Simply Sunday - Practice, A “Listicle” Sketchnote, Comics Panels, and Tattoos

A listicle of sorts, with some sketchnoting and graphic novel talk, and a book on tattoo stories

Once a month I have to drive down to a meeting, and I am perpetually surprised by the lanes that you have to pay to drive in and how it seems like the prices are random. How much it costs to drive in those lanes is always different. I somehow can’t imagine zipping in and out of lanes that add an extra fifty cents or a dollar every few miles just to save a few minutes.

The drive, the meeting, the realities..... it's a complicated bundle of things. Last month, I got diverted (for no discernible reason) off the highway onto a scenic route by a lake for 3.5 miles before being put right back on the same highway. It was like the map app had its own agenda. This week, despite my attempts to take the calmer of the two highways, I still got routed midway onto the more crowded highway. All lanes will get me there.

I thought this week I was going to scale things back and do a simple list, a short list, a listicle. My heart always says that is the goal, a nice and tidy list, a listicle for the week. I love the whimsy of the portmanteau. I think making a listicle of life is what I’ve been working on for years. Lists streamline things. Lists cut to the point. Lists are scannable. Lists have the potential to order the world, to wrangle thought into a shape that functions and has meaning based on juxtaposition. Parallelism has a place, too. But I think a listicle has room to break some rules and play in margins and in the spaces between.

I so admire the concise “5 things” approach to posts and newsletters. But this is what typically happens when I decide to present a short list: “Here are five things, and they are connected to another five, and this one has five off-roads, and this one requires backtracking, and I really need to think and talk and explain more about numbers 78-84, and I need to fact-check one of those details, which creates a new offshoot with new threads to follow, and look, in the end everything connects together like some deranged connect the dots picture, and we’ve made a zany monster. See its eyes?”

I am far from an optimist. But every week, I really think I can make a tidy list of five things to share.

Talking Out Loud

On the drive to my meeting, I was listening to a book, but my mind was wandering. Sketch notes and graphic novels, loneliness, and vulnerability, health, books, colored pencils, digital art…. It was all swirling around. I opened a note to record a bit of what I was thinking, hoping to get down the contours of my list, and I talked. (Podcasting from the car would be the best approach for me, always.)

I know those stream-of-consciousness dictated posts are often a mess to sort out later, a wall of typo-riddled text that can be overwhelming (and sometimes impossible). I started talking, and even the app couldn’t keep up. There were five listicle line items, for sure, but the dots for a connect-the-dots wall-sized mural were unfolding there on the highway. It was a masterpiece. It was honest and real. Those are all things I want to talk about. It was way too much.

(I wish I could let go and post more than once a week, writing without trying to polish everything up, writing without worrying about the fact that so many of the other substacks I read feel so well crafted, smoothed, and tumbled into beautiful glass stones. (See no. 3 below.))

(I need to be podcasting again. I need to talk.)

(I need to just trust that occasionally there are rays of light that catch my rough edges and might cast an unexpected rainbow for someone. A prism relies on facets. On edges. On the ability to refract.)

When I sat down later to add the commas and missing words and sort out the typos, the many places where the app gets the wrong word, I got lost in the weeds.

I tried to reign in the list, and it still got out of hand. Then I decided I would backtrack and sketchnote the list instead. So here is the streamlined sketchnote of today’s post.

In written form (though not in the same order!):

1. A vulnerability project. I found myself, out-of-the-blue, thinking about a month of vulnerability and what it would take to show up every day, with an admission, a simple revelation, a claiming and acknowledgment. I’ve been thinking about how freeing it might be just to throw off the covers and open the doors, and at the same time how impossible that feels. Our stories, even our simple hurts or worries, involve others, too. I don’t have any really big stories or exciting or tragic or traumatic threads. Sometimes, we just crave being able to speak freely.

2. Practice. I’ve been showing up to practice in a number of ways. This week, I picked up a book that I planned to talk about months ago and that is now overdue. I was going to write a quick summary so I can return it, but I thought, “No, I want to sketchnote it.” It is a short book. I knew it would be great practice, and sketchnoting books is something I want to do. I started the sketchnote, and it quickly became an involved process. It’s not fast. There are lots of perfectionist stumbling blocks, writing and rewriting and shifting things around. I ran into an airplane moment that I still need to resolve.

3. Staying true. Sometimes the things that we are most interested in doing  and most enjoy or find most satisfying/challenging/fulfilling/meaningful are not the things other people care about or respond to. We should be doing what we love, but our landscape of accountability and support often makes it hard to find and maintain momentum for things that may simply “not matter.” (This relates to the "sketchnote old podcast episodes" project. I’m trying to dig my heels in, but I did get stymied and stalled on the episode sketchnote I had started. Maybe it isn’t the way to use my time or the best way to build skill. I can sketchnote other things.)

4. Practice in panels. On a couple of recent mornings, I considered the small window of time and thought, “Okay, I am just going to do a diary comic or draw a panel or make some kind of rough sketch of what might go in one.” Shifting to drawing on glass adds a new level of awkwardness, and I'm still sorting out my process and still trying to find a pen or brush tool I like in Procreate. I keep editing and tweaking, trying to find my sweet spot. I have to zoom in a lot to get the smooth line I want, so there’s this constant back-and-forth. But I’m dipping my toe back in (and in for the first time digitally), and that’s what matters to me. I haven’t finished anything, and that’s okay. What I’ve been doing is almost just like a little rough draft or a little warm up sketch. It really is just practice and exploration. It’s a five minute thing even though it always takes more than five minutes. It’s the concept of five minutes. It makes me feel better to say, “Okay, I’m gonna do this for five or ten minutes” and start. I give myself a concrete window for sticking with it. Then, if it extends beyond that, and I still have time, I keep going. (Return to no. 3.)

5. Practicing capturing moments. Last week, maybe two weeks ago, there was this funny thing that happened, and my immediate instinct was to show it as a graphic novel sequence of panels. It’s funny because these moments that I am always so drawn to show are not moments where something big happens. They tend to be very small moments. They are not important moments. They don’t contain revelations. I could tell you in ten seconds about finding something, two things actually, that I had been looking for a month ago. At the time, I basically tore the house upside down trying to find these things. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t find them. I emptied containers, dug through drawers. I looked and looked and looked. And then, a month too late, I stumbled over one of the two in the most literal way because I happened to kick something with my foot. (The other thing appeared the next day.) I could tell you that story really quickly but something about the moment makes me want to show it. I really want that. There is no real point or reason to render these scenes in panels, and does it make sense to spend the time? In the time I have, my other drawing seems to have more validity and purpose. (Return to no. 3.)

6. Practicing acceptance and the rough sketch. You wouldn’t be able to tell what  happened, what the panels are trying to show, but I didn't set out to do a finished piece. I was doing the blocking in, the equivalent of an undersketch, a layer I could ink over later. I kept thinking I would go back and refine it, but it hasn’t been the most pressing thing to work on. Getting it down, even really roughly, was satisfying enough. Is there value in doing it again to clean it up? (Return to no. 3.) Maybe not. There is so often a catch-22 with personal recording. Recording takes time. In any format, recording takes time. Writing something down takes time.  Illustrating takes time. Going back and painting or filling in with marker or filling in with hatching or thickening block letters with fountain pen takes time. Everything takes a layering of time, more and more time to record a single moment, a moment that has already passed. Sometimes I don’t go back and "finish" drawings or pages or, now, digital sketches. Sometimes, I’m happy just to get it done once, roughly.

7. Practicing guitar. I talked last week about practicing “Landslide.” I’ve been looking for five or so songs that I can continue to work on. My thought is that with a list of five to ten hand-picked songs, I will have some variety and can go back-and-forth, cycling through a few each day when I sit down to practice. I’ve had trouble finding a solid list of five, but I found the second. I’ve been working on “Blackbird” (and loving it).

8. Pen and Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them. I really enjoyed looking at this book this week. Pen and Ink was written by Isaac Fitzgerald and illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton and has a nice one-page intro from Cheryl Strayed (whose tattoo story is also included). The book shares tattoo stories from 60+ people. Each tattoo is illustrated by MacNaughton. I saw her post this week about her new book, How to Say Goodbye. It was timely that there was a tattoo prompt last week for Illustrate Your Week (Week 29). I am pretty sure a tattoo decision is an overthinker’s nightmare. I would likely be a "sleeve or nothing" person because I would never be able to choose "one" thing as such a permanent mark. I used to think I knew what my “If I ever” tattoo might be, but I realized this week that was a younger me. It doesn't have the same resonance as it did when I was 21. This was an interesting prompt to consider.

See No. 3

What struck me in refining this list is that so many of these things referred back to “no. 3," to the issue of how hard it is sometimes to do things that don't have much positive reinforcement from others. (On the sketchnote, that really important element is just a thought balloon in the margin.) Even with really good self-accountability, I think internalizing public perception can be a real stumbling block when you are picking and choosing projects and how to use your time.

I can’t count how many times I may have said, “Do what you love; love what you do” through the years. Doing what I love, regardless of whether it’s the most popular thing, is an important guiding light for me. It’s how I stay true to my voice. I also know that building skill requires doing the work. I caution people all the time about thinking a magical pencil will take away the requirement of putting in the practice and being open to the process of making changes, growing, and evolving. You have to love what you’re doing enough to stick with it, even in the early (or maybe ugly) stages.

I know all of this. But it can be hard to stay the course, especially when there is limited time (and limited energy). There are lots of projects. I have to pick and choose. We all do. We make choices, and when we “love” broadly (e.g., have lots of project options), it’s easy to see why we might focus on projects that garner the most feedback and support. It feels good. It helps us keep moving forward.

Maybe there is no real harm in choosing to stay in the sunny lane, if we can find it.

Unfortunately, I think sometimes we get so wrapped up in our projects getting love and attention from others that it can be limiting or even immobilizing. We close off the part of us that wants to do and try and learn other things. We feel bad when we don’t do enough. We feel bad when we’re not filling every space or when we don’t have the most beautiful layout or when we do a pencil sketch and leave it or when we don’t  draw something as perfectly as we would like, when the balance doesn’t work out or when what we want to record doesn’t result in some beautifully composed or brilliant piece, or when we simply run out of time. Sometimes the juxtaposition of a whole bunch of things just looks like a mess or weird and that should be (and is) okay.

It’s easy to get caught up in doing things a certain way or only sharing certain things because of how others respond, positively, negatively, or not at all.

I wanted to show my scrawled page last week because I was excited by the process, buoyed by the doing, and also laughing at myself (gently) at the mess of it. More than anything, sometimes the "doing" is simply lonely. I think many of us are looking for ways to connect with others, not so much because we expect someone to admire our brilliance but simply because we need to be seen.

I wanted to show my scrawled page, and yet showing something that is such a mess is really difficult to do. (And when I say it’s a mess, I’m not playing the, “oh, I’ll say it’s really rough or messy, even though it isn’t, and I hope a bunch of people tell me how beautiful it is” game. I don’t play that way. I am really talking about a bunch of rough digital pencil lines that don’t actually look like anything recognizable. To me, it was still a victory of sorts and a step forward.)

Maybe I just need to show a messy sketch every day.

What would thirty days of vulnerability look like?

In my meeting this week, the only question I was asked over lunch was, “Do you have any exciting plans for travel this summer?” When my answer was, “No, that’s not possible,” the conversation moved on. At the dentist office, the same questions, over and over, “So are you going anywhere exciting this summer? What are you doing this weekend? What’s for lunch?”

People don’t know what to do with people who lead ho-hum, ordinary, making-do lives, I think.

Some weeks, writing is hard. Some weeks, writing leaves me in tears. Some weeks, even a listicle can’t spare me from falling off one cliff or another and stubbing my toe.

Maybe I just need to show a messy sketch every day. People are visual. They like to look at pictures. Me, too. This is, maybe, supposed to be a newsletter full of pictures. But it is in all the words that the raw comes out, the vulnerable, the questioning and the wondering, the worrying and the grateful. It is with the words that I hold and twist the prism.

One of the prompts for week 30 is to draw a monster. They might be cute, but they don’t have to be. I am looking forward to it. I hope you’ll find a spot on your pages for a monster or two, too.

What are you practicing? What projects do you question because you aren’t sure if they have value or meaning?

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Illustrate Your Week — Week 30

The new prompts for Week 30 have been posted.

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