15 Creative Pillars, and George Saunders

This week, something old and something new.

My “something new” is George Saunders’ A SWIM IN THE POND IN THE RAIN, wherein author George Saunders (LINCOLN IN THE BARDO) takes a detailed look at four 19th-century Russian short stories to discover what we might learn from them about story-writing (and maybe more, the book suggests).

In the introduction, he says,

“I’ll be offering some models for thinking about stories. No one of these is “correct” or sufficient… If a model appeals to you, use it. If not, discard it. In Buddhism, it’s said that a teaching is like “a finger pointing at the moon.” The moon (enlightenment) is the essential thing and the pointing finger is trying to direct us to it, but it’s important not to confuse finger with moon. For those of us who are writers, who dream of someday writing a story like the ones we’ve loved… the goal (“the moon”) is to attain the state of mind from which we might write such a story. All of the workshop talk and story theory and aphoristic, clever, craft-encouraging slogans are just fingers pointing at that moon, trying to lead us to that state of mind. The criterion by which we accept or reject a given finger: “Is it helping?”

I offer what follows in that spirit.”

I offer “something old” in exactly that spirit. It is one of my favourite pointing fingers. It is a page I cut out of WIRED magazine seventeen years ago.

I am tempted to talk about it at length, but the result would be very long and jumbled. Instead, I will ask you to give it a quick skim and ask, “might this have a place in my life?” Whatever answer you provide, that is the correct answer. For now.

I am not certain why, but this page hooked me immediately. I probably tore it out right then, right there, and hung it above my desk. "15 Rules for Rebuilding the World" is not the best title, I think, and the grandiose introduction does not stir me, though it provides useful context. To date, I have not read the massive books for which this is supposedly a cheat-sheet. I do have a copy of Alexander’s A PATTERN LANGUAGE, and I like it, though I haven’t read all of that, either.

For me, this feels like not merely a finger pointing to the moon, but a mystical scroll that elegantly charts the moon’s position and nature throughout the year. I suspect the appeal lies in the specific combination of the fifteen little rules, the ways they are worded and summarized here, and the accompanying imagery. I don’t use the rules like a tool—I don’t deploy them from a box like pencil crayons—though I do sort of venerate this sheet like a religious icon, perhaps because it feels “true.” Whether I read it and recognized as a description of “true” things, or whether I used the rules to build scaffolding for whatever I think of as “true,” I do not know, and seventeen years later, I’m not sure it matters. I suspect I’m also drawn to the whole Traditional Western Academic feel of it, something I grew up equating with high value, for better or worse, and which I just can't seem to defeat.

See if it works for you, as a finger pointing to the moon, and accept it or reject it as you will.

Intuition plus Iteration

Saunders praises an iterative process for writing, swinging back and forth between critical and creative modes in a many-laps-around-the-track way of writing, though he does not distinguish between the two modes:

“I go through the draft like that… a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (lather, rinse, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts, over months or even years. Over time, like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments.”

He suggests that aggressive iteration is the way he accesses his best, most true writing. It’s how he arrives at “undeniable” pieces of writing; “as in, ‘All right, this bit is pretty much undeniable,' which means that I feel that any reasonable reader would like it and would still be with me at the end of it.”

This bumped me, because it opposes the premise I’m currently working under. When I started DD4, I did so feeling like too much iteration was killing the life in the work, and that working more spontaneously would preserve whatever artistic intuition I had for the book. That’s what Chris Ware suggested; that iterative drafting drains the life from the work.

Ware’s and Saunders’ approaches are apparently contradictory, which highlights one of my favourite things about reading creative advice: eventually, if you read enough good advice (or, instead of "advice," maybe let’s say “thinking on the topic”), you discover that many approaches contradict each other, or at least leave you in a space where the only solution is to say, “well, I guess I better figure out how this works for me.” (As a tangent, I think it’s always best to read craft books while you currently have a project on the go. Best to read about writing while you’re doing your own writing. It adds a relevant, practical dimension.)

But what do we do with this contradiction?

As previously established, I’m trying to have fewer Strong Opinions, but even if that weren’t the case, I think perhaps there is no actual contradiction. As the ancient maxim goes, “different strokes for different folks.”

Working on Chapter One of DD4, I removed stages of the iterative page-drawing process that I had used previously. Did the work suffer for it? I don’t think so. Working on Chapter Two, I added a stage back in (the value study pass), another opportunity for iteration. Judged by my happiness with how the work looks to me right now, that was a beneficial move. As I letter, colour-prep, and colour my pages, the dialogue always gets a few more passes. At every stage, I am looking to create Saunders’ “undeniable” passages.

Saunders quotes Stuart Dybek saying, “A story is always talking to you; you just have to learn to listen to it.”

Saunders continues, “Revising like this is a way of listening to the story and of having faith in it: it wants to be its best self, and if you’re patient with it, in time, it will be. Essentially, the whole process is: intuition plus iteration.”

I like that idea—I've been practising that idea for years—and I believe it remains true regardless of how much iteration you incorporate into your process. You do the work, then listen, then respond, and so a story is made.

As soon as I finish writing this, I will start another iteration of the song that will (probably???) be in Chapter Two of DD4. After a week of having not read that song, I looked at it last night. I listened to it. I did not like what I heard. So I am iterating on it. Similarly, I just cut two other pages because I read them and, story-wise, I think they struck the wrong note. I re-drew and re-wrote another page for a different reason: I read what I had and decided I wanted something additional that introduced a new element.

I think iteration works for me. Or at least, I think it might be unavoidable. My problem is that I need time to let something marinate. Saunders describes working on the same page many times in one day. I can’t do that. If it’s a winner at 9:00am, it’s still a winner at 5:00pm, though seven days later, it might not be.

That’s fine. Because I think the other element Saunders hits on—intuition—is one I hadn’t considered very fully. Regardless of whether you take a hundred laps around the track or only a few, if our intuition is honed, and if we’re listening well, the results can become “undeniable.” Thinking back, I wonder if part of my dissatisfaction with my comics-making process was that I was not trusting my intuition enough, and instead was listening to outside voices or to story-crafting principles I had picked up over the years. I was trusting others' ideas instead of my own. That's a good approach in a lot of places, but perhaps not here. I will try to give my intuition a better seat at the table and see how that works.

Progress!

The combo of those floral pages from last week and now the re-writing of the song section has slowed things down!  Also it was sunny during my work-time yesterday, so I had to put up Christmas lights while the weather obliged. More handsome pages are coming soon, though, and inking is not far off. I'm thinking about streaming the inking process (I can't stream the current pencilling process, because the blue pencil barely shows up on camera). I am excited for what I will have to show you in December!

A note for patrons and non-patrons.

As previously mentioned, I try to keep these posts that are of a more "crafty" nature public, available to anyone who wants to read them, patron or otherwise. My intuition tells me it's the right thing to do. The juicy stuff, that's just between you and me, dear patron. Unless this is the juicy stuff. It's up to you, really.