creative process
My strip is not like the kind that depends on variety or new characters. I’ve got pretty much the same characters and basic idea that I had so many years ago. I want to keep the strip simple. I like it, for example, when Charlie Brown watches the first leaf of fall float down and then walks over and just says, “Did you have a good summer?” That’s the kind of strip that gives me pleasure to do.
Quoted in Barnaby Conrad’s Introduction, in Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life (Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2002), 22.
The eyes are the gateway to the cartoon character’s soul. Make sure pupil placement is where you need it to be.
“Griffy’s Top 40 List on Comics and Their Creation”
As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. Our lives aren’t prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art—underprocessed, underproduced—splinters and explodes.
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 27.
Ultimately I look upon writing as wings. We are pedestrians, we walk along the earth; we may love the earth, but the moment of absolute magic is when our imagination allows us to take flights into vaster, more entrancing worlds.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 85.
I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing; but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 2009), restored edition, 58.
The place where I write, upstairs in our farmhouse, has windows facing into the woods. The walls are lined with bookshelves. To avoid distraction, I write on a computer that is not connected to the internet. (I check email elsewhere in the house.) My companions in this room are the likes of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot, who peer down at me from the shelves, and a blue fish named Bruno. They are all very quiet.
Answer to the question, “Do you write every day?” in the FAQs, http://barbarakingsolver.net.
Pounding out a first draft is like hoeing a row of corn—you just keep your head down and concentrate on getting to the end. Revision is where fine art begins. It’s thrilling to take an ending and pull it backward like a shiny thread through the whole fabric of a manuscript, letting little glints shine through here and there. To plant resolution, like a seed, into chapter one. To create new scenes, investing a character with the necessary damage, the right kind of longing. To pitch out boldly and try again. To work every metaphor across the whole, back and forth, like weaving. I love that word “fabrication,” because making an elaborate fiction feels so much like making cloth.
Answer to the question, “Do you go through a lot of drafts?” in the FAQs, http://barbarakingsolver.net.
A dissolve is a film technique, usually a transition from scene to scene where image A begins to fade out, overlapped with the fade in of image B. And it’s a technique which even predates cinema. It comes from magic lantern days when they were doing slide to slide. Rather than having a cut, just a slam, they would do an overlap. It was more pleasing. Nowadays you don’t see too many dissolves in movies. And I never paid attention to when they went out of fashion. And Kevin Tent, my editor, and I think they’re beautiful. I happen to be a big fan of Hal Ashby films in the ’70s and to my mind, he an ex-editor, was a master of dissolves, and particularly long dissolves. For me, they lend emotion to a film and there’s a kind of a melancholy that comes from them.
“Director Alexander Payne on Mining Every Film for Comic Potential,” Fresh Air with Terry Gross, NPR, December 2, 2013.
Starting out, I imagined a straightforward book in three parts, moving along a taut narrative path with a sturdy foundation of clay undergirding all. Books have their own fates, however, and research—at least the kind of research that I practice—yields to serendipity. If the destination is known beforehand, what’s the point of the journey? A provisional map of the whole allows the woolgathering pilgrim to get a little lost along the way without losing his bearings completely. Meanwhile, coincidences and chance meetings confirm a certain rightness, a fit, in the meandering quest.
Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival (New York: The Penguin press, 2012), 15.
The nature of process, to one degree or another, involves failure. You have at it. It doesn’t work. You keep pushing. It gets better. But it’s not good. It gets worse. You go at it again. Then you desperately stab at it, believing “this isn’t going to work.” And it does!
Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design by Jennifer Bass & Pat Kirkham (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2011), 386.
I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw. I taught at the grade-school level. Kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around, drawing—they’re just doing stuff.
interview by David Salle, in Interview magazine.
You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don’t all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It’s the only way, I’m telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading. And don’t write letters during that time. If you don’t write, don’t do anything else. And get in a room by yourself. If there are two rooms in that house, get in the one where nobody else is…
Letter to Cecil Dawkins, November 12, 1960, in The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. by Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 417–18.