That Kinda Itchy Feeling.

On chasing the urge to make something — before you know what it is.

It starts with a kinda itchy feeling.

I’m on YouTube, watching some old UPA cartoon from the late ’50s. The colors are bright and flat, the lines a little off-register, the bodies shaped like bowling pins. Something about it makes me want to make something. Not necessarily a cartoon, or even characters like these — I just want to be inside the feeling I get from watching it.

Or maybe it comes from a book. I’ll be reading P. G. Wodehouse or E. B. White or Anne Patchett, and suddenly I want to borrow that voice, try it on for a while, see what happens if I write from inside it.

Sometimes it’s a memory — a feeling I had when I was three or seven or fourteen — that I want to replay like an old record, just to understand it better, to feel it again.

So I sit down at my desk and pull out some colors that match the mood in my head. Not the literal colors from the screen, but the ones that feel right while I’m still under the spell of that inspiration. Or I write a sentence to see what it feels like to write like that — not a parody, more of a collaboration. It’s a fragile moment, a bit of a high-wire act, but if I stay with it long enough, it starts to feel incorporated into the soup of me.

People think artists start with an idea — some statement they want to make, or an image they want to see in a frame. But that’s not my experience. For me, it begins with a feeling, a sensation, an almost physical itch that says, Do a thing like this. Be in this feeling. Only after I start inhabiting that space do I begin to look for a form, a framework to channel it into.

So I start to play.

Sometimes it’s clear right away where the feeling wants to go, and a drawing, an essay, or a video begins to take shape. Other times, I lose the thread midway; the spell breaks, and I no longer know where to go. It gets frustrating — a wrestling match, a chore.

Or maybe it changes direction completely. What began as a memory becomes a different memory, or an image, or something I can’t name. The whole thing shifts, a pinball ricocheting toward a new corner.

I get ideas all day — when I’m walking the dogs, in the shower, reading, half-asleep. They rarely show up when it’s convenient. So I open my phone and drop them into a folder called Pretty Good Ideas. Sometimes I can capture the thought clearly; other times it’s just a link, a screenshot, or a half-sentence that feels obvious when I jot it down. If I’m in the mood, I keep writing and end up with a decent first draft.

I go back to that folder a lot. Much of what’s there has expired — I can’t remember what I meant or why I was excited about it. But sometimes, working with one of those half-formed scraps, I end up somewhere completely new.

That’s why it’s worth catching those sparks while they’re still in the air, even if most of them never catch fire.

Every artist I read about seems to follow some version of this strange process: a tickle, a pulse, then a period of playing and seeing where it goes.

A musician hears three notes in a row and starts looping them, humming nonsense lyrics until they turn into a song. A writer jots a sentence that grows into a short story, then a book.

It’s all so serendipitous — a blossom blown off a tree, landing in a river, drifting until it catches on a bank and takes root. For every tree that grows, a thousand blossoms are swept away.

We think that developing our skills and tools will lead us to the art we want to make.

And yes, we need them — they fan and shape that first flicker — but technical perfection is never the point. There are artists whose craft is impressive but whose work feels hollow because they’ve lost touch with that inner impulse. And there are others whose work is clumsy or crude yet moves us to tears.

Artists are sensitive because we have to be — paying attention to those first, faint feelings, and trusting them even when they make no sense. Letting them breathe before trying to shape them. Having faith that they might become something if you give them time.

So I keep telling myself to stay open, stay patient, and wait for that faint flicker to show up — and hope it wants to play.

Do you get the itch? Let me know in the comments.

Your pal,

Danny