It's not "doodling"

A big part of my writing process is what looks like doodling. I hate that word, doodling. It’s drawing, but its implications are meandering and mindless, just screwing around. But it’s what my writing often looks like, and it weighs on me. I’m hard on myself when it comes to getting stuff done, and often, at the end of the day, at the end of a week, or after several weeks, I look back at what I’ve made, and when I see what is basically a few hundred small drawings of whatever, I feel like I’ve just wasted that time.

But I remind myself that this is, in fact, the work. It’s part of the process. It’s thinking, and imagining. And then it’s taking the things I’m thinking about and imagining and drawing them, which makes them real. What was a fragment of an idea, a small cloud floating in a dark void, has now been put on paper and it exists. If you’ve been doing this as long as I have it’s easy to take this process for granted. And this is where I’m hard on myself. Often, this work, and it is actual work, feels more like avoidance. I don’t want to do these things I’m supposed to be doing, so I open up my sketchbook and, well, basically I doodle.1