Sketching

There was only one part of high school I enjoyed. (And really, who enjoys any part of high school if you're not Homecoming Queen material?) And that was art class. I was in drawing or painting or ceramics class every semester of high school, sometimes begging pretty please so my teacher - bless her - would let me retake an art class I'd already taken as a freshman. That great big classroom with all the windows, with the shelves upon shelves of paints and oil pastels and ceramic carving tools was the quietest, best place in that whole crazy school.

By senior year, I'd finally run out of classes to take and was horrified by the possibility of taking astronomy or home ec or any number of tortuous subjects. My fellow art geek veterans and I were so disappointed in this lack of options that our sweet, wonderful teacher decided to teach her first AP art class. There were about seven of us and she didn't have a time block available, so we commandeered a table in her intro level drawing class and enjoyed all the benefits of being AP students - meaning, so long as we finished our portfolios in time to send them off to the judging committee, we got to do pretty much any damn thing we wanted to do.

We were all geeks, and sometimes leaving a group of artsy geeks to their own devices results in...extreme geekiness. While we worked, we talked about movies, then about how we would have filmed those movies differently. Then we were leaving those movies behind altogether and coming up with our own stories. We compared ideas and offered suggestions to one another, we sketched scenes that we wanted to see brought to life and tore pictures out of magazines so we could assemble our "casts". Slowly I began to realize that, not only was I easily the least talented artist of the bunch, but that I was more often than not putting away my art pieces and bringing out paper and pencil so I could write instead. We listened to music and talked and juggled ideas, and it fueled my creativity in a way that it hadn't ever been fueled before. All this visual art made me want to create art with words. I knew I didn't have a future at an art school, but writing became my dominant interest.

I still have "sketching" sessions: I listen to music and flip through magazine pages. I still "cast" my stories. I'm working on a novel now - that will not be posted on the blog save for my flash fiction pieces - and have been compiling character names and poring over research materials, looking for inspiration, drawing, pulling up web pictures. I think it's important that, as I write and post the blog stories, I have something a little more secret in the works too.