No words

Written communication is my favorite way to... well, communicate. I tend to favor text or speech, text in particular, in my everyday life (you see this is about to get as personal as they come, so bear with me). I also take many notes all the time, not just because ~I am a writer~, but because of how my brain retains information. I learn by muscle memory, physically reproducing an activity, and writing on paper is a physical activity. It helps me remember the information I wrote while also develop ideas and elaborate thoughts.

For the purpose of this absolutely non-scientific issue, I will take a leap and say you can see a connection here between how one thinks and how one communicates, and of course this leaks into how we create. So I would argue that, because I favor written communication, I don't usually tell visual stories.

Now, video games are visual and aural experiences. Yet I have always struggled to abstract the written component, the text. It seems natural to rely on text, punch up a dialogue, find the right words. And just to make it clear, this here is not a complaint, I use this skill whenever I can. But again, I work on an audiovisual medium and although text is cheap, it is not the most effective every time.

So how does one improve in communicating with no words? Is that something that can be taught or is it a natural trait, akin to the way your brain learns? I can't say I have answers, but what I do have is the belief a human being stubborn enough can learn pretty much anything.

My first idea was to learn how to draw. And here I'd like to open a parenthesis: everyone knows how to draw. It is usually the first form of artistic expression a child is introduced to and we learn it before reading and writing. It is a way to assess the world around us and bring our imagination to life. But most of us abandon it when we start to develop self-critique and also learn how to write, because writing is more often used in everyday communication than drawing. So we get very judgmental of our own abilities and turn to what will be of most frequent use to make connections with other people. Despite this notion of text as informal communication being fairly recent in human history, abandoning your abilities in drawing early on is not a new thing at all. After all, this ability to learn the "rules" of good and bad which stops us from making art is something we naturally develop as our knowledge and sense of self mature.

I thought that rescuing my drawing abilities would help open my mind to visual storytelling. Which, yes, it does. But it takes time and practice to develop it as a language. Same with visual composition, storyboarding and collage. You can read a great esperanto dictionary from cover to end and still not know how to speak esperanto.

So circling back to the reasons why most of us stop drawing as kids, I realized that book-binging was not going to fix what stopped me on the first place. Then there was the one thing I have not thought about: try to tell a story with no words. Nevermind the lack of technique, just try. Think of a scenario or a prompt and challenge yourself to communicate this without using text. It is the most obvious path, and it took me months to realize that it is what I needed. I needed TIME and PRACTICE. Of course, drawing again and having learned more about storyboarding is amazing, but the one way to get where I want to go is to nosedive and turn off the critic inside, at least for a while.

Being self-aware is not that fun. I recommend Flowers to Algernon by Daniel Keyes - not a book about drawing, but to reflect on the burden of knowledge. I understand you a little better now, Charlie Gordon.

-Maíra