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In Flight With David
from In Flight With David McPhail by David McPhail (Heinemann, 1996)
I've always loved to draw. I loved to draw when I was a young child, and I still love to draw as a middle-aged man. I've drawn thousands - even tens of thousands - of pictures, sometimes the same one over and over, but I still love to draw...
The first drawings I ever did were on pieces of brown paper bags that my grandmother cut up for me. I drew with a fat, black crayon just right for my chubby little fingers.
I can remember loading up my Radio Stake wagon with drawings I had done and taking them over to my girlfriend's house. I think her mother burned them.
Years later, I wrote a story called The Magical Drawings of Moony B. Finch about a little boy who loved to draw. Moony was me - or more to the point, Moony was who I wanted to be. Moony could draw so well that his drawings came to life.
Mine never did.
In a way I don't mind. My drawings require more from a viewers imagination - which is perhaps how it should be.
Sometimes I feel as though I write words just to go with the pictures that dance through my head. (The pictures I see in my head are fuzzy and out of focus. That's why I draw them - so I can better see what they look like. If those images in my head were sharp and vivid, I'd have no need to draw them.) I don't think of myself as a writer. Stories just seem to come to me. I write only after I feel a prickly sensation stirring in my brain. By now I know this means there's a story in there trying to get out.
I'm convinced that stories find me, not the other way around - and if I'm not prepared, they move on, perhaps never to return. That's why I try to be ready. I always have a pen and paper nearby. Some stories come rather quickly and easily. I feel as though a voice is telling me the story and all I have to do is write it down. (Sometimes I have a hard time keeping up.)"
The story continues in In Flight With David McPhail