I had this realization the other day: I love a first draft, but any- and everything beyond that feels a little too permanent. I was showing off a drawing I’d done and was repeating, “It’s just a sketch” as a way of pushing off my own unhappiness with the drawing — and, to be fair, it was just a sketch, deliberately unfinished and just a few minutes’ worth of work — when I had the thought that, for the most part, I stick in the realm of “just a sketch” quite a lot. I’m not entirely sure what not a sketch would even look like, at this point.
After all, it’s not as if I produce canvases or any kind of finished artwork at any point; everything I come up with is purposefully a work in progress abandoned midway through, intentionally. When I was in art school, decades ago, I eagerly worked away inside my sketchbooks but when required to take things the next step, I found myself fighting indecision and discomfort. I remember having to work on the final show for my BA degree and being unhappy with almost everything I displayed, and then — after grading but before the show actually opened — being counseled by the teachers that I should re-arrange my show because everything in my sketchbooks was better than the work on the walls. (They were right, and I agreed, but having someone else say it was this odd, sobering moment.)
It’s not just visual art that this attitude impacts; writing for the internet is faster and, in many ways, more temporary than writing for print. I was watching one of those movies about Big Moments In American Journalism that was made a decade or so ago — before the second Trump era demonstrated how little journalism is actually valued by those in power — and someone said that old line about journalism being the first draft of history; online writing and online journalism is the first draft of that first draft, another work-in-progress and that’s a comfortable space for me. Every time I’ve written for print feels more daunting somehow.
Maybe at some point, I’ll work up the nerve to create something — written, drawn, whatever — that feels worthwhile to be a “finished” work, or at least a second draft. For now, everything has become a sketchbook, filled with unclaimed, unclear potential that I might be able to figure out, if I wait long enough and look at it right.









