Doodling for Writers

by Rebecca Fish Ewan

Drawing and doodling—in the margins, on napkins, anywhere—can contribute to your writing process and fuel your creativity.

In Doodling for Writers, memoirist and cartoonist Rebecca Fish Ewan combines her wit and wisdom with practical, engaging prompts and activities to illustrate how simple sketching can get you over hurdles, bring back memories, and even provide a roadmap for where your story needs to go.

Full of encouragement and anecdotes, Fish Ewan's cartoon-self—accompanied by a few sidekicks—will guide you through basics of drawing and then show you to how to apply it to your writing process through character sketches, place maps, and more.

In the author-illustrator's words, ''This book is not about getting writers to abandon their craft so they can become artists. For one, writing is an art form, so they're already artists. For two, this book is about letting drawing enrich their writing life, not replace it.''

Pick up this book, pick up a pencil and erase the notion that you can't draw.

140 pages, Paperback

Published October 6, 2020

About the author

Poet/cartoonist, Rebecca Fish Ewan's passion is mingling text with visual art, primarily in ink and watercolor, to tell stories of place and memory. Her hybrid-form work has appeared in After the Art, Brevity, Crab Fat, Survivor Zine, Hip Mama, Mutha, TNB, Punctuate & Under the Gum Tree. Her illustrations and essay, “The Deepest Place on Earth,” were published in the Literary Kitchen anthology, Places Like Home. Rebecca has an MFA in creative writing from ASU, where she has been a landscape design professor for 25+ years. Rebecca grew up in Berkeley, California, and lives with her family in Arizona. Books/chapbook: A Land Between, By the Forces of Gravity, Water Marks, and her new book, Doodling for Writers, which releases October 2020.

Rebecca has been living in the Sonoran Desert with her family for nearly half her life. She misses the ocean every day.

She has an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University and degrees in mathematics and landscape architecture from UC Berkeley.

The first draft of her book, A Land Between, was written outside. She has also published in Landscape Architecture Magazine and Brevity. She is an associate professor of landscape architecture in The Design School at ASU.

IG: @rfishewan
See www.rebeccafishewan.com for more.

Reviews

[Louella Lester · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love it. I used to draw and got me doodling again!