Notes on writing and drawing

How much of the year is left

Monday, December 2, 2013

I realized last night as I finished yesterday’s logbook entry just how little time was left in the year. You can see DEC 1 on the calendar, but your brain doesn’t really register it the way the chunk and heft of the pages turned behind you does.

What to do with the rest of the calendar?

It’s tempting to call it a year and spend the rest of December in retrospection. It’s around this time every year that people start posting their “best of the year” reading lists (myself included) — as if anything you read in December doesn’t really count. This is a mistake, because every time I post a best of the reading year list before December 31st, I read a book or two that should’ve made the list, a book that gets lost in the cracks between my official lists. (Last year it was Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Ian Svenonius’s Supernatural Strategies for Making A Rock and Roll Band. The year before, it was Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad and Howard Gossage’s The Book of Gossage.) ~~None of these books is now on my “best of” site, even though they should be.~~

What else am I missing by being prematurely retrospective? (I can’t remember which artist said it—maybe Hockney?—but having a “retrospective” makes it sound like you already died.)

There’s a section in Show Your Work! called “Don’t Quit Your Show” where I tell this little anecdote:

One time my coworker John Croslin and I came back from our lunch break and our building’s parking lot was completely full. We circled the sweltering lot with a few other cars for what seemed like ages, and just when we were about to give up, a spot opened and John pulled right in. As he shut off the car he said, “You gotta play till the ninth inning, man.”

Play ’til the ninth inning. That’s exactly what I was looking for. The year is a baseball game with twelve innings and I want to play until the last out.

So this year I’m pledging to not make my year-end list before the year’s end. I’ll be posting mine on January 1st, 2014. I’m also planning not to let up just because it’s December. I’ll still be checking all my boxes: meditating, making a blackout poem, writing, and reading every day. Because we might only have 30 days left, but a lot can happen in 30 days.

What will you do with yours?

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Also: If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution, I suggest buying a daily diary (here’s the one I use) and keeping a logbook.

Illustrating

Monday, September 2, 2013

Illustrating is my favorite phase of the book-making process because—surprise!—it means the writing is finished, and now all I have to do is make pictures. For Show Your Work! I have a map of all ten chapters on two taped-together pieces of 11×17 paper. As I’m working, I make little doodles of illustrating ideas on sticky notes, and arrange them according to each section.

Once I have an idea of what I need to work on, I don’t make too many sketches, I just I head over to the analog desk, grab a Sharpie and start doodling. I don’t worry much about getting the drawings or the writing perfect because everything is eventually going to get scanned into the computer and fiddled with anyways.

Some people have asked me if the lettering in Steal Like An Artist is a font — it’s not. It’s just my handwriting. Here’s a short little timelapse of me lettering:

While I like to letter everything by hand, a few of the illustrations have been purely digital. This Beethoven/scenius illustration, for example, was done entirely with my Wacom Cintiq 13HD.

The work is slow, but the book is really coming together. Occasionally, I’ll get some help from my studio assistant:

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Keep your overhead low

Thursday, August 1, 2013

“The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.”
—Lynda Barry

Anybody who tells people to “do what you love no matter what” should also have to teach a money management course.

Low overhead + “do what you love” = a good life.

“I deserve nice things” + “do what you love” = a time bomb.

A good life is not about living within your means, it’s about living below your means.

When Instapaper creator Marco Arment was asked about his business model, he said, “I sell an app for money, then I spend less than I make.” Sell something for money, spend less than you make. Is there a better model?

“The trick is,” film executive Tom Rothman says, “from the business side, to try to be fiscally responsible so you can be creatively reckless.”

The 80s underground band The Minutemen used to call this “jamming econo.” They knew the music they wanted to make would probably never be mainstream, so they kept their day jobs, made their records for cheap, learned how to fix their own tour van, and hauled their own equipment.

Live frugally so you can do the work you want to do. Save up some “screw you” money, so you can quit a job you hate to take a job you like better. Turn away venture capital money and bootstrap so you can keep control over your business.

To “jam econo” might not be the flashiest way of life, but it’s the best way to stay free.

[I cut this post from Show Your Work! because it felt too much like the “Keep Your Day Job” section of Steal Like An Artist.]

First draft of Show Your Work finished

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

I finished the first draft of Show Your Work! today. It’s printed out and sitting on my desk. Nobody has read it other than me. My wife will be the first. Then I’ll take her notes, make some changes, and send it to my editor.

This book has not been easy to write. I’ve been working on it since last summer. The last time I wrote about it was October 2012. I’ve screwed up in more ways than one.

The biggest challenge for me is structure. Once I have a structure, once I have a skeleton, then it’s easy to just pack on the meat. This book started out in three parts, with about two dozen chapters. Now it’s another list of ten, like Steal. Maybe it’ll morph into something else before this is all done.

For now, it’s time to sit back and have a beer and let people read. Then, it’s back to work.

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Show Your Work! My Creative Mornings Talk

Sunday, May 12, 2013

It was my pleasure to give the inaugural talk at the first Creative Mornings here in Austin last month. The monthly theme was “The Future,” so I tried to make the talk a sort of rallying cry to encourage future presenters and attendees to open up and share the process of their creative work, not just the products of that process. (That happens to also be the subject of my next book.)

If you don’t want to watch the video, I’ve pasted my notes and a few slides from the talk below. Enjoy.

* * *

It’s weird to try to give a talk about the future, because most of the time, talks like this are actually about THE PAST. A speaker is asked to get up on stage and talk because they’re someone who’s accomplished something, so they must have something to say, some sort of wisdom or experience or advice to impart to the audience.

But I happen to think that most advice is autobiographical — a lot of the time when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.

Now, we usually think that the past is behind us, and the future is in front of us. This seems totally natural, right? But years ago I read about this tribe of indigenous people in South America called the Aymara, and they have this very different way of talking about the past and the future.

When they talk about the past, they point to the space in front of them. When they talk about the future, they point behind them. Strange, right?

Well, the reason they point ahead of them when talking about the past is because the past is known to them — the past has happened, therefore it’s in front of them, where they can see it.

The future, on the other hand, is unknown, it hasn’t happened yet, so it’s behind them, where they can’t see it.

This kind of blew my mind when I read about it. The past is right in front of us, but the future is behind us.

The future is hard to talk about because it hasn’t happened yet — it’s behind us, where we can’t see it.

[Read more…]