• Skip to main content

Wendy MacIntyre

Novelist

  • Bio
  • Books
  • Touchstones
  • Notebook
  • Blog
  • @
  • Home

The close affinity between drawing and writing

by Wendy MacIntyre

illustration of a writers quillThis morning I saw the most intriguing shadow effect on the bedroom wall, with the lacy curtain (often in peril as a cat ambush station), slanted over the nine squares of the upper half of the window. The delicacy and precision of the shadow shapes made me want to draw them. I wonder if this will happen eventually; that I will try to take up a pencil again and make a picture of some sort, however clumsy. I do still write my first drafts of my fiction long-hand with pen on paper. This “old-fashioned” practice is strongly connected to my childhood love of drawing, and my conviction that my thought flows more readily through small written marks on a page than through touching a computer keyboard. So once again, I find myself reflecting on the close affinity between drawing and writing.

© Wendy MacIntyre, 2017