Why Scribblings?

If the truth be known, I was working so hard to get the blog started in the workshop, that my brain turned to mush. Naming my work stymies me, but you can only have so many pieces in an art exhibit listed as "Untitled" before it gets really confusing. My writing clubs also expect titles on work submitted. Naming things is so daunting to me that it's a wonder that my sons even have names. (There is a story there too. Perhaps I'll tell at a much later date.) Anyway, during the blog workshop Scribblings popped into my head, and that became the name. Not that I'm trying to defend it, but the more I consider it, the more appropriate it seems.

One definition for the word scribble is "to write quickly or in a way that makes it hard to read." If you've seen my handwriting, you know that mine won't win any penmanship awards. On the computer my writing is fraught with so many typos that sometimes it's also hard to decipher. There is also an implication that scribbled writing might not make a lot of sense. I can't deny it - that applies to me as well. I view the blog as a more immediate way of writing than a manuscript, something short, and an excuse to ramble without following a plot. I'm learning lessons along the way. Reading over my few attempts reiterates that there is a reason publishers have editors. 

Another definition of scribble has to do with marks that children make when they first put pencils or crayons to paper. In the most influential art education textbook for decades, Creative and Mental Growth, author Viktor Lowenfeld, defines the stages artistic development. The first stage is the scribble stage, from two to four years of age. Within that stage are steps, the last one being when the child begins to name the scribbles. Lowenfeld considered this a very important stage, even calling it one of the "great occasions in the life of a human" because it marked the "change from a kinesthetic thinking in terms of motion to imaginative thinking in terms of pictures.....the ability to visualize in pictures."

So here I am, a beginning blogger, fledgling novelist, trying to develop more imaginative thinking. Perhaps Scribblings fits me just fine. We all have to start somewhere!