Cameron Stewart

Still Life, Part 1

Added 2023-05-08 10:10:32 +0000 UTC

This is a short comic I wrote and drew a couple of years ago, when I was going through a difficult period of creative block. As an attempt to break it I started doing daily writing in the mornings. First thing after waking up (and making coffee) I would sit at my desk and write whatever came to mind in a notebook, not censoring, revising or second-guessing, just starting to write and not lifting my hand from the paper until I had filled three pages. Most of the time it’s pretty useless, just 45 minutes’ worth of garbled thoughts, but that’s not the point of the exercise - the point is to just train yourself to write every day no matter what, and not worry about whether it’s good or bad or whether it would ”become” something. I think this is one of the biggest struggles that I and many other modern creatives have, the pressure of feeling that everything we put down on paper must in some way be shared or monetized and the heavy sense of failure when it isn’t working. Doing this daily exercise helps me break out of that (at least temporarily), because I give myself permission to write without any self-judgement or worry that it isn’t “good enough.” Most of what I write in these notebooks I will never look at again - that’s also a key part of the exercise, to let your writings go and grow comfortable with not needing to look back and revise them. But occasionally I feel like I manage to unearth a good idea for a story, and this was one of them. I began writing about a man walking along a beach with his dog and making a gruesome discovery, and found that I filled the three pages with ease. Shortly after that first improvised draft I started to draw. I wanted to draw it in a loose, sketchy style that was different than the “cleaner” inked work that I’ve usually done in my comics work. This is the first half of the story, at the end of the week I will post the second half. Hope you enjoy it, please let me know in the comments!