The best possible representation of my process as a writer could be nothing short of a small mess. It starts with every intention of making sense, as you can see with the center image, the first sketch I made for this class, and seems to progress with some sort of order, but quickly becomes tangled. I’m not ashamed of having an irregular process, the sticky notes on the board are far too real, I’ve had walls full of sticky nots in the past (though not exactly this semester, seeing as my dorm is so small I don’t really have too many walls to spare). A lot of it is barring into a task head-on, then figuring out what I like and what I should fix, then stumbling back and actually tweaking what I think is necessary, and changing my mind a couple dozen times. My writing consists a lot of having a draft of what I should write, and another of what I want to write, and then finding a way to smush those together. It’s breaking rules I didn’t know were rules, and pretending like I know what I’m doing.
Most of all, it’s finding a way to enjoy myself no matter the task at hand.
Sure, maybe I don’t have to use charcoal on a sketch I could get done in five minutes, or climb up into a precarious position to take the perfect picture, or draw the exact angle of my bed in that story that takes place in my room, but I want to. A lot of writing is making compromises with myself: you can have fun with the introduction if you promise make a meaty argument later on, or two more hours of sleep are more important than tracing that page to a likeliness that the artist himself couldn’t distinguish.
Everything is connected, somehow, and sometimes things are forgotten or left out. I don’t entirely understand it, nor do I feel I have to. It’s a journey where I’m never sure exactly what will happen. I make an effort, at times, to make sense of it all, for the sake of improvement, and sometimes it works, sometimes not. One thing’s for sure: it’s a process with no ending in sight.
The Secret Language of Sabrina 