I pin photos and magazine clippings and index cards on a bulletin board above my desk for inspiration when I’m writing. I keep a box up on my bookshelf labeled “bulletin board,” and whenever I start a new book, I take a photo of whatever’s left up there, clear off all the contents, and dump them in the box. Going back through the box is like digging through a little time capsule. Above is 1/3 of the current board. (Clockwise from the left: David Hockney, Sister Corita Kent, Bill Cunningham (photo by Andy Warhol), Tove Jansson, Walt Whitman, Phil Connors, Lynda Barry, Nina Katchadourian, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Marcel Duchamp, and Hannah Höch.)
First drafts
Essential reading: the “Shitty First Drafts” chapter of Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird:
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner or a professional, writes Lamott, when you first sit down with something new, “We all often feel like we are pulling teeth.”
Yes, agreed the late David Rakoff, “Writing is like pulling teeth…. From my dick.”
In Half Empty, he, too, talks about the necessary pain-in-the-ass of the first draft:
Writing—I can really only speak to writing here—always, always only starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food.
Rakoff said writing never got any easier for him. “It still only ever begins badly,” he said.
I re-read these quotes every time I’m in the middle of drafting a new book. And then I remind myself of my own motto: “It doesn’t matter if it’s good right now, it just needs to exist.”
Come to think of it, that’s not a bad life motto, either…
A good week’s work
Moominpappa as inspiration. Don’t break the chain…
Teaching the ape
Just for fun, I drew James Tate’s “Teaching The Ape To Write Poems,” from his Selected Poems, as a comic.
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.
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