When I was a kid, writing and drawing were joined in my imagination as a single magical scribe-like activity. I got one half of the two-part equation from each of my parents. My father was an editor and writer and my mother was a commercial artist. In the beginning, drawing was dominant because it came naturally while writing had to be learned. But writing represented the ultimate power, embodied in a pile of typed or printed pages like one of the manuscripts in my father’s office or one of the dense books without pictures in it on his bookshelf.