What My Art Teaches Me About Writing (And Vice Versa)
How to steal problem-solving methods from crafts you don't practice
Most writers treat detail selection as intuition. Sequential artists know it’s architecture.
Intimate moments zoom in.
When a character’s micro-expression becomes critical—when the reader needs to see the muscle at the jaw tighten, the pupils dilate—you reduce environmental scope and bring the camera close. In sequential art, this means a panel focused on the face. In prose, it means stripping away extraneous detail and narrowing to the gesture that matters.
The principle works in reverse. When I’m drawing a scene and can’t figure out the right framing, I write it first. The prose tells me where to look.
Different crafts solve the same fundamental problem—what matters in this moment?—through different methods. Stepping outside your primary medium teaches you something about it you’d never discover otherwise.
The Bidirectional Relationship:
I work across illustration and writing because each craft keeps demanding the other.
Designing Arunean naval uniforms, I needed to understand how the fabric moved, how the countershading worked across different postures, where the closures sat on the body. So I drew turnarounds. The art revealed things the writing couldn’t—that moment when hands reach behind to secure the martingale strap showed practiced familiarity, physical flexibility, preparation as ritual. When I returned to the manuscript, I knew exactly how Somerset moved.
The way he adjusts his coat became a tell for his psychological state—controlled when fastening buttons, desperate when tearing the martingale loose. I learned that by drawing his hands.
But the reverse happens constantly. I’ll be working on a sequential piece and the composition clicks when I think about it narratively first.
Take this page—an Imperial officer caught by a Drukhari, vulnerable and out of uniform. The wide shot establishes the power dynamic: the alien looming, the human exposed, the threat made spatial. But that’s not where the emotional weight lives.
So I overlay the close-up. His face. The fangs. The sweat, the pain. The Drukhari’s eyes stay out of frame because the threat isn’t what he’s thinking—it’s what the human is experiencing. The zoom tells you what matters: not the spectacle of capture, but the cost of it.
This is what sequential art teaches writing. When emotion becomes critical, everything else falls away. The environment doesn’t matter anymore. The reader needs to see this face, right now, feeling this.
The same principle works in prose. You can describe the full scene—the threat, the room, the captor looming—or you can cut everything except: After moments, he winces, wet eyelashes parting to watch a drop of blood break between his boots.
One version gives context. The other gives intimacy.
The art showed me how to write it. The writing told me where the camera needed live for that moment.
What Zoom Actually Means:
Zoom is information hierarchy. What does the audience need to process right now? What can you strip away? What must be present?
In visual storytelling, you zoom by adjusting shot distance and environmental detail. A wide shot establishes location. A close-up on hands gripping a railing tells you about tension, exhaustion, determination—without showing the whole figure.
In prose, you zoom with sentence focus and sensory selection. You can pull wide by describing the full scene—storm, deck, crew scrambling—or push in by isolating a single detail: The polished, worn wood of the spokes. Salt spray on his knuckles.
Same craft. Different execution.
When I’m stuck in writing, I sketch the scene. When I’m stuck in a drawing, I write the beat. They’re two languages describing the same moment. Translation between them reveals what’s actually important versus what’s decorative noise.
You Don’t Need to Be Multidisciplinary to Use This:
Most people aren’t working across multiple mediums professionally. You don’t need to become an illustrator to benefit from this principle.
Experiment with adjacent craft forms as diagnostic tools.
Stuck on a character? Sketch them, even badly. Deciding “where are their hands?” and “how do they stand?” forces specificity that prose sometimes lets you avoid. You might discover your stoic military officer has a nervous habit of adjusting his cuffs—something you never wrote because you never had to make his hands do something visible.
Stuck on pacing? Block it out like a storyboard. Rough thumbnails, stick figures, whatever. You’re not making art—you’re clarifying what happens and in what order. Sometimes narrative problems are structural problems. Visual blocking makes structure obvious.
Can’t figure out your setting’s geography? Draw a map, even a terrible one. Spatial relationships become clear when you’re forced to put distances in relationship to each other.
And maybe you’re thinking: I don’t have time for that. I don’t have the energy to step outside my work and try learning something new.
Fair. Here’s the version that requires zero new skills:
Watch a movie or read a book you love. Then analyze it.
Not as a consumer—as a craftsperson. Ask:
Why does this scene land?
What’s the shot composition doing?
Where does the camera focus, and why there?
What sensory details does the prose prioritize?
What gets shown versus implied?
You’re already consuming stories. Start dissecting them. That analysis teaches you how other crafts think about the same problems you’re solving. A well-composed shot in a film can teach you about prose focus. A perfectly paced chapter can teach you about visual rhythm.
The point isn’t mastery of a second craft. The point is borrowing another craft’s problem-solving method to illuminate your own.
I learned 3D modeling and the full gamedev pipeline years ago—purely for curiosity, never intending professional work in games. Understanding how 3D artists think about form, depth, lighting, and camera angles changed how I approach 2D illustration. I started thinking about perspective and sightlines and where the light source lives in ways I’d never considered.
That knowledge didn’t come from studying illustration harder. It came from stepping outside illustration entirely.
Creative Variety as Fuel:
Some people thrive on singular focus. I’m not one of them.
If I write for too long without drawing, my prose gets flat. If I draw for too long without writing, my compositions get stale. I need variety—not as distraction, but as cross-pollination.
This isn’t universal. But if you’re someone who gets restless, who feels like your work suffers when you do the same thing too long, consider that variety might not be procrastination. It might be how your creative engine actually works.
Switching between mediums keeps each fresh. The writing benefits from visual thinking. The art benefits from narrative structure. They feed each other.
When you return to your primary craft after time away, you often see it differently. Problems that seemed insurmountable become obvious. Solutions you couldn’t find reveal themselves because you’ve been thinking about structure through a different framework.
The Practical Takeaway:
Steal ruthlessly from how other crafts think.
Ask yourself:
If this scene were a comic panel, what would I show?
If this description were a photograph, where would the camera be?
If this character were a sculpture, how would they hold their weight?
If this plot were architecture, where are the load-bearing walls?
Different crafts ask different questions. Borrowing those questions—even when you’re not executing in that medium—teaches you what’s actually essential versus what’s habit.
For me, the lesson was simple: when something matters, zoom in. Cut the environment to the detail that carries weight.
Intimacy requires focus. Focus requires knowing what to cut.
And knowing what to cut? That’s what separates craft from noise.
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Fair winds,
—D.S. Black