Drawing the moon

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Here are Galileo’s drawings of the moon, made over 400 years ago. And here are my comparatively pathetic doodles of the moon phases, copied from online diagrams yesterday in my diary to try to memorize them:

Why bother copying a diagram of the moon? Because copying is how we learn, of course, and in the course of learning how to learn again, I’ve discovered that if you want to understand something, you need to draw it out, with your own pencil and paper, to force yourself to really look at what you’re copying and internalize it.

Even better if you can start sneaking what you’re learning into your work:

Filed under: the moon

Recent candor

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

It’s not like I was holding that much back before — unfortunately, I tend to do my thinking out loud — but for better or worse, I’ve been more candid than usual in recent interviews. I don’t know what’s brought it about, really, other than: Being truthful and open feels really good, but even more than that, it’s not boring. So many podcasts are so boring and who wants to be boring? I’m also just genuinely happy and relaxed right now, so, I dunno, I just don’t feel like bullshitting. (You’d think the opposite would be true? That I’d have more patience for bullshitting now that I’m happy and relaxed? Life is weird.)

My interview with Jonathan Small on Write About Now:

And my interview (in two parts) with Chris Do on The Futur:

Filed under: interviews

Start before you think you’re ready

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

Here’s Stephen Harrigan (talking about his book, Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas) and a reproduction of one of Botticelli’s paintings of St. Augustine. (Like almost all writers, St. Augustine, too, wondered about the problem of how to begin. )

In my experience writing books, it isn’t just a “resistance” thing or a “perfectionist” thing or a fear thing, it’s more about research and wondering if you’ve done enough of it. Research becomes your way of procrastinating, because, let’s face it, research is just more fun than writing. (Me, personally, I became a professional writer so I could be a professional reader.)

Steven Johnson says the answer is to “research as you go”:

Email and social media and games are obvious distractions. In my experience, the more subtle threat – particularly for non-fiction writers – comes via the eminently reasonable belief that you’re not ready to start writing, because you haven’t finished your research yet.

And here’s David McCullough:

There’s an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing. When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know.

Maybe that’s where fear comes in. As Greil Marcus put it in Lipstick Traces:

I began to poke around, and the more I found, the less I knew.

The biggest help to me with my books comes from something Stewart Brand said to Brian Eno, captured in his diary, A Year of Swollen Appendices:

“Why don’t you assume you’ve written your book already — and all you have to do now is find it?”

Why it’s hard to fake kids’ drawings

Monday, November 4, 2019

A week or so ago, Robert Sharp wrote to me asking me about the quality in children’s drawings that seems impossible to fake. What I wrote back was: It seems to me that children, when they are drawing, are pushing the very edge of their abilities, while adults, when trying to mimic children’s drawings, are holding back somehow.

Lynda Barry had a much more interesting take during her interview on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters podcast. She says it has to do with line, gesture, and the link between drawing and seeing and thinking:

A kid’s drawing isn’t line…. A kid’s drawing is gesture. It’s natural human movement. Another place we see that is in the sciences. If you watch a scientist… watch how they move their hands on the whiteboard when they’re thinking? It’s astonishing… the parallels between how their hands look and how their drawings look and four-year-olds. It’s amazing.

It would make the physicists just cry to show that it looks just like four-year-olds, but the thing that I’ve come to realize is: What if that’s what a line looks like, not just when you’re getting an idea, but that the line itself is giving you an idea. That’s the part people don’t remember or suspect about drawing: That drawing can go, not just from your head to the page, but definitely from the page up your hand and into your head. That’s the kind of drawing that kids are doing. They’re drawing and then seeing what it is that they’re drawing.

(This reminds me of how my son Jules, even now, will add a few lines, then sit back, admire what he’s done, pump his fists in excitement, and then keep adding lines.)

Some chalkboards from my files (though only one scientist):