Why Every Writer Needs to Draw Their Books

Generally speaking, writers aren’t known for being visual artists. Their whole deal is crafting something beautiful with words, not with color or line or visual perspective, so they often do not draw.

But if you’re not drawing out your book, you should be.

It’s OK if you’re not an artist — draw anyway

To be clear, I’m not saying you need to storyboard out every scene. And I’m certainly not saying the pictures you draw have to be gorgeous.

(To drive this home, here’s a sample of what other people do in Paint….

…aaaaaaaand what yours truly can do in Paint…

It’s OK. Go ahead. Stare at it for a second.

Done?

OK.

Your brain is visual, so don’t fight it

What I am saying is that people are incredibly visual creatures. I’ve blogged about that before regarding the potential for authors to include pictures in their novels. When you draw out images related to your story, even if they look like my Santa, it helps your brain sort out exactly what you want. That clarity has enormous value when it comes to visualizing future scenes in a fun way that helps the writing process flow well. In fact, you even can use drawing as a shorthand, more memorable outline in the planning stages, too.

Drawing pictures also can help a graphic artist who does your cover or other images get a sense of your artistic intent. Great artists can expand on your concepts even if your drawings leave tons to be desired, as demonstrated in this piece for Huffpost. When you’ve got this intent expressed well, when you can feeeeeeel what you aimed for, it’s the perfect time to pop that image on an aesthetic or vision board to keep you motivated.

If you reeeeeeeeally hate drawing, I’ll compromise. Go online and find some free images–even GIFs–that are as close to what you had in your head as possible. Use those in your outlining or boards. Or use an image editing program like Visme or Canva to create something unique from what you find. You don’t have to start totally from scratch; you just have to finish with something that solidifies the concept and emotion inside of you.

As an example, this is one of my favorite GIFs. It’s of Anne Hathoway in Les Miserables, but it’s got exactly the tone I want for one of my novels.

You might say that all novels are just the written form of what we have seen in our minds. So make sure you’re seeing your concept or scene clearly and concretely. Focus on it. Be able to help others see what you do. Drawing is not writing, but it certainly can be part of the writing process.

The original version of this post appeared on Medium November 30, 2021.