Paring away, simpler and simpler

Dick Bruna's drawings of Miffy only allow for very miniscule changes to indicate emotions--the position of eyes, the length of the ears, the shape of the mouth.

"That's all you have. With two dots and a little cross I have to make her happy (...) or a little bit sad--and I do it over and over again. There is a moment when I think yes, now she is really sad. I must keep her like that."

He is constantly paring away, distilling down to the simplest purist form possible. When he draws Miffy crying, for instance, he says, "I very often start with three or four tears. I take away one, and the next day I take away another one, and at the end I have one tear, and that's very, very sad."

Georges Simenon wrote to him and said: "I see that you are trying to make your covers still simpler and simpler. You are doing the same in designing as I try to do in writing."

It might take him a day to draw a single illustration of Miffy.

<note: I'm going to take an entire month off from blogging... so, see you back in september!>

Dick Bruna and Miffy

I love Miffy. She is so simple. And I know what that means--there's a huge amount of work that got her to look that simple.

Dick Bruna, the creator of Miffy said:

"I would love to be able to draw like a child, so spontaneous, so open-minded on those big sheets. As an adult you start to draw and then hope that you make something good, something beautiful. A child is not like that, they start and see what happens... I draw things you will see close to home, things that I also like. Maybe I still think a bit like a child, I have a childish mind, I think. There are a lot of things I don't understand." 

Dick Bruna (b.1927 in Utrecht)

One wet and windy seaside holiday, he drew a story for his son, Sierk. It was about a little white rabbit called Miffy. His first Miffy children's book looked like this (1957):

By 1963 she looked like this:

I love his simple daily routine--he is a multi-millionaire mogul (over 85 millions books sold in over 40 languages) and yet this is his day (as simple and distilled as his art) every day he gets up at 5, squeezes a glass of orange juice for his wife Irene, draws her a picture about things she has done, or reminders of things she is planning to do. hHe cycles to Utrecht canals and goes to a cafe for coffee. Works in his studio. Cycles home for lunch. Back to the studio in the afternoon to do admin work.

Miffy is 50 now--and to celebrate, a museum was opened in her honor. The Dick Bruna Huis.

Picture books and Margaret Wise Brown

"A book should try to accomplish something more than just to repeat a child's own experiences. One would hope rather to make a child laugh or feel clear and happy-headed as he follows a simple rhythm to its logical end, to jolt him with the unexpected and comfort him with the familiar; and perhaps to lift him for a few minutes from his own problems of shoe laces that won't tie and busy parents and mysterious clock time into the world of a bug or a bear or a bee or a boy living in the timeless world of story." Margaret Wise Brown

This was 1935 and it was brand new stuff for picture books. Before Margaret Wise Brown, the picture book had been dominated by fairytales and fables. Margaret Wise Brown's focus on a child's every day life dignified children's own lives and was a game changer--it changed children's literature and the picture book for ever.

And it was fed by her work as a teacher at the progressive Bank Street Experimental School in New York City, where she listened to children and heard their stories and how they spoke.

It's what makes her voice so distinctive. I love her titles: The Noisy Book, The Important Book, Another Important Book. They're still fresh today. How radical they must have been then.

She was a pioneer. She fought for keeping big words in her books, refusing to dum down the language. She fought to get authors and illustrators proper royalties and fought to get the illustrator the same royalties as writer. (Before they had only received a flat fee.) 

What would you spend your first royalty check on? She spent hers on a cart full of flowers. How wonderful. Then she invited all her friends over for a party to help her enjoy them. What style! 

what's it about--the story or the writer?

Margaret Wise Brown loved reading as a child and remembered all the stories she read but none of the authors. 

"It didn't seem important that anyone wrote them. And it still does seem important. I wish I didn't have ever to sign my long name on the cover of a book and I wish I could write a story that would seem absolutely true to the child who hears it and to myself."

It's as if the story is timeless. It just is. You as the writer were lucky enough to find it. You were available and it came through you. You were that person on whom nothing was lost. But it's all about the story and not about you, the writer. The writer is simply the servant to the story. If it at any point the story becomes the servant of the writer--if it becomes about you then you can be certain of one thing: you're in the way--and the story can't get through. And it won't be as good.

In the end the job of the writer is to be available, then get out of the way and let it go.

Margaret Wise Brown's two classics THE RUNAWAY BUNNY (1942) and GOODNIGHT MOON (1947) (both illustrated by Clement Hurd) are not only still in print--they are still bestsellers.

See the full gallery on Posterous

She led an adventurous life: dating the prince of spain, hosting parties in her Upper East Side apartment, generally being a stunning New York Socialite. 

 Here's what The Writers' Almanac wrote:

"Brown never had children herself, but she worked with young children as a teacher in a progressive education program at the Bank Street Experimental School. She was also a New York socialite — tall and strong, with blond hair and bright green eyes. She dated the prince of Spain and loved to host parties in her Upper East Side apartment. She spent her first royalty check buying an entire cart's worth of flowers, and often took the proceeds from a book and purchased a ticket to France or a new car.

"She died suddenly at the age of 42, energetic and adventurous up to the end. She was on a book tour in Europe when she was stricken with appendicitis and had an emergency appendectomy. She seemed to be recovering well, and she decided to show her doctor how good she felt — so she kicked up her leg in the can-can. It caused an embolism, and she died immediately."

Perfectionism versus getting things DONE

via 
Joshua Rothaas

To be creative 1st create an Oasis of Quiet

What Cleese says is so practical and true. It's all about how to be playful."Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating."

We need:
--quiet space, undisturbed (locality: secluded)
--for a specific period of time (duration: limited)

what are your tips and tricks for inspiring creativity?

We have to work to get play back into our lives.

Breaking Free: Improvisation, Writing, Denyse Schmidt

I had never quilted in my life and here I am going to an improvisational quilting workshop run by possibly quilting's biggest star--Denyse Schmidt. 

 

What was I thinking? 

 

Well, Denyse is my dear friend, and she said it would be great for anyone not just sewers or quilters. Neither of which I am.

Most workshops you go to to learn something right? Not this one. You unlearn. And that's what makes it so great.

And it's also what makes it an amazing workshop for writers--or anyone in a creative field. Because it's all about freeing yourself from "the rules" -- "the right way" to do something, "the wrong way" to do it -- freeing yourself from all the second-guessing... breaking free of habits and fears. It's about discovering, exploring, experimenting. And most of all trust. Not knowing what is going to happen next. 

In short, this workshop is all about unlearning. And it's fabulous. 

(Time Out write an article about the workshops: here)

There were three bags of scraps to choose from: small pieces, medium pieces, large pieces. One at a time we chose a piece blindly and sewed it to the next piece we drew out of the bag.

The only rules:

--you have to use what you grab, even if you hate the color and you are certain it will ruin everything

--you have to choose the path of least resistance (don't get fancy--match the piece to the other piece the obvious way)

the sewing machines we used:

It was exhilarating because you were not "in control" and you didn't know what would happen next. But miraculously, by the end of the class, we'd each sewn 5 or 6 squares... and they were all of them stunning. The pieces of material you hated because essential to the design. It all worked. 

Here is what I ended up with, my four squares...

This workshop is a wonderful way to get unstuck, to remember what it's like to play--and then come back to your writing or your art with the same playfulness and trust and discovery.

Thank you Denyse!

To sign up for Denyse's class you can here.

Here are some photos I took... Here's where Denyse sews 

and all her lovely pins

and her inspiration wall (complete with British war poster)

her cool filing cabinets

cool material (everywhere you look is beautiful!)

are you a writer... or an author?

"Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."

Collette

Rules for Writing

"These are the rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story" Elmore Leonard.

some favorite quotes from Elmore Leonard:

Style is the sound of the writing. 

Writing is rewriting.

It takes me 4 pages of writing to get 1 page I like.

It gets harder.

and another he quotes:

Words can get in the way of what you're trying to say. Joseph Conrad.

Becoming a writer: choose? or chosen?

"Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days." Paul Auster (b.1947)

Writing is Boiling Down

"It's like boiling down. Four pages can go through six, eight, ten drafts to get down. The beginning is always rewritten much more than the rest, because it's the setting up of information as well as the telling of the story--that's always much harder to juggle." SUSAN MINOT

Writing--it's as much about what you take out as what you put in. 

Balancing writing and promoting--Billy Collins

When asked what Georgia's incoming poet laureate should keep in mind, Billy Collins said:

"The best thing you can do it writer really, really good poetry. You can be an advocate, but the best you can do to spread the word of poetry is to write really good poetry. the other thing is, [poet] Robert Hass called me up when I became poet laureate and he said, 'They're going to be pulling you, interviewing you to death, dragging you from one place to another. Just don't leave the place where you write your poetry. Don't give up that psychological spot here the poetry comes from because they will try to drag you out of there and make you a public figure.' Being a poet is a very private activity and you have to hold onto your solitude." 

What a great way to balance writing, with speaking about and promoting what you've written. You need to be out there reading from your work, and speaking. Publishers expect it--even require it.

But I love this reminder: your best work is writing, and the most important thing you can do is to hold onto your solitude where your writing came from in the first place.

Billy Collins on writing every day

"I'm a writer every day, but I don't write every day. Every day I'm looking for those ducks to land on the water, or something to nudge me toward the page. But I don't really have any compositional habits. I'm afraid it's still kind of a romantic view of writing. I have to wait for something to startle me rather than just hacking it out every day. But it doesn't take much to startle me. My stepdaughter, who was 16 a couple of years go, was doing all these drawings of princesses and fairy tale castles and fantasy stuff. Fair enough. But one day she came in with a little drawing of a scallion o a plate and I wrote a poem about it because I thought she was moving from one phase to another. She was moving out of fantasy into the simplicity of real things." Billy Collins

How freeing to read that Billy Collins doesn't write every day. If you're not one of those writers who writes every day (and hard as I try I'm really not)--you can feel guilty, like you're failing, not doing it right, not living up to your potential. You name it.

But perhaps that's too limited a view of what it means to be a writer. What if it's not about the typing or your desk or word counts or pages? What if it's actually about showing up. Whatever that means that day. Whether that means you're at your desk or out watching children in a playground--whatever you're doing--the point is you're showing up and being one on whom nothing is lost.

"I'm a writer every day but I don't write every day."

All I can say is, if Billy Collins can write the way he does and not write every day, then that's good enough for me.

To fill the page with a dream

"Day after day, season after season, I face a blank page and I have to fill it with a dream. That's my work. And we have a team like an orchestra, that makes it happen." Elbaz, designer at Lanvin
via NYT

It's the work of a writer too. To fill the blank page with a dream.

Or is it more than that--is it actually the work of us all?

What will we fill the blank page of our lives with--today? now?

Writing Tip: don't try and guess what editors want

"Don't try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they're always looking for something new." WILLIAM ZINSSER

It's scarier to trust yourself. And write the book that's in you to write. The book that only you can write. It's risky.

But which is riskier?

To follow the trend? (By the time your book comes out they'll have moved on to something else.)

To try and write the book that that someone else writes? (Won't they do a much better job at being them?)

Or to write the book that only you can write? And possibly find yourself ahead of the trend, setting the trends, doing something startling and new?

The best composer you've never heard of

That's what the Wall Street Journal said of Morten Lauridsen.

Dana Gioia (past chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts) describes him as "one of the few living composers whom I would call great."

What does Mr Lauridsen say? 

"There are too many things out there that are away from goodness. We need to focus on those things that ennoble us, that enrich us."

And of his "Lux Aeterna": 

"I didn't want to write an elitist piece that only the very best choirs in the world could perform--I wanted to write a piece that could be within the reach of many people, many performers. It's a piece with a message, and I didn't want to complicate that message with complicated musical language."

Reminds me of what another composer said: "Use ordinary words and say extraordinary things." Arthur Schopenhauer

Beautiful, direct, true, from the heart. Too many things away from goodness. I'm so glad Morten Lauridsen isn't.

(The award winning new documentary about him, "Shining Night" isn't yet scheduled to be broadcast anywhere in the US. The Wall Street Journal: "All he does is compose radiantly beautiful music and lead what appears to be a wholly satisfying life, and these days that's not quite enough to make you a household name. Time was when PBS would have snapped it up. Why not now?")

 

Magicians and Writers: truth and illusion

"Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion." 

Tennessee Williams in THE GLASS MENAGERIE

drenched

James Dickey, (b. 1923) who's most famous novel, Deliverance (1970), was made into a movie, also wrote poetry. He said: "A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning."

dangerous weapons

"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters." ~Frank Lloyd Wright
I love the quote. Plus the idea that something that puts words on a page is dangerous.

Wait. No. Of course this typewriter is dangerous. Imagine what it could do to you if it landed on your head.

I have one of them sitting in the corner of my room. My mum says she loves it and wants it because she learned to type on it. But it's too heavy to pick up let alone transport across the Atlantic. So here it stays sitting there. (But she gets to visit it.)

The other creepy thing about my ancient dangerous typewriter is: it's a typewriter that was around when Hitler was.

This is getting all too creepy. So I'm stopping now. And going back to my extremely dangerous bright green Clairefontaine notebook...

Interview with children's writer/illustrator Shaun Tan

Author illustrator Shaun Tan recently won what amounts to the nobel prize for children's literature: the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. His book THE LOST THING was turned into a great animation (see below). He also worked as concept artist on animated films including "Wall-E". He was interviewed by SPIEGEL and answered the questions by... drawing pictures.

For instance when asked to introduce himself he drew this:

And when the interview said "At age 37, you have received the highest honor in your field. What's next?"... he answered:

Love him. Very cool. Read it here.