Starting New Habits

I bought a sketchbook yesterday.

Not yesterday when you read this of course, but yesterday for me.

I bought the sketchbook at the Reject Shop. It was not a nice sketchbook. It was not an expensive sketchbook. It doesn’t have a nice cover. It doesn’t have a leather case to keep it in. It’s not like the leather cover my sister got me for my bullet journal. It cost me $3 and its brand name is ‘VISUAL ART DIARY.’

Today, I started drawing in it.

The process of writing in this blog this year has been an ongoing test of writing to a specific word limit. I used to just write whatever ‘felt good,’ and the normal size of a post was where I thought I’d delivered a good amount. I get very little feedback on my writing, but one thing I did get reasonably often was that some articles felt they ended about where they wanted them to keep going, so I set the target of a thousand words a day this year.

I don’t like the idea that I’m padding my work. Hitting 700 or 800 words and thinking I’m out of words makes me look at what I’m doing and check if I’ve missed something I meant to talk about, or if I’m saying something badly and should repivot the whole article to be about something else. There are definitely some outliers – this year has featured numerous articles in the 3,000 plus words size – but keeping to a thousand words keeps me scrutinising my work. I don’t mind that.

It’s that reflecting on myself that plays into why I got this sketchbook, and why I started to draw in it.

I mean, just reflecting on this, I was thinking about my relationship to this blog, the thing that I call doing work. I know that, for example, autoethnography, the kind of research I do, involves essentially, keeping progress diaries that you know will be shared with an audience, but then also, that that sharing with an audience will need to be to trust that it’s honest. That means I’m not just writing for a public audience (of a sorts) but I’m having to do it in a way that resists the natural fear I have of revealing too much of myself.

Just talking about process, this is an article that in my mind, is a padding article. I thought, today, the Desert Bus game jam would be running. My plan for what went up today – oh yeah, that Desert Bus game jam a few weeks ago? But my plan for today was going to be writing my post about making the game I had in mind for the Desert Bus Jam. Time stamp for any of you who might like imagining you know the order I write these things. Today, with that sapped out of me, I just didn’t have anything to write about any more. I rearranged things – I put up an article about orcs, and that means that there’s a week of articles about Magic: The Gathering transformers cards… I guess vehicles fit the bus theme?

I am surrounded by people with very different relationships to their stuff. Some of them are people who own things they never use because they don’t want to use them up or damage them. But if this is a piece of trash sketchbook, not a gift, not a nice thing. It’s just a thing I got under my own power, that doesn’t cost a lot and doesn’t need any kind of special reverent treatment.

The cover on my bullet journal is on my mind because I realise I don’t actually pull that thing out anywhere but at home. It lives on my desk, face-up. I don’t travel with it, I don’t take it to work, and when I took it to work, I didn’t pull it out at work, because it’s got this nice leather cover and the leather cover has a strap and you need to be mindful about it and where it lays. This replaces the little rubber strap the actual book has to start with, which isn’t a serious thing. My sister got me something lovely for my bullet journal, and I don’t dislike it. But having it made my bullet journal something more serious than it is, and that means I use it less for what it is.

Okay, but I got a cheap sketch pad. Why?

I need it to be cheap, so I use it.

I need the way I engage with it to be cheap, so I use it.

I need the thing to be low investment, so I use it.

I need to use it.

I need to draw a lot of bad drawings and I need them to be in something that isn’t precious and if I want to throw it out I can, because the point is not the object, the point is the practice. I need to stop hesitating from doing things because I’m trying to preserve a perfect record that makes me look good. I need to stop caring about how someone else, who isn’t me, is going to feel about how I use the things I get for myself. And it sucks to think like that.

But it matters to me, as a creator and as an advocate for creators, that we all recognise that it’s okay to make things that aren’t permanent. That nothing I make will last. That what matters is the experience of it and what I can share. Save things for use later, don’t save them for the ideal of saving them forever. Waiting forever is how things live their lives unused and eventually fall apart from the weight of time itself. It’s a great way to have a bookshelf full of tomes you never get around to read for fear of cracked spines. It’s okay instead to have junk and trash and make what you can with it because the interface of your tools is important to how you can emotionally handle creating.

It needs to make you feel okay to do what you’re doing. I know some of you need fancy sketchbooks to feel like what you’re doing is serious. I’m not telling you how to live your lives. I’m telling you how I live mine. And I started this sketchbook, making this.