One line at a time

This week for Inktober I've drawn two big cats.  I chose a jaguar for the pattern challenge, and added a snow leopard to the snow prompt.

A week ago I bought a copy of Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain in a local charity shop.  First published in 1992, the book was much talked about when it came out.  Having read it, now I can see why.  Her premise is that everyone can draw, we just need to see what's in front of us.  But in order to do that, we have to get the logical left brain out of the way and let the pattern-recognising, holistic, right brain run the show.

Betty Edwards gets her students to draw the negative space around and between objects,  and because the logical left brain can't make sense of negative space, we're forced to turn the task over to the right brain to draw what it sees.  I've found that focusing on the negative spaces slows my drawing down.  I'm forced to really see the way the lines go and focus on their angles.

So what does this have to do with writing?  Well, as a science fiction writer, I have to invent everything about my worlds.  And recently I've begun to realise that my earlier books didn't contain enough world building.  I had a sketchy idea of what the place looked like, but often I didn't put enough detail in.  I rewrote one of my novels set on a orbital shipyard a few years ago, and when I did I realised I didn't know my way around the place.  So I sat down to map out the six decks, working out where the docks were, where offices, shops, and living spaces were.  It gave much greater coherence to the rewrite when I'd done that.

In the novel I'm currently rewriting I drew a map of the continent which my characters travel over.  But now I've come to a place in the narrative where my characters cross a river, and there's no river on my map.  I'd been confused by this on an earlier draft, but hadn't worked out why.  Slowing down, looking back at the earlier chapters with the previous river crossing, got me to realise that I had a river missing from my map.

Figuring that out seemed very much like the process of drawing on the right side of the brain.  In order to solve the problem, I had to slow down and look at things in detail. I think that both my writing and my drawing will benefit from this technique, from slowing down and putting the right side of the brain in charge in future.