Fresh back from teaching Mastering Setting with Kelly Going (K.L. Going), I am excited about a concept that arose and wanted to share it with my writing peeps. On Friday evening, we were fortunate to have Melanie Hall as a a guest. Melanie is an illustrator whose work I would characterize as musical and flowing. Every illustration reveals a dreamscape of some kind, in a very Chagall-like way. As it turns out, Chagall is one of Melanie’s major influences.

One of the things I most love about having illustrators as guests for writing workshops is that artists are wonderful at showing process. They bring sketchbooks along and show us how many drawings it took to get to a final characterization or composition.

Melanie’s sketchbooks gave us a great opportunity to talk about the concept of “sketching.” I pointed out the difference between artists–who do sketch after sketch after sketch–and writers…