Saturday I hung out with my friend Naima. She's a talented kid who grew up in the South Bronx. In high school she had a terrible record, mainly because living with her family put unreasonable demands on her, like having to stay home from school to take care of her baby sister. But her teachers loved her, and gave her all sorts of glowing letters of recommendation for college, because she was really smart and creative, and worked hard when she could, and had her own way of thinking about everything.
She doesn't exactly have the worst situation of anyone else I know. But it's hard for her to disentangle herself from the various family conflicts and other problems that keep her where she is. She ended up going to community college and dropping out - I wish she'd tried for a SUNY school instead, like Purchase, but the prospect of leaving home was too scary, I guess. Now she's in her mid-twenties, and trying to figure out some kind of job situation that might free her from living in her mom's apartment with the rest of her family, sniping at each other for the rest of their lives and going nowhere.
One of her talents is art. I went to a group show she was in, where one of her paintings won an award. It was very cool. No one in her family showed up. Just me and two other friends of hers. But she loves doing artistic things. She loves costuming, and coming up with outrageous masks. She's won cash prizes for zombie costumes in local competitions. Basically, she's great. But her lack of education, and lack of middle-class experience, makes it pretty hard to parlay her skills into jobs and freedom.
One of the things we talked about yesterday was how she could draw some comics. She's really into the idea, and has given it a shot a few times, but she doesn't have any sense of how to organize her work, do multiple drafts, plan a layout. She can draw a good picture, but the idea of what kind of labor might lead to a larger, organized project like a comic book, is foreign to her.
She's done some work though. Some of the stories of her crazy family are perfect for putting into comics. So she's started writing down some of her experiences, and trying to express them as descriptions of each panel of a comic. So yesterday we did this thing where she'd read me the description of one of the panels, and I'd draw it out. Just to show her that a story-line could actually be created. We did about a page of that, and talked about what it meant to whip out a page of drawings like that, and what it meant to do a draft. It's not like she's never heard of any of this stuff before. But the idea of taking those abstract concepts and applying them to her own activity, is a little hard to navigate.
I know how she feels. For a big project, it's often really hard to know where to begin. Big projects also involve a lot of work that has to be tossed out because it reveals things about the project that require starting over in a different way. It's not wasted work, but it's stuff that doesn't make it into the final draft; and it's hard to have faith that this kind of work isn't just totally wasted. It's hard to develop the understanding that the final product, even if it represents a lot of hours of work just by itself, can also represent not even a tenth or a twentieth of the amount of work that went into all the sketching and writing and rewriting and resketching that came before.
She can easily do about 2 hours of drawing per day. That's what she told me. Probably it's more, but even if it isn't, she could whip out some solid drafts in a relatively short time. So we talked a lot about how much time to spend on doing drafts, and what it all meant, and how to go from the draft to the final project.
I'm excited to see what she comes up with. Some of her stories are funny, and some are hard-hitting, and some are just downright twisted. If she just starts drawing them in the form of an actual comic book, that'll be a major step forward.
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