I have enjoyed drawing and coloring from a very young age.  Starting with coloring books, and then creating my own drawings and paintings.  Even though I never took any art classes, as I taught myself how to draw. An older sister shared with me her knowledge from the art classes she had taken, and my mother taught me the basics of painting.  I watched speed-drawing videos on YouTube over and over again, using them to teach me how to use shapes to create drawings, and techniques for coloring my drawings. I loved drawing characters from my favorite movies, books, and video games, and eventually, although I didn’t think of them as such at the time, I started drawing characters from a story I saw in my mind.  Not the whole story, just bits and pieces here and there, and it intrigued me.

But where art was something I enjoyed, writing was not.

I have loved stories even longer than I have loved drawing, and reading is one of my favorite activities, but not writing.  When I was younger, I had given writing a try and, in my eyes, I had failed. I couldn’t find the words to convey the stories I wanted to tell.  Compared to the prose of my favorite authors, my work was choppy and boring. Writing was frustrating. I could see scenes so vividly in head that seemed interesting and exciting, but when I tried to translate them to paper, they seemed dull and lifeless.  My characters all felt shallow and boring, my plot felt stagnant. And so I put writing away, content to only be a reader for the rest of my days, save for academic papers and the occasional attempt at a silly short story just for fun.

Obviously, writing didn’t stay away from me for long.  Encouraged by one of my older siblings, at the age of fifteen I tried writing again.  I opened a blank word document and I started writing. To my surprise, writing was no longer boring.  I could tell the stories that had been in my mind for years, slowly growing and changing. About a year later, I was sending my first completed manuscript to be published.  What I thought I had not ability to do became one of my favorite activities. I never took a creative writing class. Just as I had watched speed-drawing videos to learn how to draw, reading books to learn how to write.  Rather than a creative writing class, I took a reading class and learned the inner workings of a plot, about rising action and climaxes, the different kinds of heroes and villains found in books.

I have recently begun to look back through my old sketch books and pick an old drawing to draw again, as shown above.  This exercise allows me to see how I have improved over the years, or where I may not have improved as much as I would have liked.  Both of the pictures above are compositionally the same, but the details and even the style of the two drawings have changed.

It was the same with my writing.  When I look back at my old rough drafts of my writing that I have since revisited, the stories are still the same at their core.  There may be different characters that have been better developed, or a different goal for the plot that has grown more depth, but they all came from the same idea.  Like drawings, books don’t have to be perfect the first time they are written. That is what rough drafts are for.

If you have a story inside of you, but you feel it isn’t ready or don’t have the ability to tell it, give it time to grow, revisit it from time to time.  When the story is ready, it will tell you.

The art and coloring are mine, but the characters are not mine.  They are Takumi and Kiragi from Fire Emblem: Fates.