reviewed by Leila May
My sister is an artist. You can trace her practice across the years: thick pencil marks and shades of grey into the wafts of watercolors blossoming across the page. The faces of women become more featured, saccharine scenes of blushing ladies and action shots of our puppy digging in the backyard. She sees the tints of orange in a patch of sunlight, the angle of a paw pushing off the dirt. My sister is an artist, and she believes this.
I am an artist of words now, toiling over a laptop with the colors of the mind. But I remember being an artist of the physical world as a child. The weight of the tool in my hand, the slight scratching in the margins of notebooks, the messages a younger me left on the papers I crumpled up and threw away. Like many people, at some point I stopped believing in the pen and paper.
Only until the summer of unemployment in 2020 did I turn back to the physical arts. I started watching YouTube videos on knitting, hastily twisting thick orange yarn around my needles to make an unsustainable sweater for the summer weather. Something about the tangibility of the fabric arts (the weakening in finger joints and hunched lumps in my neck) awakened a need in me, a desire to feel the weight of the art in my hands.
Therefore, when I met with the Hippocampus Publication at the AWP conference in Philadelphia, Rebecca Fish Ewan’s Doodling for Writers immediately caught my eye. My newest obsession after fabric arts is hybrid forms: the abstract weaving of images and genres under the umbrella of literature. This intersection of my interests called my name. “Healing your inner child” is a sort of online buzzword right now, but to me, Ewan’s work is a guide back to my younger self.
Doodling for Writers begins with an assurance to those who, like me, abandoned art in favor of a “logical” career path. Plainly, she claims, “if you can write, you can draw.” There is no pressure to be the next Van Gogh, only a reassurance that there can be joy and enrichment in the combination of doodling and writing. There is a chance your drawing will be surrealist little hodgepodge of shapes at first, and this is okay! According to Ewan, doodling is like a car; you don’t have to be “Baby Driver” level, you just need to get where you need to go. Take some of the pressure of yourself and try and love your drawing, even just a little. We have been so conditioned to see art as objective, but this technique details more than surface-level beauty. Doodling for writing can be a way to sort ideas, design setting and characters, and a principle for overcoming the dreaded writer’s block.
In the first section, Ewan begins with the groundwork, detailing the basics of pens and paper, the different weights of a line, and how to shade in light and shadows. While more expensive and higher tech vocabulary is available, she also mentions that a scrap piece of paper and a busted pencil work just as well. Again, Ewan places an emphasis on the result instead of the often arbitrary rules of the art world.
Moving into the next section, we dive into the practices of doodling in the writing process: mental maps of a fantasy world, character sketches that banish the abstract, and a relief from stalled inspiration. As writers, we must manifest the invisible into the written space, describe how spaces and objects feel, how they twist and move, without ever experiencing this firsthand. A belt buckling, the grim-faced expression on an alien face, the intangible fear of floating in open ocean. Sketching to release these figments is one path to an increased writing life.
Putting Ewan’s advice into practice, I find myself seeking solace in the grip and turn of the pencil, and the gentle scratch against printer paper. Though writing is a connection to myself, it can become tiring, and doodling is a way to rest in that creative space. As Ewan notes, doodling “keeps you near what you love when you can’t stand being intimate with your beloved. If you’ve drained all your words away, you can keep making marks on the page by drawing.” Since reading, I have found many nights painting with watercolors—little doodles of tomato plants and bookshelves.
The inclusion of drawing into my craft life has also clearly extended to my academic life as I am writing an ars poetica assignment. Using Ewan’s idea of an integrated hybrid form (wherein the combination of images and written words influence the reader’s experience), I am pasting in doodles of abstractions and metaphors in my work. Though my drawings are in no way realistic, I am still pleased with the adorability of my drawings—see a little smile on my character as she hefts a crate of fruits. A dream-bearing mouse sneaks across the page. A grim reaper surrounded by tulips glares out at the viewer. I find symbols in my adjectives, mood in my turn of phrase, brushstrokes in my imagery, and paint them on the page.
Besides the wealth of information and exercises at the end of each section, Ewan includes her own heartfelt doodles to add witty examples of an integrated form of writing.
Squiggly drawn dogs and cats drive cars in metaphoric examples, curl together on a couch to illustrate harmony, and walk off together into the sunset on the last page. Their heart and humor create a guiding thread of inspiration as we work through our own hybrid practice.
I have heard the stories of people who let their art fall by the wayside, believing themselves not good enough to continue. When we see Monets and Hoppers hanging in our hallways, it’s hard to see your own scratches as anything but mediocre. But the truth is that a craft does not necessarily have to be good (whatever that means), to be fun. When I first started knitting, my projects were loose and lopsided. And when I was a young writer, there were inconsistencies and rambling plots that made no sense. Even if we work at a craft for twenty years and we still aren’t masters, there is meaning in the joy it brings the creator. If there is pleasure in the flick of a paintbrush, the smoothing of clay, and the twist of yarn on a hook, the work is valuable.
Find yourself here, take a break, and most importantly, have fun with Rebecca Fish Ewan’s Doodling for Writers at Hippocampus Publications.
Leila May is an English and creative writing major at Lebanon Valley College. She enjoys knitting and baking in her free time, as well as exploring questions of queer identity and the boundaries between the real and unreal. Their work has been published in Equinox Literary Magazine and she is currently poetry co-editor of Green Blotter.