Tag Archives: writing

Writing for Hire Is Not Spiritual Debasement

Posted on by

This first ran on Splice Today.
___________

Writing gets demystified pretty quickly when you do it for a living. All the stuff you hear in creative writing programs about cultivating your own voice or writing what you know or making the familiar strange — pretty much nobody who will pay you actually gives a shit. Instead, the kind of things your clients are likely to focus on are, can you meet a deadline? Can you be just as entertaining and accessible as we’ve decided the audience would like you to be, without being so entertaining and accessible that someone gets offended? Can you figure out something to say about dietary supplements without instantly revealing that neither you, nor we, nor really anybody cares about dietary supplements? In short, can you competently jump through the hoops at your boring day job the way that everybody else has to jump through the boring hoops at their boring day jobs? And can you do it without too many glaring grammatical errors?

Like I said, you figure all this out fairly quick. Or, at least, it seems like you would. Not Anna Davies, though. Davies is, she tells us right at the beginning of her essay a “real writer” — and as proof, she says she’s ghost-written a massively popular YA series. She clearly intends for us to be impressed — and, hey, I can oblige happily enough. I was impressed. Ghost-writing a massively popular YA series— that sounds like a great, relatively enjoyable source of steady income. I’d do it if I had the chance.

Anna, though, doesn’ t present it as an enjoyable source of steady income. Instead, she makes it sound like some sort of Faustian bargain, in which she sold her inner glittery snowflake for ugly, mundane cash. She’d wanted to be a famous YA writer herself, but all she did was write other people’s series. She buried her muse so thoroughly that even her editor tells her, “You write well, but nothing has heart.” To which she replies, in a transcendent psalm of self-pity:

“Of course nothing did. I’d given it to them. I’d given them my time, my talent, my 20s. And that was the lesson that had somehow gotten buried as I learned to create characters, set scenes and turn around a revise in three days: Never give more than you’re prepared to lose. In the course of five years and approximately 600,000 words, I’d become so good at mimicking the voice of another author that I’d lost my own, and I’d failed to nurture my own career, not to mention well-being, as carefully as I had the lives of the characters that had never belonged to me.”

Davies has written for the New York Times and Marie Claire, and is making her declaration of failure from Salon. Clearly, she spent some time in there nurturing her career. But putting that aside, what exactly is she complaining about here? That all her dreams didn’t come true? That she had to work at a job that was occasionally unpleasant and felt like work? That after five years she’s only a quite remarkably successful writer rather than being J.K. Rowling? I don’t mean to be cruel, but, jeez, buck the fuck up.

To be fair, when you read the whole essay, you get the impression that there is more going on with Davies than she is quite willing or able to explain. She talks about her mother’s death; she talks about drinking too much; she talks about relationship failures. It doesn’t exactly add up, but for whatever reason, she’s obviously quite unhappy. I don’t think she’s lying about that, and I certainly don’t blame her for it.

Still, for a working writer, it is kind of irritating to see my profession presented as some sort of catastrophic self-betrayal, and/or as leading inevitably to a dark night of the soul. Reading it, I felt (presumptuously, but still) like I’d gotten a little glimpse of how sex workers feel when they have to sit through yet another documentary about how debased and miserable they are. Work for hire can be exploitive and depressing just like any other job, of course, and sometimes folks will treat you badly (or in the worst case not pay you.) But there’s nothing about it that’s inherently demeaning, or no more so than any other kind of employment.

Davies though, thinks there is. Work for hire function in her essay as a weight and a corruption, the thing that has prevented her from becoming a real writer, or even a real person. It’s like being a ghost writer has made her a real ghost; as if writing for someone else has turned her into no one. She seems, in other words, to have confused her job with her soul, and to have lost perspective in a catastrophic manner on the fact that being a ghost is just a gig. It’s not a sign that you are dying.

How To Get Rejected While Trying Pretty Hard

Posted on by

Freelance has been somewhat kicking my butt this week, so I thought I’d reprint this piece, first published on Splice Today.
____________
The worst thing about freelancing is the constant rejection. No matter how battle-scarred and hard-hearted you are, it still sucks to have people constantly showing up in your inbox to tell you that your ideas aren’t good enough and also that they are not going to pay you. Like other writers, I would like to learn some secret formula — any secret formula — that would allow me to get to the point where only 40% of my pitches are rejected, rather than half of them or more. And so New York Times culture editor Adam Sternbergh has kindly attempted to help, by posting a series of tweets (some storified here, laters added here which explain just what editors are looking for in a pitch, and how you can make sure you don’t get pushed to the bottom of the electronic slush pile.

There’s only one problem. Sternbergh’s advice isn’t very good. In fact, based on my own experience as a freelancer who pitches constantly to outlets large, small, and in between, much of Sternbergh’s advice is largely useless, and in places its actively misleading.

Now, “largely useless” here does not mean “entirely useless.” In fact, if your goal is to pitch specifically to the New York Times culture section, Sternbergh has a bunch of detail that I’m sure would be valuable. Sternbergh says that he wants short pitches. He says he wants stories with characters and conflict, not ideas. He says that he doesn’t want to talk on the phone. Those are good, practical details about what Sternbergh wants, and if I ever get up the gumption to pitch him at the NYT, I’ll definitely keep them in mind.

But the conversation around Sternberghs’ suggestions (at the storify link for example) seems to be couched at least in part in general terms — not as a style guide for what the NYT in particular wants, but as advice for what editors more broadly want. And the problem here is that different editors want really different things. Most editors don’t want to talk to you on the phone, it’s true…but I’ve had some who did. Some editors may want short pitches, but others seem to like more detail. Some editors are looking for ideas, not stories — and in a lot of cases, ideas and stories are both really secondary to having a good news hook.

In fact, one of the most important things about freelancing is that there isn’t a formula. That’s the nature of the job. You’re working for a bunch of different clients, and pitching to a bunch of different outlets, and none of them will have the exact same procedures or expectations. This is a good thing to some degree, because it means that if your pitch gets rejected one place, it might be accepted somewhere else with different priorities. But it’s a frustrating thing too, because it means that you can’t get into a groove (or even a friendly rut) the way you can when you work for a single employer.

Sternbergh addresses this in a tweet from earlier this week, where he writes (https://twitter.com/sternbergh/status/474275132824096768) : “If you’re not sure if your idea is right for that magazine you shouldn’t be pitching that magazine. Not until you’re sure.” Again, there’s some truth to that; you should be at least somewhat familiar with the venues you write for. Pitch the story about the local Chicago arts show to the Chicago Reader, not to the Atlantic. Pitch the story about Chris Ware to the Comics Journal, not the Dissolve. That may seem somewhat obvious, but I know, for example, that the Comics Journal would sometimes get pitches about stand-up comedy — so if you do just a little research, you’re going to be ahead of at least some folks.

But Sternbergh’s broader point here seems like it’s designed not to help freelancers, but to make them despair. Sternbergh says that you should be “sure” your idea is right for a magazine before you pitch— but, again as someone who pitches all the time, the one thing I’m sure of is that you’re never sure. If I waited till I was sure something would work, I’d never pitch. Even with magazines I’ve worked with frequently, even with outlets I work with weekly, even with editors I talk to all the time, I still don’t know when a pitch will be accepted. I’ve had hope and a prayer pitches taken because they struck an editor’s fancy; I’ve had things I thought were certainties turned down. You can read a magazine, but you can’t read an editor’s mind — and even if you could, that still wouldn’t necessarily help you. I’ve had pieces turned down because the editor didn’t get a chance to look at the pitch until after the news hook went cold. I’ve had pieces turned down because the editor was over budget and just couldn’t afford to run them. I’ve had pieces turned down because they were too good a fit, and the editor already had something similar in the works. I’ve had pieces turned down because the editor I had a relationship with left, and the new editor just wasn’t that interested in my work. And so forth. There are as many reasons for rejection as there are pitches to reject. If you throw a ball into the air, gravity will bring it down. If you throw a pitch into the Internet, more likely than not it will come back to you with a “no”.

The ugly truth is that successful pitching often has less to do with the form of the pitch or how many paragraphs it’s got, and more to do with that somewhat humiliating ritual known as “networking”. But that’s hardly unique to freelancing; if you’re lucky enough to know someone who knows the right person, you can get past a lot of the hoops that are set up expressly to provide overworked employers/editors/whoever with some rubric for weeding people out. When you’re pitching cold without an introduction, there’s not much you can do but try to do due diligence, follow the submission instructions if any, give it your best shot, and cross your fingers. Nobody can tell you how to do more than that, because there’s nothing more than that to be done. And yes, that can be a little disheartening. But, on the other hand, at least you’ll know that getting rejected doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It just means you’re a freelancer. Welcome to the club.

Revelations of a (Ghost)writer

Posted on by

My life is full of ghosts – those of my grandfather, father, and uncle, all of whom wanted to be writers. My grandfather sailed from Ireland and became a Boston shoe salesman instead. My father was a stockbroker in New York City. My uncle, however, was a copyright lawyer who became a well-known writer of young adult and children’s books. John Donovan also became the Children’s Book Council president, “a non-profit trade organization dedicated to encouraging the literacy and the use and enjoyment of children’s books.”

Throughout my childhood, John would send books. I breathed them in like air – adventure stories, science, nature books, biographies. I would smell the books, rest my head on them, open their pages with awe, escape the real world into theirs.

When my father was dying, I stole the manuscript of the only novel he’d ever written. It was belly-up rotten. Huh? He had three Ivy League degrees. Didn’t matter; he had no talent. What he did have, and what shocked me, was a barely veiled starry-eyed love for a Malaysian woman he’d met while selling car tires there before he met and married my mother.

To understand why that was so surprising, it must be understood that my father was the type of Bostonian who begged its cliché: conservative, unemotional, inexpressive. In short, uptight.

My uncle, on the other hand, loved books, theater, dance, film, writing. Once he told me that he had fallen in love only fifty times. In short, he thrived.

While my father expressed no emotion, my uncle emoted often. Was there a tie between expression and talent? The biggest complaint my father had about me was that I was too emotional.

Was I? In third grade, I read the dictionary for fun. I wrote my first book – of jokes – in fourth grade. Throughout childhood and high school I wrote and directed plays, bribing siblings and pals to perform them at the grown-up cocktail parties. I started writing picturebooks when I was in my teens. I received triple A+’s on my English assignments, which praised my imagination but implored me not to write “this way” in college, to instead follow the rules.

Off to college I went, led by my emotions. I wrote as much as I could, exactly the way I wanted to. By graduation, I had become a big fish in a little pond. I had published poetry. I learned how little that mattered the instant I arrived in the big pond known as Manhattan. Flapping around like a fish far from water, I finally landed work in a small advertising agency. Then a bigger one. I wrote copy. And copy. And copy.

During that time, my father fell ill and died. My sister was diagnosed with a fatal illness. After her young life ended, I quit the copywriting job that paid my bills while it bankrupted my spirit. I left Manhattan for Montauk, the far end of Long Island, and dove into the artist’s life.

Er…the starving artist’s life. It was winter, I knew nobody, there was no work to be found. After a year writing it, and the next year trying to sell it, I sold my first young adult book. It didn’t make me rich, but I got legs out of it – (mostly) positive criticism, attention in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times, workshop gigs at writing conferences, public readings.

I joined a local writing class. I couldn’t help it, my pen would lift as if possessed, and I would edit people’s stuff. When fellow scribblers began offering to pay me for that, I started an editing business.

While I wrote my second novel, I became a ghostwriter. I worked with doctors, lawyers, Indian Chiefs. That’s a fib – about the Indian Chiefs, but it’s true to say that psychoanalysts, teachers, furniture makers, all wanted to be writers. So did ophthalmologists, dentists, bankers. Let’s not forget the entomologists, painters, and mechanics.

Finishing my third novel, I started a writing workshop. Writing is lonely; I longed to be around other scribes who were grappling with issues that can inhibit the creative process: Is this book any good? Should I go to law school? Are 26 rejections too many? The calls started coming in – some the kind I was used to, but increasingly, developing into something else.

As it turned out, a lot of contractors on Long Island’s East End wanted to be writers. They wanted to tell their tales of leaving places like Manhattan for places like Montauk, working at the homes of the doctors and lawyers and Indian Chiefs who had left places like New York City and bought houses on the East End so that they had somewhere to write their books.

The contractors wanted to write stories about the same clients who were now calling me with woeful tales about how their contractors were simply not returning their calls inquiring when that kitchen redesign, living room expansion, or guest house addition would finally be finished. Who could say? The contractors were busy talking to me.

My father’s words rose up like ghosts: Are we all really writers, or are we all just too emotional?

______
Stacey Donovan’s website is donovanedits.com

Mamaskin

Posted on by

I published this in Poor Mojo’s Almanac a while back. I was thinking about it again in the context of our ongoing discussion of comics, reading, Lynda Barry, and pedagogy (parts of said conversation being here and here and here. Anyway, I thought I’d reprint it, and then talk a little about how I wrote it and (generalizing wildly) about how people create.
_____________________

Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl named Lorna, who lived with her mother in a house in the woods. Lorna was so beautiful that everyone who saw her fell in love with her. This was a nuisance; she couldn’t go to the stream to get a drink of water without getting twenty marriage proposals, and it was hard to feed the hens when the lawn was covered with young men kneeling and weeping. Lorna got so fed up that she didn’t even want to leave the house, and when she did leave it she’d have to put a bag over her head, which made it hard to see. Her mother, who was old and wrinkled and had an odd sense of humor, would giggle when she saw Lorna walking around and bumping into things. But she did love her daughter, and she knew this sort of thing wouldn’t do for the long term. So she told Lorna, “When I die, and you must seek your fortune, take my skin and wear it to disguise your beauty.”

Eventually, Lorna’s mother died. Lorna did as she’d been told; she took her mother’s skin, clothed herself in it, and went off to seek her fortune. She enjoyed walking through the fields without a bag over her head and without having to dodge love-sick suitors, even though having to wear her mother’s skin was a little icky. Finally, after a long trek, Lorna reached a large castle. She knocked and the Prince who owned the castle came to the door. As it happened, he needed someone to watch his geese. Lorna took the job.

Lorna moved into a little hut near the castle. She might have lived happily ever after there tending the geese, except that her mother’s skin didn’t fit exactly right. During the day it was okay, but at night when she was trying to sleep it pinched and itched, and she discovered that if she wanted any sleep at all she had to remove it. So she put it at the foot of her bed. And in the morning the geese would poke their heads into her hut, and see her sleeping in her natural form. Then they’d fly into the air singing, “Honk! Lorna’s prettier than you think! Honk! Honk!”

One day the Prince happened to be up early wandering out in the fields. He heard the geese honking about Lorna, and he was curious. So he walked over to Lorna’s hut and saw her through the window just as she was about to put on her mother’s skin. “Oh, drat!” said Lorna. “Does this mean you’re going to fall in love with me now?” And of course it did. But the Prince was fairly handsome himself, and, to tell the truth, Lorna was tired of geese and of dead skin. So she married him, and after a while, as she got older, she grew less pretty, and started to look rather like her mother even without the skin. Eventually only the prince and the geese and her children loved her, and all the young men fell in love with somebody else. Which was perfectly all right with her.
__________________

So…like I said, I wrote this a while back. It was originally supposed to be part of a Composition and Grammar textbook I was working on for high school students taking courses by correspondence. I was doing a unit on narrative and was having students do writing based on fairy tales. I would give them a bare bones outline of the fairy tale plot (one or two sentences), and then tell them to expand the story (into three or four paragraphs). I provided several examples of expanded narratives, and the story above was one such. (I think we didn’t use it because my boss at the time felt the whole mother’s skin thing was too creepy…and maybe she had a point.)

Anyway. Thinking about writing this, and the exercise it was a part of, made me think of this comment by Dan Kois about Lynda Barry’s pedagogy:

As I mention in passing in the article, Lynda makes the case in her class that narrative structure — that is, one major component of the craft of storytelling — is a natural muscle that most humans have. The example she gives is the way you tell a story depending on whether you have one minute to tell it or ten minutes to tell it; she points out that it’s a natural tendency to construct the details of a story in a manner appropriate for the space that one has to fill.

The exercise I was doing — asking students to expand a fairy tale — is basically an exercise that Barry says is unnecessary, if I understand Dan correctly. Barry’s saying that people naturally know how to tell a story in the time (or space) allotted. It’s not an issue of craft (that is, learned ability) because it’s natural, like falling in a lake. If you have ten minutes to tell a story, you tell it in ten minutes. Simple as that.

So were all my efforts superfluous? I didn’t think so then…and now that I have a son, and am subjected to his narrative efforts all the time, I’m even less convinced. If you listen to small kids tell stories, the thing you notice is that they don’t know how to do it. There was a horrible period there, for example, where my son was obsessed with Garfield. He wanted the strips read to him all the time (which was bad enough), but he also wanted to explain and relay the strips to others. And he just couldn’t do it. He could see the strip in his mind, and he generally got the words right, but he couldn’t figure out what needed to be told when and how to a person who hadn’t seen the strip. The narrative would start and stutter and stop and go back again, and miss the joke and then he’d start over and you just wanted to claw your eyes out and curse the name of Garfield forevermore.

My son’s much, much better at narrative now…but it’s not because he got in touch with his natural essence. It’s because he’s read a lot more, and listened to people talk a lot more, and has internalized (some of) the rules and codes for creating stories. And it really is often “rules and codes” — he and his friends tell stories to each other, and they are obsessive about breaking their stories into chapters…and almost as obsessive about repeating the same story in the same way as it was originally told to them. And…my son actually explained to me at length at one point how he was going to write the back cover blurb for his book. Which maybe means he’s being corrupted by corporate culture, but as a doting father, I prefer to believe that his command of point-of-purchase advertising is instead a sign of increased narrative mastery.

Be that as it may…I think my version of the “Mamaskin” story itself also suggests that narrative is less a natural reflex than an acquired skill. Specifically, the story is put together from other stories. The basic plot, as I said, is taken from a folk tale. My retelling is also informed, obviously, by my generalized knowledge of folk tales, and of folk tale adaptations. Specifically, it’s probably more than a little touched by Patricia Wrede’s YA feminist Enchanted Forest series, with the smart, capable Princess Cimorene, who starts young but as the series goes along gets older and wiser.

The end of the my story, though, comes from here:

He, the one they recognised, no longer thought–his mind being so occupied–that love might still exist. With all that was happening at the time it’s understandable that the only thing they would tell of later was what he did, the incredible action he performed, which no one had seen before: the gesture of supplication, in which he threw himself down before them, imploring them not to show love. Alarmed by this and shaking they raised him to his feet. They interpreted his
impulsive behaviour in their own way, while at the same time forgiving him. He must have found it indescribably liberating to find that they’d all misunderstood him, despite his desperately explicit manner.

It was likely they’d let him stay. As the days passed he came to see more clearly that the love they were so vain about and which they secretly encouraged in one another did not affect him. He almost had to smile at the trouble they took and it became obvious that their concern for him could not amount to much.

What did they know about who he was? He was now so terribly difficult to love, and he felt there was only the One who was capable of it. But He was not yet willing.

That’s the conclusion of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and one of my favorite passages in all of literature. And since I liked it so much, I stole it, which is more or less what writers do. (I also was thinking of this line from slightly earlier in Rilke’s narrative: ” The simple love of his sheep didn’t affect him; like light falling through clouds, it was scattered all about him and shimmered softly upon the meadows.” I love that.)

I’m not denying that there’s a personal element in my version of “Mamaskin” as well. Like Lorna (and lots of other people), I found marriage rather a relief. But I’d argue that (like Lorna’s again) the relief is itself a narrative one. When you’re in the story of romance, you’re in the story of romance; getting out of that is figuring a way to tell a different tale, which is closely related to living a different life.

Barry’s certainly right, then, that narrative is natural in the sense that it’s tied up with and into human lives. But the thing is that human lives aren’t very natural; we’re weird alien things, narratives grafted onto dyring animals. Figuring out what to do with this narrative that’s in us isn’t something you find naturally the way a bee locates a flower. It’s something you acquire like a baby learns to speak. That is, with a certain amount of struggle and tears, and with varying proficiency depending on numerous factors, including the quality of your teachers. Speech is a technology and a craft, and so, surely, is writing. And, as is generally the case with a craft, you get better at it by imitating models, practicing, and sometimes taking advice. There’s not any particular magic to it, except maybe the magic of not having any magic except the skins our parents have left us.

Caroline Small on Comics and Writing (again!)

Posted on by

Caro keeps writing these massive comments that I hate to see buried in the threads. So I thought I’d highlight this one too. (I’d urge people to click over to the thread also, though. James Romberger, Robert Stanley Martin, Jeet Heer, and others also have many interesting thoughts.)
____________

Gracious! I couldn’t participate yesterday or Friday and it’s going to take me awhile to really catch up, but I think I need to jump into the James/Robert kerfuffle here because I think James’ real target is probably me. So I’ll try to clarify.

For me it is a question not of giving precedence in the creative process to one person or another, or even to one skillset or another, but just of teasing out all the different “crafts” that go into making a really extraordinary comic. The importance of visual craft is certainly indisputable. I mean no dismissal of it. But I think the craft of manipulating narrative is also very important, and — depending on the conception of the work — the craft of manipulating prose may also be important.

So the question for me isn’t which is more important, because I think that there is no right answer to that — creators can make choices about whether to try and balance them or let one be dominant on a case-by-case basis. That’s part of the craft of creating any work, choosing which elements to emphasize at which point.

But I also do think it is the case that, de facto, right now, advanced visual craft is consistently and significantly much more important to people in art comics — both creators and fans — than advanced narrative craft, even though some creators dismiss both. At the level of skill, James, as you rightly point out here and many other places, it is extremely difficult to find someone who is really gifted at both visual creation and narrative manipulation. The conditions for getting highly skilled at visual craft are more accessible to cartoonists than the conditions for getting highly skilled at narrative craft.

We’ve discussed this before: there are so many inputs to that — education, culture, aesthetic preference, history of the art forms — it’s just really rare that people are first-rate at both. Although I can make arguments for people here and there, I really can’t come up with anybody working right now other than Eddie Campbell who I think sails easily over my bar, except possibly Dan Clowes, who still isn’t quite in Campbell’s league narratively.

Given that difficulty of finding people who are good at both, and given the pressures of a commercial work environment, I think it’s logical that there aren’t many (any?) mainstream collaborations that have the seamlessness, the balance between the different craft inputs, of a tremendous literary/art comic like “Fate of the Artist.” I do understand what Gary and Brunetti are getting at with the notion that a single creator can integrate the disparate crafts in a way that’s very difficult for collaborators. A really seamless artistic collaboration probably requires a meaningful level of intimacy and honesty that seems likely hard to get in a really commercial environment.

I do understand the struggle here over who can and should get credit — without that intimacy and honesty, the more aggressive personality is probably going to be in the lead. But I think credit is a red herring when talking about issues of approach, because who gets credit would depend on how the approach played out in the specific work. Credit is specific; approach is general. I don’t think any particular imbalance is an inherent property of collaboration — look at John and Sondra of Metaphrog. I don’t have the sense that one of them is more “in charge” than the other. I think they are true collaborators. But that’s not going to be the case with all collaborators. They, like a lot of bands, get around the issue by giving themselves a collective name and emphasizing the group work.

I think it’s essential, therefore, that we bracket questions of credit and the relative importance of individual contributors when we think about the value and risks of collaboration in general. I think we need to look at the actual effects of the Gary/Brunetti approach in practice, not just the romance of it as an ideal goal: what so often happens in single-creator comics is that the elements of “architecture” typically associated with writing, the manipulation of narrative and the rudiments of fiction that Barth calls “craft”, get short shrift — often relative even to film and mainstream fiction, but especially relative to the types of narrative manipulation you see in the most ambitious prose writing.

This is partly because, I think, many cartoonists simply aren’t aware of how craft-intensive the manipulation of narrative is, or they think, like Dan says for Lynda Barry, that narrative is and should be something we do “naturally.”

Up to a point, the notion that human beings are storytelling creatures is true, with some caveats to what “natural” means, but narrative-minded Western humans have been stylizing that “natural” ability for at least a few hundred years now, so it’s a pretty aggressive choice to reject everything they’ve done out of hand. Not that you were defending that stance, James, but to privilege “naif” writing is to be extremely aggressively anti-writing, at least in the sense of what “writing” means to most people who spend a lot of time reading prose fiction.

I think Barry’s anti-Craft stance is much, much, much more harshly against writing than Robert’s is against visual art. I find it really hard not to get very personally offended at it, and the only reason I can avoid it is because it seems to have a psychological source rather than a political one. She feels excluded by formal writing, and so her response is to construct a pedagogy that excludes formal writing right back. That’s not personal against me. But I just don’t agree that either group needs to exclude the other, and I think she’s wrong to approach it that way.

This quote is a good place to expand on that point:

ask her about how she wrote CRUDDY and she’ll tell you a tale of years of woe stemming from reading book after book on story structure and novel-writing, which ended only when she threw it all away and painted the novel in ten months with a brush.

I’d be curious to hear Dan’s response to Noah’s form/content point, but my problem with this ties back into the Dickey book and the tangent with Charles about reading speed – you don’t develop intuition about story structure and novel-writing by reading how-to books. You develop intuition about story structure and novel writing by reading thousands of novels. How-to books just help make you more conscious of things you already know about and have experienced through tens of thousands of hours of reading prose books. Those how-to books resonate and make sense not because they show you something new, but because they articulate intuitions you already have as a reader. If you don’t have those intuitions already developed through that relationship with reading, those books won’t make sense. They won’t tie back into anything “natural” and they’ll feel horrifically artificial, like they are talking to someone completely different from you.

And if you don’t have that intuition, it’s going to be very hard to manipulate narratives and write in ways that speak intimately and in compelling ways to the people who have read thousands of novels. Those people SHOULD BE an audience for “literary” comics. But we often are not, because there is such widespread contempt for the writing we love among the comics community. It is a fierce exclusion, and one that feels very deeply personal. And it is a completely unnecessary exclusion — and I think often a completely UNINTENTIONAL exclusion, born of psychology and lack of experience and interest rather than actual dislike.

So although I want to qualify again that as a way of getting at inner process, Barry’s pedagogy sounds extraordinary, what I find so terribly off-putting about it, at least as presented here, is her seeming inability to see past the limitations of her own, “naif” or “brut” discourse to recognize how her pedagogy and its goals could work with rather than against more craft-intensive approaches to writing and more stylized approaches to narrative, how it could be welcoming to prose readers rather than exclusive of them.

There is no reason why comics cannot have both a brut, naif tradition and a full-range of more stylized traditions in narrative — the exact same way it draws from both naif and stylized traditions from visual art. There are brut visual traditions as well as artists who are as skilled as the best classical illustrators and painters, and comics welcomes them all.

But for writers, if you are interested in more stylized narratives, or in more academic ways of talking about and thinking about narrative, you are consistently marginalized — forced to defend your perspective against charges that it’s “anti-visual” or anti-artist, and, more aggressively, told you are insensitive to the history of comics or just plain uninformed. That type of assertion, like Barry’s “anti-Craft” language, are not “approaches” to making art when they are stated so baldly and with the intent to derrogate or exclude other approaches. At that point, they are just ways of policing the discourse community. And a strictly policed discourse community is not a fecund environment for great art — ask any anti-academic Modernist.

What I’d like to see is a more engaged recognition from within comics of the extent to which these ways of thinking about comics are schools or whatever that can co-exist and even overlap and inform each other. The “anti-Craft” approach Barry and others take is a school of cartooning and should be treated as such (someone mentioned James Kochalka’s term “cute brut” to me.) There is an “art school cartooning” that allows for naif narrative but requires more ambitious visual craft. I’m sure there are several more approaches that already exist within comics praxis, and there are definitely a number of approaches that hypothetically are possible but really do not exist within comics praxis.

If comics praxis is to expand to include the widest possible range of discourse communities in its scope — something which absolutely MUST HAPPEN before it can truly and accurately be considered a medium (rather than a genre) in praxis rather than in potential — comics practitioners, including critics, have to be able to talk about competing approaches as competing approaches, without bullying each other over the various ways that one approach excludes elements of the others. That’s the point of approaches — they select certain aspects to privilege and push aside others. But they do not do so universally — more comics like Eddie Campbell’s won’t mean there are fewer comics like Lynda Barry’s or Ariel Schrag’s or Seth’s. It will just mean the discourse communities who can find affinities with comics and make investments in comics will be bigger and more diverse, and that’s better for every cartoonist, no matter what his or her approach.