated some sense of visual attunement, I still felt like a novice, starting from scratch. Besides, the mountains and sun-sets painted in my adolescent past did not prepare me, even inadequately, to doodle for graphic storytelling. So, I thought it would be a good idea, with teaching aids online, to return to the basics of drawing and get some systematic training.
As weeks passed, I also read graphic novels to familiarise myself with various styles, learning to see words as images and images as the vehicle that takes the narrative forward. I started a sketching practice by drawing lines, using the entire arm (not the wrist) to draw circles and making choices about materials and mediums — paper or digital. As I struggled to draw lines that were not crooked or failed to form a neat circle, I could not help but notice how similar the frustrations were between writing and drawing (or between being unable to write and unable to draw). And yet, when I am stuck as a writer, the immobility does not bother me as much.
Nuruddin Farah, the Somalian novelist, when asked how he dealt with writer’s block, replied, “There is no such thing as the writer’s block; there is only the writer’s impatience.” Whether accurate or apocryphally attributed to Farah, these words significantly altered my relationship with the blank page waiting to be typed on since I first heard them from the Indo-Canadian novelist and playwright Anosh Irani on a panel entitled Maps for Lost Writers: Nurturing Creativity at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2013.
This brings me back to sketching or working on any new skill, which, like a long journey, would require overcoming the sketcher’s impatience. To arrive at a point of creating evocative and compelling images would require years of sustained practice and patience. One may or may not reach that destination. But, for now, this exchange between my writer-self and trying-to-be-an-illustrator-self keeps me amused enough not to make me want to quit trying.
What does it mean for you to pursue any skill in a disciplined and intentional manner? Is there an art or craft form you feel somewhat or more or less or fully confident about that could inform and inspire something you are a beginner at?
Here is to becoming a novice repeatedly and overcoming new blocks and old impatiences!
Kumud
