Making it and showing it

A young man in Zagazig draws cartoons of his street. The fruit seller arguing with a customer, the boys playing football between parked cars, the old man who has sat on the same chair outside the same door for as long as anyone remembers. The drawings are sharp and funny, and almost nobody has seen them.

People tell him he is talented, which is true and misses the point. Drawing was never his difficulty. He draws every evening without being asked.

His difficulty is the other thing. Putting a drawing where people who know him can see it, attached to his name, and waiting to find out whether they like it.

These are two separate acts, and they ask for different kinds of nerve. The first is a private conversation between a person and a problem: how to catch that argument in five lines. The second is public. It invites judgement from neighbours, cousins, strangers and the man on the chair. It can change how people see him.

There is a simple way to tell them apart. Last month he opened an account with no name and no face and posted a few of the cartoons there. It felt easy. Nobody could trace them to him, and so nothing much was at stake, even when one of them was shared widely.

That ease is the clue. The drawing was never the hard part. The hard part is being seen to have made it.

Most people who say they are not creative are describing the second problem and blaming the first. Once the two are separated, it becomes possible to work on the one that is actually holding them back, rather than practising a skill they already have.