5-year-old drew this comic in the Comic Note Book we picked up at the new Kinokuniya here in Austin, and I was reminded of the great anthology, Abstract Comics.
Search Results for: notebook
10 things about writing
This was today’s newsletter, but I thought it’d make a good blog post, too, so:
1. Do something small every day and it adds up. (Every day, no matter what I try to blog and write in my diary.)
2. I have lots of Daily Rituals when I work: I keep everything in a banker’s box, I scatter index cards and markers around the house, I tack pictures of my heroes on a bulletin board above my desk, I press the sleep timer on my clock radio, and I smoke a fake cigarette pencil.
3. First drafts don’t need to be perfect, they just need to exist. (More in Anne Lamott’s wonderful book, Bird By Bird.)
4. The tools matter and the tools don’t matter.
5. Notebooks double in power if you take the time to re-read them.
6. It’s way easier to get things done when you’re working on things worth doing.
7. You can spend your time on work, family, or friends, but you can only have two at a time.
8. If you’re blocked, play with blocks.
9. I can’t think about my book if I want to fall asleep at night, so I need to wind down with a good book that’s not in the genre I’m writing in. Comics and fiction work well, but what I really love is trashy rock ‘n’ roll histories, like Please Kill Me, Van Halen Rising, The Dirt, or, the one I’m reading right now, Meet Me In The Bathroom.
10. I think I have it figured out, but every time I write a book, I learn new things.
What to keep
Some of the kids’ drawings fall into the “I don’t want to recycle this, but I can’t see keeping it in a folder,” and those often get pasted into my notebook. Funny thing is, I have a hunch that these collaged scraps will mean more to me in the future than some perfect, saved drawing. (“Oh, this is when J was into drawing Kraftwerk and O was into playing waiter…”)
Writing advice for artists and visual thinkers
Yesterday designer Jessica Hische tweeted, “I have it in my head that I should pursue an MFA in creative writing to be a better writer and find more space for writing in my life. Really, I should find a way to carve out time to focus on writing without paying tens of thousands of dollars to do so.”
Unsolicited, but here’s my advice for visual thinkers (and others) who want to be better writers:
1) Get Lynda Barry’s What It Is and do the exercises every day in a private notebook.
2) Start a blog and write something there every day.
3) Find or start a writer’s group. (I don’t have one, but I’m married to a fantastic writer and editor.)
4) Become a better reader. Read way more than you write.
5) I believe that the creative process translates across disciplines, so the real challenge to a visual artist who wants to write is learning to operate with words the way you do with pictures. (For example, my blackout poems started out as my attempt to write like a collage artist.)
6) Here’s cartoonist James Kochalka talking about creativity, and how if you can draw, you might be able to write, if you can write, you might be able to make music, etc.:
7) I don’t think most academic programs are set up to help creative workers make these kinds of cross-disciplinary transitions. (Some do or did exist: Carnegie Mellon, for example, used to have an information design program that helped designers learn to write and writers learn to design.)
8) One of the reasons I started the list with Lynda Barry is that she speaks of “The Image” (learned from her teacher Marilyn Frasca) — the thing that is alive in the work. If you can learn to work with The Image, it translates to any art form.
9) I should add that I went to an explicitly “interdisciplinary” college, so I was actually exposed to these ideas in an academic setting. (Lynda went to one too, Evergreen, and she is now a “Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity” at the University of Wisconsin)
10) Cartoonists, because their work demands work from two disciplines (writing/art, poetry/design, words/pictures), are highly instructive when it comes to visual people learning to write, writers learning to make art, etc. (Check out Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics for more.)
11) Read a lot. Write a lot. Repeat.
This is how I make a book
Productive procrastination for writers who draw: Going through my notebook, I found this clipping from a piece by Edward Carey (author of The Iremonger Trilogy) about how he works.
- ← Newer posts
- 1
- …
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- …
- 42
- Older posts→