Chapter 1 - Doodles and The Shadow-Line

Summary

Although doodling is a break from putting words on the page, it is not necessarily a pause from writing, because the process includes reflection. This chapter explores the ways doodling and writing may have intertwined for Conrad, who – like his characters Blunt, Razumov and Stevie – doodled; in the Shadow-Line holograph there are 109 doodles. By moving his doodles from the margins of the manuscript to the center of discussion, a visual portrait emerges of an artist for whom “procrastination” and productivity worked in delayed symbiosis.