“An American question: ‘How do you know I don’t have a gun?’ … I backed away from Marquise and the gunman, hands out, half-up. Part of me thinking ‘stay,’ thinking, ‘what a story.’ Thinking they wouldn’t draw. Thinking what a strange verb — draw. Like together we might make a picture.”
Jeff Sharlet. The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War. W. W. Norton & Co., 2023. p. 234.
When I wrote my novel Most Famous Short Film of All Time, for all the time I spent contemplating the scene of Lev talking to Lear in the ice cream shop over the notebook, I don’t think the wordplay on “draw” came to mind. It changes the scene in my imagination. To draw is to shoot is to start over.