stitch london sketch

So last night I went to my first Stitch London meeting. I still don’t know how to knit, but it’s such a great place to draw fab-looking women all sitting fairly still. Here’s my studio mate and stitch London organiser Lauren O’Farrell. I tried to draw her looking like the crafty crafty deadlyknitshade that she is, complete with the goggles she wore on Gary’s birthday.

Yesterday I was having a hard time with a piece of writing, so this morning, I wrote twenty pages longhand of all the other stuff that’s been rattling around disjointedly in my head and pestering me. I have a hard time pinning down thoughts if I don’t write. If I try to talk them through with someone in person, I get so overstimulated by all the different things going on besides just the words that I have a hard time articulating anything. There’s my relationship with the person – past, present and future – their body language, my empathy for them and not wanting to make them feel uncomfortable, the other things going on in the room, what’s going on in the next room, any passing smells, so many things all at once. (I think something related goes on in people with autism, but I don’t think I’m autistic.)

It’s fine if it’s a prepared speech in front of people, but if I’m trying to put my finger on something I’m not even sure about myself, I really need to write. And then I write for so long, that no one really wants to read all that writing. (They probably don’t want to hear it in spoken form either, but when you’re talking with someone, they’re usually too polite to ask me to stop. They’re eyes just glaze over.)

That must be what good storytelling is, picking out a very few key bits and framing them well, so people will want to read them. It just takes a lot longer to say if I have to package everything up very neatly and it only comes out two book fairs a year, at most. I guess saying more is what mini comics are for. I need to make more of those if I ever want to communicate at all.