Everything from your haircut to your clothes to the type of instrument you play to the melody of a song to the rhythm — they’re all tricks to get people to pay attention to the story,” he said.
“If you just stood up in a crowd and said your story — ‘I came home, and this girl I was dating wasn’t there, and I was wondering where she was’ — it’s not interesting,” he said. “But give it a melody, give it a beat, build it all the way up to a haircut. Now people pay attention.”
HOW TO AVOID A BEHEADING
I like to draw while watching TV: I drew this while watching Ken Burns’ new documentary, which is quite good. The guy who told this story is a badass.
VONNEGUT: THREE ACTS OF PUNCTUATION
For my buddy Brandon, who starts teaching his first creative writing class today, an excerpt of an old NYTimes article from 1971:
The class began in a surprising way. Vonnegut remarked that last time they had been talking about form, and he walked to the blackboard and drew there a question mark, an exclamation point and a period. He said these bits of punctuation were the outline of a three-act story.
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
MORE ANDERS NILSEN
On inspiration:
[M]yths, fairy-tales and religious stories like the Bible…They are endlessly interpretable and adaptable. A bottomless source. They’re the template for pretty much all storytelling in the Western world. Whether by design or by stumbling onto them I think there is much to be gained from brushing up against them, borrowing, stealing, rewriting and quoting from them, whether subtly…or overtly…”
On not-knowing:
…when making comics is working, it really doesn’t feel like you are the one telling the story, it feels like the story already exists and you are just doing your best to get it down on paper. It’s like a very carefully attentive manufacturing process. So for the story to change would be like for someone who assembles calculators to start changing the calculators. They probably wouldn’t work.”
On art and religion:
All art comes from religion. From trying to understand and contend with the world.”
On the artist disguising himself in his work:
I’m happy to be back to my usual practice of heavily disguising my life in the stories I tell. Generally speaking, it’s still me in my other work, it’s just that I’m disguised as a bunch of little birds.”
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- …
- 512
- 513
- 514
- 515
- 516
- …
- 621
- Older posts→