I recently got stuck in a swamp of anxiety over whether the craft of fiction writing, which I’ve worked at for about ten years now, will ever turn into a reasonably successful career, or if I’m doomed to a diet of ketchup and canned beans for the rest of my life. Such anxiety makes it painfully hard to write. Every new project must be the One that will launch me or at least kick-start something. That kind of pressure sucks all the joy from anything I might try to write.
Illustrator and visual artist John Hendrix advises artists to keep sketchbooks and treat them as visual playgrounds to enjoy the process of drawing, without worrying too much about accuracy or producing a finished piece of art. The point isn’t to make a masterpiece, but to enjoy the process of creativity. You can decide what to do with it later. In order to combat my career anxiety, I decided to start my own sketchbook for writing.
These are a few pages from that sketchbook, things I liked enough to let other people see. No, they’re not perfect or even very polished. But maybe some of the fun that I had in writing them will come through in reading them. If so, they’ve succeeded.