The Cartoonist's Squiggly Line: On the Discipline of the Unfinishable Practice
A reader named Corinne recently sent me a question that I’ve been turning over for days. She asked, simply: "When do you stop practicing and start?" She’s been drawing for years, filling sketchbooks, but feels she’s never quite 'good enough' to begin the graphic novel she dreams of creating. She’s stuck in the antechamber of her own ambition, polishing the doorknob but never turning it.
I pictured a cartoonist at her drafting table, surrounded by crumpled paper. The gap between the confident line in her mind and the hesitant one on the page feels like a chasm. She practices hands, faces, perspectives, believing that one day she will achieve a state of technical mastery that will grant her permission to begin the real work. This is a seductive and dangerous myth. It mistakes the nature of practice, turning it from a verb into a destination.
Practice is not a finite course of study you complete before the main event. For the writer, the artist, the creator of any kind, it is the main event. The practice is the work. The sketchbook isn’t a waiting room; it’s the studio. The morning pages aren’t a warm-up; they are the foundation of the day’s real writing. We fall into the trap of believing that we must first assemble a perfect, complete toolkit before we can build the house. But the house is built with the tools you have, and you acquire new ones as you build, often inventing them to solve problems you only encounter by starting.
The Squiggly Line as Anchor
Consider the cartoonist’s squiggly line—the one in the margin of a notebook, the quick gesture drawing that captures a posture in three strokes. It is not a failure to render a photorealistic arm. It is a complete and successful expression in its own right. It has energy, intention, and life. It is practice, yes, but it is also a finished piece of communication. It exists. This is the mindset we must cultivate.
The discipline required here is not the discipline of relentless, future-focused drilling. It is the discipline of presence. It’s the discipline to accept that your 'practice' and your 'real work' are the same thing, just viewed through different lenses of intention. The day you start your graphic novel, you will not stop practicing. You will simply be practicing within the context of a larger frame. You will still draw bad panels. You will still wrestle with perspective. The learning, the fumbling, the incremental improvement—that never stops. To wait for it to stop is to wait forever.
So, Corinne, the answer to your question is: you start now. You start by redefining your practice as the act of creation itself. Let your next sketchbook page be page one of your story. Let the characters be drawn with the same hand that draws your practice squiggles. Let them be imperfect. The discipline is in embracing the unfinishable nature of getting better. It’s in understanding that the goal is not to arrive at a point of flawless execution, but to remain forever in the fertile, messy, and vital state of becoming. The work begins not when you are ready, but because you begin.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: