Copying is how we learn
“You start when you’re young and you copy. You straight up copy.”
—Shel Silverstein
All artists begin by copying. (I wrote a book about it.) But what’s instructive about hanging out with kids all day is understanding on a day-to-day kid’s eye level just how natural copying comes to us.
My kids (5 & 2) are gleeful, natural born copycats. Copying is how they wrap their hands and hearts and heads around the world. They not only copy drawings and music and recreate the world with blocks and play, they mimic their parents, they mimic each other, they mimic kids on the playground, etc. Copying and mimicry is as natural to them as breathing. There’s nobody around telling them they should do any differently, nobody saying something dumb like, “Don’t you want to do something original?” So they go about their mimicry, unfettered by any adult notions about originality.
When my son got into engines last year, he spent endless hours copying diagrams out of car repair manuals.
Soon, he was into drawing musical instruments:
And at that point, since he’d landed on one of my own passions, I decided to start copying him. I would copy his drawings into my notebook, trying to steal some of his line style:
Then he started copying sheet music, just for kicks:
I’ve decided to copy that from him, too, and start copying piano pieces I want to learn by hand. There’s a beautiful story told by Paul Elie in Reinventing Bach:
Johann Christoph [Bach’s older brother] kept a collection of sheet music locked in a cabinet with latticed wood doors. Bach, perhaps now twelve, yearned to make music, not run through the exercises his brother assigned him, which he had already mastered. One night while the others were asleep he slipped a hand through the latticework, took hold of a sheet of music with thumb and forefinger, drew it out through the slats, and copied the notation onto a fresh sheet. Working by moonlight, he copied the manuscript the next night, and the next, until the moon entered a new phase. After six months of moonlit nights he had a complete work. Finally one morning he brought the fresh piece of sheet music to the clavier and played it….
Bach himself liked to tell that story, and his point was that this is how he educated himself and learned how to make music—by deeply studying the work of other composers. One of the best ways to internalize someone’s work is to copy it by hand.
Here’s Nicholson Baker, with his advice to writers:
Copy out things that you really love. Any book. Put the quotation marks around it, put the date that you’re doing the copying out, and then copy it out. You’ll find that you just soak into that prose, and you’ll find that the comma means something, that it’s there for a reason, and that that adjective is there for a reason, because the copying out, the handwriting, the becoming an apprentice—or in a way, a servant—to that passage in the book makes you see things in it that you wouldn’t see if you just moved your eyes over it, or even if you typed it. If your verbal mind isn’t working, then stop trying to make it work by pushing, and instead, open that spiral notebook, find a book that you like, and copy out a couple paragraphs.
After our last presidential election, the artist Morgan O’Hara went to the reading room at the New York Public Library with “with a small suitcase of pens, a few Sharpies, papers and copies of the Constitution. I brought old notebooks, half-used drawing pads and loose sheets to share with anyone who might show up.” Then she started copying the Constitution by hand, with other people who showed up joining along. She wrote of the experience:
Hand copying a document can produce an intimate connection to the text and its meaning. The handwriter may discover things about this document that they never knew, a passage that challenges or moves them. They may even leave with a deeper connection to the founders and the country, or even a sense of encouragement.
The cartoonist Lynda Barry writes beautifully about the magic of copying writing and drawings by hand. Here’s a page from Everything, Volume 1:
She says:
I think copying someone’s work is the fastest way to learn certain things about drawing and line. It’s funny how there is such a taboo against it. I learned everything from just copying other people’s work.
She brings the practice into her classrooms, and every few weeks, has her students get up and look at the notebooks of other students. “They are encouraged to try out anything they see. To copy all they want. To draw in a way they would have never thought of on their own.”
When I was in middle school, my English teacher, Mrs. Neff, had us keep composition books, and sometimes she gave us a prompt to answer, but sometimes she simply wrote a poem on the board for us to copy. She never made it explicit exactly what we were supposed to be learning by copying, but now I know. We were absorbing the poem. (I still do this regularly in my notebook.)
Eventually you can’t help but move from copying into something of your own. My 5-year-old is already figuring this out: A few months ago he started recreating Kraftwerk songs in Garageband, but his versions always had something new and interesting in them. It was his inability to perfectly replicate the song that made something interesting happen.
This process was brilliantly summarized by @neinquarterly on Twitter:
Studies have shown
The director Paul Thomas Anderson once said, “I had a friend who…any time he went to see a film and the title of the film was said onscreen he would scream out this horrible obnoxious noise, he would say ‘buk-CAW!’ really loud.”
I’ve started doing that whenever I read the words “studies have shown.”
I’m always a little shocked by how many “scientific” studies seem to be bent on confirming folk wisdom. As if our words, passed down to each other through generations, aren’t enough evidence for the modern age.
Today I read a headline that could’ve read, “Study Confirms What Artists Have Been Doing for Hundreds of Years.”
Feeling blocked? Play with blocks!
One handy thing about having young children is that it’s given me a good excuse to knock off work and play with blocks. I love building blocks. I could spend hours just building towers and letting my 2-year-old knock them down. It’s one of the purest delights I know.
For writer Lawrence Weschler, playing with blocks is a big part of his writing process, particularly when he’s working out the structure for a piece:
I procrastinate. I play with blocks. I have lots and lots of blocks, wooden blocks, and you should see the palaces I construct. Not giving the subject the slightest thought. Awash in pure formfulness. Puzzles and revelations surrounding structure. Days pass. Weeks, (Obviously somewhere in the back of my mind, I am sorting out structural issues regarding my writing as well, but not consciously.) At length, palace-building all the while, I begin to thrum around about structural questions in the piece: what if I led instead with X? And, hey, wait, it’s weird, but that P section rhymes with the T, S could go before P, and we could flip M and N. Hmmm. And this sort of thing becomes more and more interesting to me. Presently compellingly interesting. (The polarities reverse, and now the empty page is magnetized north and the rest of the world south: The house is burning down? Who cares.)
In The New New Journalism, he makes a point that his blocks are his own:
These blocks belong to your daughter?
No, my daughter is not allowed to play with these blocks. They are mine.And what do you do with these blocks?
Well, my wife, who is an important human rights monitor, and my daughter, who has been off at school, will come home and see the elaborate cathedral I’ve built on the kitchen table. And they’ll say, “We see you’ve been busy today.” And I have!
Later, he’s asked how the block palaces he builds actually get translated into writing:
I tape large one-by-three-foot blank sheets together to create a kind of a blotter. I doodle and sketch a lot on the blotter. I make little diagrams to connect things. The point is to lay out and visualize the structures I’ve been thinking through when I was playing with the blocks.
There is something magical that happens when you move things around with your hands — it frees up your mind to think. (Just now I was doing the dishes and came up with the images for a talk I am working on.)
Weschler is not the only creative adult who plays with blocks — so does the designer Tucker Viemiester. When he found out his mom donated his old blocks to Head Start, he made her get them back so that he could have them for himself:
What Mr. Viemeister, who has brought the spirit of fun and practicality to a wealth of products, most famously the Oxo kitchen utensils, values most about the blocks is how plastic they are, even though they are made of wood. With Legos, he said, the play process is more tilted toward a goal: the house or ship or castle that you build and are finished with. The Unit Blocks — with nothing to hold them together, and difficult to move when assembled — encourage a more fluid, open-ended process that is never quite finished and easily started anew.
What’s interesting about building blocks is that they were not always such a commonplace item in the lives of young children. As Norman Brosterman writes in his fantastic book, Inventing Kindergarten, “it is something of a surprise to discover that, like kindergarten itself, they have not been with us forever.”
The kind of children’s blocks we think of today can be traced back to kindergarten’s inventor, Friedrich Fröbel, who included blocks as one of his “gifts” to students. He specifically designed them to be “plastic” in the way that Tucker Viemeister points out makes them so great. Froebel hated the way most kids’ toys and models in the nineteenth century were basically like the packaged pre-destined LEGO kits of today, where there is a “right” way to put them together, a final shape to build step-by-step towards, so he made his block sets pure geometry, “Nonspecific, open-ended, and symbolic.” Here’s a picture of some of the block sets from Inventing Kindergarten:
Later, Caroline Pratt, founder of City and Country School, and author of the great book I Learn From Children, developed the “Unit blocks” we know best today from preschool and kindergarten. She was trying to figure out a good way to bring the world into the classroom. She wanted to help children discover the world by re-building it in miniature.
The Unit blocks were her solution. In Ian Franzier’s introduction to I Learn From Children, he writes:
She had taught manual arts and knew hot to work with wood. From pieces of maple she made sets of building blocks in basic shapes, each shape in proportion with the others so they could adjoin each other in simple multiples…. [They] became the most widely used elementary-level playtime blocks in the country… She couldn’t patent her Unit Blocks — in them she had discovered something too basic to claim, as if she had invented water—but their acceptance by day care centers and nursery and elementary schools is by now close to unanimous.
Frazier points out that the blocks, which were designed to mimic architecture, ended up influencing architecture itself. This is exactly Brosterman’s thesis in Inventing Kindergarten: that kindergarten’s emphasis on geometry and abstraction had a part to play in the beginning of abstract art and modern architecture. (Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, was one of the first generation of students in Froebel-style kindergarten, and fondly remembered his Froebel blocks.)
So, if you’re feeling blocked… buy yourself a set of blocks!
(Above: pages from the Feb 12, 1945 issue of LIFE magazine.)
Afternoon collage
“A very sensible day yesterday. Saw no one.”
—Virginia Woolf, Jan. 31, 1939
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