Which is harder, drawing or writing?

[McDuffies]

Which is harder, drawing or writing?

[RobboAKAscooby]

Generally I'd have to say drawing because I still have much to learn and it can get frustrating at times. The more frustrated I get the more mistakes I make and a page that should have taken an hour or so to draw can end up taking a whole night.

Of course writing isn't without it's troubles but usually these are external like someone interrupting me while I'm in the groove (and not taking the hint to bugger off).

To be honest any creative aspect can be difficult if I get into the wrong mood.

[MariaAndMichelle]

Certainly drawing takes longer, and as Schoob says, it can get frustrating. This is not to say that writing doesn't have its difficult moments, as well. But yeah, overall, we're gonna have to go with drawing.

To be honest, we've had a creative block for a LONG time now. Nothing really seems to be going anywhere.

[Dutch!]

I find the artwork side of things to be 'harder', if that's the word we're going with. It takes longer and for me, I can sometimes get a tad grumpy and impatient knowing this will take me an hour or two out of my evenings after work to get it all done to a standard that I can at least be happy posting up, let alone completely satisfied with. For me it's more the time issue, because a hefty day of teaching, particularly if half the kids are in... well... let's just say... a mood... the more time to wind down after work the better.

[Terotrous]

I think it probably depends on the person's natural talents. For some people, drawing ability comes extremely easily. Others have to work much harder at it. Similarly, there are some people who just can't be funny or write a story that makes any kind of sense no matter how hard they try at it.

From a purely time-based perspective, it's probably quicker to write than draw in most cases, but I don't know if making good art is inherently any "harder" than good writing.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

It depends on what definitiion we're using for "writing." Because to me, writing for like a book versus writing for my comic are two totally different animals.

Writing, just regular writing writing, is very easy for me. It feels very natural to translate my thoughts out through my fingertips and onto paper. One of the most basic forms of expression besides plain old talking, at least for me. Of course there are times where I know what I want to say but can't quite phrase it, but I can typically get around that faster than when I hit a block while drawing.

If I make a mistake while writing and later want to change a phrase, paragraph, whatever segment, it's really easy to go right into the material and snip it out and rephrase it the way I want it. Drawing though, I have to pretty much get it right on the first go around or else I need to start again wholecloth. (I realize a lot of this is due ot the limitations of working with traditional media as opposed to using a tablet, but it still stands in many ways). For instance, I go back to look at comics I drew a while ago, and I can't really tweak them to make them better because the basic LAYOUT is even still disenchanting no matter what I do. "Fixing" them would require me to toss out the thing entirely and resketch, re ink, recolor everything.

Of course this depends on what stage my work is at when I catch an error- sketching is obviously an easy fix, and inking and coloring aren't too hard to repair on the computer barring special circumstances. Yeah, the computer really helps a lot when editing, like at least 95% of the time, and that's editing with only a mouse . Can't be ENTIRELY traditional, you know.

With drawing there's also more variables due to the multi-dimensional form of the media. I think of writing as one-dimensional, guiding the reader solely through time, perhaps doing some jumps and skips now and then. But drawing represents two dimensions at the very least, and three if you want to include time. You can fit a lot of information into one panel that might require pages upon pages of written word (or at least a VERY formidable control of the language) to adequately represent. This also is more taxing mentally, because I need to consider what I'm showing, what I'm leaving out, whether it's okay to start omitting things once I get lazy or whether it will unintentionally change a reader's feel of a scene.

Now, like I said, writing for my comic is different than writing for words. Writing for my comic requires me to think visually, seeing a little movie play out in my head. When I do non-comic writing, I write by how the words "taste" together and don't do a lot of time visualizing, which is why my written settings are bleak and unexplroed. To write for my comic I have to "see" what's going on, and try to envision the best way to give the reader the same effect.

Ooh, just got an idea for a new thread topic

So, writing, drawing, and writing-for-comics are each a different kind of difficulty for me. Things that are easy or a non-issue in one of them may be a considerable stumbling block in another. Both writing and drawing come naturally for me, but it doesn't mean that I don't have struggles with them from time to time.

[McDuffies]

Interesting, because based on my experience, I thought that there's be more people who find writing harder.

I don't think of "harder" as activity which takes more time or anything. I think that writing is harder because it takes more energy out of me, it takes more thinking, it makes me want to procrastinate more often on it, etc. Drawing, for me, is largely relaxing, visceral.
I don't think I'm a natural talent for drawing. For one, my learning curve was never very flattering.
Thing is, writing basically means organising ideas, putting them in places you see fit, showing them in certain order and timing. Coming up with ideas was never hard for me, it's organizing them, juggling them, filling space between those ideas with something meaningful that is hard for me. With drawing, it doesn't get larger than organizing a single page, and a big part of it is repetitive activities which I can do with my brain on minimum. I often used drawing as a relaxation between studying when I was in college.
It is possible that I have higher criteria for writing than for drawing. With writing, I always find myself returning to same scenes over and over and rewriting them, I'm never really satisfied with how particular things play out. This happens to much less extent with my drawing.
But I simply feel that when you're writing, you're juggling a lot of things, keeping them all in your virtual memory and trying to find their place, while drawing is a much more simple thing.

[Cope]

When it comes to creating comics, it's pretty much always the art that makes me want to ragequit. I enjoy doodling idly, but producing art in accord with the unreasonable demands of a story is just an exercise in frustration.

[CMikeNIke]

I find writing to be much harder, and harder to get better at for me because of the lopsided time spent drawing vs writing. Drawing one page, from roughs to finish is about 3 days, though that's if I'm not doing other projects or work. On the other hand, the time I have to just sit down and write and edit and adjust etc. is sporadic at best, and individual pages can be pretty light on dialog at times, making it take even longer to get practice in.

Also slowing my writing is the completely different ways to improve. Really, for writing, you just have to write and read other literature, there aren't really specific tips or strategies to get better at one part of my writing, but I can find near unlimited tutorials, walkthroughs and methods to draw.

And if you've read through all this babbling to here, you will have a clear understanding of how poor I set my thoughts in order... well, ta da, writing done the Mike way.

[RobboAKAscooby]

I often used drawing as a relaxation between studying when I was in college.

See I'm the same with writing, I find it easy to just drift into the story and free-write for a while.

With writing, I always find myself returning to same scenes over and over and rewriting them, I'm never really satisfied with how particular things play out.

But then I have the same problem here, I can write one hundred pages and only use about ten.

[Phact0rri]

I don't know if i could call one harder than the other. They are mutally exclusive with their sets of Pros and Cons. Drawing is a lot more relaxing, but I can have time run away from me when I'm writing.

[Terotrous]

Interesting, because based on my experience, I thought that there's be more people who find writing harder.

One thing I think may be a factor is that it's harder to "practice" writing. Practicing art is very straightforward, you just draw a lot of things and you'll make gradual improvement, pretty much regardless of your skill level. I'm not sure whether or not writing can be improved through practice, but if it can, the effect is much more subtle.

I think my writing has gotten better over time, but it seems more related to the passage of time than anything else. It probably takes some combination of practicing your own writing and consuming the writing of others to get better.

[McDuffies]

Interesting, because based on my experience, I thought that there's be more people who find writing harder.

One thing I think may be a factor is that it's harder to "practice" writing. Practicing art is very straightforward, you just draw a lot of things and you'll make gradual improvement, pretty much regardless of your skill level. I'm not sure whether or not writing can be improved through practice, but if it can, the effect is much more subtle.

I think my writing has gotten better over time, but it seems more related to the passage of time than anything else. It probably takes some combination of practicing your own writing and consuming the writing of others to get better.

Well writing can be learned if not practiced, I don't think you can build any sort of physical reflex for writing. If every time I drew I had to think "wait, how does human body look again?" it would probably also be more stressful, but with writing there's nothing you reflexively do, unless you want your work to be very derivative, I guess. The process is also different each time because no matter how much you formalize your writing process, each story is still substantially different from the other.

[peterabnny]

With me, it depends on the cartoon as some camera angles and views are harder to draw than others, but generally, it's harder for me to draw than write.

[Mo]

I'm with McDuffies on this one: I find writing harder, nowadays. Drawing is more time-consuming, true, but it is also very relaxing. When I draw I just zone out and concentrate on lines and shapes and shades and colours. Writing casually, such as when writing a letter or writing a blog entry, is relaxing as well, but writing a story, or a comic strip, is much more challenging to me; mostly because I'm finding it very hard to evaluate my writing. With a drawing, it's very easy for me to find the flaws and to figure out what I need to improve, or what looks wrong or boring. With writing, it is much more difficult for me to determine whether anyone (other than myself) would enjoy reading it, and whether they would find my jokes funny or characters engaging. I worry much more when I write than when I draw. Perhaps it's a question of confidence or experience.

There was a time in my late teenage years though, where things were the other way around: I spent most of my time writing stories then, and it came easy to me. The words just came out of me, I didn't even think about it. However, although the process of actually writing came easy to me, finishing a story was... a different story. I'd get bored with one story quickly, or just happen to get another idea that I thought was better, and abandoned most projects very quickly.

[Bookwyrms2]

I would find drawing more skill intensive - it's a more complex task and I believe it requires a greater investment of time and effort to develop skills in it. That said, the drawing itself is a fairly easy process. I fairly rarely get 'artists block' - sometimes a panel may push my level of skill, but I always generally know what I want to draw. I struggle with writer's block all the time. Even when I know how I want the story to flow, it's often a struggle to get it down on paper. There are times when the writing just flows naturally, but the art is almost always like that.

[Yeahduff]

Drawing is work. I can sit down and just do it, and while it takes a while, I pretty much know what I have to do and how to do it. Writing is where I get stuck. It's so much more abstract, I can add and subtract stuff forever. Kinda where I'm stuck at the moment.

[McDuffies]

ditto. I dunno what's the right measure of sideplots to include in my superhero comic.

[Labasaur]

I've been drawing constantly ever since I can remember, and so I've got boxes filled with old sketchbooks. Didn't get into writing until I was older though, and although I've been told I'm good at it, it isn't at all the second nature that drawing is. When I wrote a story for a class once, I turned it in pleased. About a month later when I read it again I thought it was crap. With drawing there are certainly things that I'm not good at, but it's easy to notice and adjust on the spot. On the other hand, you can't draw in a lot of places, but you certainly can write in most... And when you write in a public place, people don't stand around to ask questions like they do when you draw. I still think that drawing is easier for me though =]

[MixedMyth]

It really depends on what I'm drawing or writing. If I'm writing a nonfiction piece with lots of citations, that's waaay harder than writing fiction. Likewise, if I"m drawing a picture with lots of perspective tricks and background details that's way harder than doodling. So it depends what kind or writing and what kind of drawing we're comparing here.