The Lie Behind “I Can’t Draw”

The “I Can’t Draw” Fallacy.
If you are an adult, and someone asks if you can draw,  you most likely would answer:  “I can’t draw a stick figure or a straight line.” You have believed this since you were seven or eight.  Ask a five-year old to draw anything, from the people that live in the moon to the Battle of Gettysburg, and the child will set about with crayons and enthusiasm.

Light up your imagination

The enthusiastic child doesn’t have extraordinary talent. What that child has is a lack of fear. The assignment sounds like fun, a challenge to their imagination. The same challenge, to your ears, sounds like an uncovering of everything you don’t know about the topic.

In fact, if you spent 10 days with the right teacher, you would “remember” how to draw. But you had that knowledge taken away from you at just the time you were most creative.

Get back that lost skill, and get rid of that fear. In January, I’m starting a class for visual journaling that will let you keep the journal you always wanted–with colorful drawings and symbols. You don’t have to know how to draw anything. You don’t need a single talented bone in your body.  All you have to have is the desire to keep a visual journal an a sense of fun and wonder.

You’ll discover the world of ideaglyphs–symbols and designs of your own invention that will delight you and spark your creativity and imagination.

To read about the class, which will be  held online and start on January 6, 2009, and continue on January 11 and 15, see the second column of my December 15 newsletter. There’s a link to send me an email if you have questions.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and creativity coach. She runs workshops in visual journaling.

Petroglyphs: Ancient stories alive today

More than 5,000 years ago, the urge to tell a story that would be remembered drove human beings to invent writing. The first writing were not letters and words, but groups of symbols that told a story.

In the American Southwest, symbols are found on the sides of canyons or in caves. They are called petroglyphs. They were scrateched, etched with cactus juice, or chiseled into stone and give a message or tell a story. Because most of the cultures that used petroglyphs died out, reading them involves conjecture.

Petroglyph at entry to Taliesen West

Unlike hieroglyphics, petroglyphs are not words or sounds, they are symbols. The entire picture records an event, travel, migragraionor clan mark. Some are related to spiritual life and vision quests.

Some petroglyphs are easier to understand than others. Animal figures most likely symbolized a successful hunt or the location of a herd. Vision quests were symbolized with human and god figures, surrounded by dots, which may have indicated stars or the vision quest itself.

Abstract concepts were also used. A spiral represented a migration or spiritual journey.

Linked figures, like those seen on the left side of the picture on the left are not a spiral and may represent mutual responsibility or a treaty.

Both of these photographs were taken at Taliesen West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s summer camp and studio.

Complex petroglyph outside Frank Lloyd Wright

—Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and creativity coach. She values everyone’s story and the secret meaning behind them. She teaches ideaglyphs, a journal writing technique that uses personal symbols and doesn’t require knowing how to draw.  (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Magic Words: Journal Prompts

Words, the sound of them, their meaning and even their letter shapes, hold endless fascination for me. I collect words. It’s a collection that is constantly evolving and I never have to worry about running out.  To keep track of words, I write them down. Not on long lists, but on the backs of the tickets that say “admit one” that you use for video arcades or drinks at charity events. (You can buy them cheaply at Staples.)

Word ticket. Admit to anything you want.

This isn’t a vocabulary list, I simply write down words I like. China. Sideways. Torch. Bay. Vine. Indigo. The left  side of my brain wants me to separate them into piles of verbs and nouns, adjectives and adverbs.  Or put them in different envelopes marked “abstract nouns,” “colors,” “comfort words.”  The right side of my brain won that argument–I can do a lot more piling them all together.

What do I do with the words? Sometimes I simply sift through them to see what interesting combinations I get, quite by extraordinary coincidence. Star grass. Silver lantern. Poem leaf. Lightning root. They make great journal prompts. “Lightning root: The cause of lighting, the first tiny frzzt that leaps larger and jags across the sky.” Or, another one: “The place in the earth burned

The word book box

by the lightning strike. It’s tap-root deep, and next year it will grow a transparent dandelion.” I never tire of these imagination games, and reading back over them has sparked many an idea.

Sometimes I draw three tickets and they represent the past, present and future. Today I pulled ‘Hope’, ‘Spin’, and ‘Comfort’ for the past, present and future, and spent a happy 20 minutes deciphering what it means, recording it all in my journal.

For years, I kept words in a bag, but a few days ago I found a box shaped like a book. It seemed the perfect place for the words.

The word book box, open

I’ve been a word collector for a long time. When I was about eight, I noticed that ‘live’ spelled backwards was ‘evil.’ I thought that was very important, mysterious, and special. That was enough to get me started.
When I got to the moody part of teenage life, I turned to anagrams and came up with the idea that ‘live’ could be changed to ‘vile,’ which is how I thought of my life.
Later on, of course, ‘lives’ became ‘elvis’ and after that, Elvis lives.

In high school I discovered anagrams. While math was not my strong suit, I discovered that ‘Eleven plus two’ is an anagram of ‘Twelve plus one.’

In college, I anagrammed ‘dormitory’ to ‘dirty room.’ My favorite that year was “the eyes= they see.” ‘ Silent’ morphed to ‘Listen’. Still one of my favorites.

I use the tickets to think about words in different ways. “Bay” can be a part of the sea, a place where the truck unloads, a window, a color, and a sound. That’s one rich word.

If you choose the words randomly, they create a kind of poetry. You can always add the words that are missing. Before you know it, you’ll be playing with words and discovering their secret meanings that you’ve always known, but never noticed. Your journal will never be at a loss for writing again.
–(c) 2007. All rights reserved. Quinn McDonald is a word collector and a certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

Chicago, via Journal Pages

My journal includes a lot of writing, but sometimes writing is not enough. I want a shorthand that reminds me of what happened, what I saw and felt. And an ideaglyph (a kind of visual journal) helps me do just that. Here’s an example of an in-progress journal page of my trip to Chicago. I left in great weather and arrived

Trip ideaglyph, journal page

just as a front was going through Chicago, dropping the temperature, kicking up the wind and lowering the sky.

The page concentrates on the quickness of the trip. In 24 hours I went there and back, felt a 50-degree temperature drop (and rise, as I came back), and experienced the joy of seeing the country from 37,000 feet.

In the first fragment, I saw miles and miles of the Rio Grande,

journal page detail, river

the part that is not the border between Texas and Mexico. That’s the part that’s in New Mexico. From the airplane, the river looks stitched into the side of a long plain, just as it meets a mountain. It looks like a mended fabric, the river-stitching holding back the mountain wrinkles from the smooth brown plains. It’s stitched tight in buff against a smooth olive background.

Further on, there were big, rough mountains. They were snow-topped now that it’s November. There were tiny villages sparkling against the feet of the mountains, but there was a sight that amazed me. A round blue lake sparkled on the ground, surrounded by miles of flat earth surface. A road, straight and clean, paced around acres of

lake road journal page detail

land, at least 20 miles worth, as if drawn by a ruler. This road had no exit other than the lake. After all those miles of horizonless space, the road’s whole purpose was to curve around the belly of the lake. Seeing that is comforting, as if the roads knew how to do more than just get stuff to stores. Occasionally a road breaks free and finds its way to a beautiful lake, a simple purpose, well done.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer who teaches business communications and ideaglyphs, a form of visual journaling that doesn’t require drawing skills. See her work at QuinnCreative. (c) Quinn McDonald 2008 images and writing.