Tag Archives: meg cabot

Draw What You See, Not What You Know

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(This post contains affiliate links. If you click on a link that takes you to Amazon and purchase something, we get a commission. It doesn’t cost you anything extra.) In Meg Cabot’s All-American Girl, 15-year-old artist Samantha Madison’s parents send Samantha to an art class as punishment for charging the mean girls at her school for drawings of the mean girls with their favorite celebrities. Her parents considered it unfair because Samantha wasn’t charging her friends and other nice people in the school for the same service. Samantha doesn’t want to go, but what’s a girl to do?

At Samantha’s first class, the instructor tells the students to render an accurate rendition of the still life on the table. She explicitly tells them to draw what they see. Students choose their media and create their art. At the end of class, the students place their art on the windows, and the teacher critiques them.

Samantha feels bad for the other students. Her art is superior to theirs, even though she is younger than them and hasn’t been in class as long as they have. She hopes that the instructor won’t praise her too much because she doesn’t want the other artists to feel bad about their work.

When the instructor gets to Samantha’s art, instead of praising the art, the instructor tells Samantha that she’s disappointed. The canvas doesn’t show what Samantha saw. The grapes are perfect, unlike the still life grapes, the pear is in the wrong place, and Samantha added a pineapple. Samantha drew what she knew, rather than what she saw.

The same thing happens when people learn something new. We tend to believe we know what the instructor wants. Rather than wait for the instructor’s instructions or the rest of the class to catch up, we do our own thing. We jump ahead of the training. Much of the time, it’s not a big deal.

Sometimes, we end up in the weeds. We thought we were headed to one destination, but the instructor was taking us to another. When we don’t follow, we end up lost.

One of the hardest things for people to do is to wait for others to catch up. However, rushing ahead may end up creating more havoc or causing you to miss important things. Sit back, take a breath, and draw what you see.

What does All-American Girl say about the flow and creativity?

Message from Sima, our cat:
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If you want to learn more about creativity, check out my books:

‘All-American Girl’ and the Flow

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(This article uses affiliate links. If you click on a link that takes you to Amazon and you buy a product, we get a commission. It doesn’t cost you anything extra.) In Meg Cabot’s All-American Girl, Samantha Madison is an artist, who loves to draw. When she talks about her art, she says:

When you are drawing, it is like the whole world around you ceases to exist. It is just you and the page and the pencil… When you are drawing, you are not aware of time passing, or what is happening around you. When a drawing is going really well, you could sit down at one o’clock and not look up again until five, and not even have any idea that so much time has gone by until someone mentions it, because you have been so caught up in what you are creating…

When you are drawing, you are in your own world, of your own creation.

And there is no world better than that.

The Flow

Mihály Csikszentmihalyi called this “the flow.” It is a state as Cabot describes it through her narrator, Madison. You can achieve this state through other endeavors, including sports, when solving a complex problem, and when participating in other creative activities. It is also known as “in the zone.”

‘All-American Girl’

All-American Girl is a quasi-romance seen through the eyes of a 15-year-old girl, who happens to save the President’s life. It comes with all the angst, worry, and love triangles that you might expect from the genre. It also faces the question of learning how to become one’s true self.

Creativity Notes

If you want drawing to be your thing, I recommend joining our Patreon and looking at the 2025 Advent Calendar for easy ways to draw Christmas. If you want to learn more about creativity, check out my books: