A story about creativity
Doodle and the Scribble That Had a Name
Doodle scribbles over a whole page in black and cannot say why. A story about drawing a feeling you have not got words for yet.
3 minutes to read aloud Β· π Happy
Doodle covered the whole page in black.
Not a picture. Just scribble, round and round, so hard that the pencil went through in two places.
"What's that one?" asked Dreamy.
"Nothing."
Doodle turned the page and did another one.
This is what happens when Doodle's feelings get too big. The words go away completely and the scribbling starts, and Doodle could not have told you what was wrong if you had asked for an hour. Something had happened at school. Doodle knew that much. The rest was just a black shape sitting in Doodle's chest.
Dreamy sat down next to Doodle and watched three more pages get scribbled.
"Do the thing you always tell me," said Dreamy.
"What thing?"
"Colour how you feel. Then give it a name."
"I am colouring how I feel."
"You're hiding it," said Dreamy. "There's a difference. Do it properly."
So Doodle took a clean page and slowed down, and actually looked at the black shape in the chest, and drew it on purpose.
It came out spiky. Spiky and tight and dark in the middle with a hot orange edge. Doodle added the orange without meaning to.
They both looked at it.
"What's it called?" said Dreamy.
Doodle looked at the spikes for a long time.
"Left out," said Doodle at last, and was astonished, because that was exactly right and Doodle had not known it until the pencil said so. "They did a game at lunch and they didn't ask me."
There it was. The whole thing, in three words, which had been completely unreachable twenty minutes earlier.
Doodle pinned it to the wall. It is still there, spiky and orange, labelled LEFT OUT in wobbly capitals.
The strange part is that it stopped being so heavy the moment it had a name and a shape and somewhere to live. A feeling in your chest goes round and round. A feeling on a page just sits there and lets you look at it.
Doodle turns any feeling into something colourful you can hold.
That is not a small talent. It is how Doodle says the things Doodle cannot say.
