Writer's block.
I was going to end it there to be funny but realised the universe could in no way allow me to live.
Anyway I mean this blog to be a record of the various screws up, breakdowns and brickwalls I face and my clumsy attempts to climb over them. Writer's block is a bizarre one - sometimes I sit hunched up on the floor of some train station, typing frantically as I can see the last percent of my laptop battery melt away and I know that if I can't finish what I'm doing by the time the power goes, then the world will implode. Other times I've been sat in the sunlight on Hampsted heath with this kickass view in front of me and a load of cake and I've got nothing - I've reworded a few sentences I wrote a week ago, but anything I come up with reads like the obituary of Robert Gair; inventor of the precut cardboard box (researching someone boring enough to make that analogy work depressed me alot... Wikipedia has a history of the cardboard box page here. I DARE YOU.) The will to write seems to come and go in waves and I'm going to try and pay attention to it a bit more to see if I can do anything about it (science, right?) but I was reading a foreword to a book by the illustrator Shaun Tan recently and he spoke about an interesting way of facing writer's block when it comes to illustration - taking a line for a walk.
When you have a blank page and no brief, there's no limit to what you can draw and you'd think this means you could just come up with anything, you know just go nuts - but in practice it's really difficult. So Shaun suggests just drawing a shape, any shape, the first that comes into your head. From that you just let your imagination fill in the rest. You immediately get an impression of what you want this shape to become and in that instance you can suddenly visualise the rest of the image. It's a lot like how your brain constructs an image from the shape of a cloud; selecting shapes it's familiar with and piecing them together into an image it wants to see - which is something I'm going to be focusing a lot in my book The Cloud Shepherd (title drop... boom). So here's my go at taking a line for a walk:
The shape I started with was the curve along the top of the hut on the left. Then immediately it was "Oh hey that's a hut. WAIT. Moon hut." I'm calling it welcome to the neighbourhood and I'm not going to be boring and try to explain it more than that.
This one's different - I started with the curve of the beak and then the rest of the image came from something I've been wanting to draw for a long time but couldn't visualise as a scene. Anyway this is a character from the book named the Raven King or else the Collector of Things. It's very unfinished as you can see but hopefully I'll be able to layer up all the bits and pieces and finish it up. I was watching Spirited Away recently and one of the things that I love about Ghibli films are these big piles of stuff you get in the back of some scenes - so I'm aiming for something like that.
Last one I did before the line walking concept but it was similar in that I started from the idea of something having a perfectly spherical head and filled in the rest from there. Apologies for the crap quality, I don't have photoshop or a good camera or any idea what I'm doing - and not just with this. Anyway this is called the Sun Giant and my idea here is to extend the taking a line for a walk idea to writing by putting together a short story just from this image. It's not a cure for writer's block because a novel needs to have a cohesive, thought out plan if it's to be a novel. But I think it's an interesting experiment (moar science) and let's see how it goes. If you made it this far THANKS. One again I'd really appreciate some criticism.
Peace out.
I was going to end it there to be funny but realised the universe could in no way allow me to live.
Anyway I mean this blog to be a record of the various screws up, breakdowns and brickwalls I face and my clumsy attempts to climb over them. Writer's block is a bizarre one - sometimes I sit hunched up on the floor of some train station, typing frantically as I can see the last percent of my laptop battery melt away and I know that if I can't finish what I'm doing by the time the power goes, then the world will implode. Other times I've been sat in the sunlight on Hampsted heath with this kickass view in front of me and a load of cake and I've got nothing - I've reworded a few sentences I wrote a week ago, but anything I come up with reads like the obituary of Robert Gair; inventor of the precut cardboard box (researching someone boring enough to make that analogy work depressed me alot... Wikipedia has a history of the cardboard box page here. I DARE YOU.) The will to write seems to come and go in waves and I'm going to try and pay attention to it a bit more to see if I can do anything about it (science, right?) but I was reading a foreword to a book by the illustrator Shaun Tan recently and he spoke about an interesting way of facing writer's block when it comes to illustration - taking a line for a walk.
When you have a blank page and no brief, there's no limit to what you can draw and you'd think this means you could just come up with anything, you know just go nuts - but in practice it's really difficult. So Shaun suggests just drawing a shape, any shape, the first that comes into your head. From that you just let your imagination fill in the rest. You immediately get an impression of what you want this shape to become and in that instance you can suddenly visualise the rest of the image. It's a lot like how your brain constructs an image from the shape of a cloud; selecting shapes it's familiar with and piecing them together into an image it wants to see - which is something I'm going to be focusing a lot in my book The Cloud Shepherd (title drop... boom). So here's my go at taking a line for a walk:
The shape I started with was the curve along the top of the hut on the left. Then immediately it was "Oh hey that's a hut. WAIT. Moon hut." I'm calling it welcome to the neighbourhood and I'm not going to be boring and try to explain it more than that.
This one's different - I started with the curve of the beak and then the rest of the image came from something I've been wanting to draw for a long time but couldn't visualise as a scene. Anyway this is a character from the book named the Raven King or else the Collector of Things. It's very unfinished as you can see but hopefully I'll be able to layer up all the bits and pieces and finish it up. I was watching Spirited Away recently and one of the things that I love about Ghibli films are these big piles of stuff you get in the back of some scenes - so I'm aiming for something like that.
Last one I did before the line walking concept but it was similar in that I started from the idea of something having a perfectly spherical head and filled in the rest from there. Apologies for the crap quality, I don't have photoshop or a good camera or any idea what I'm doing - and not just with this. Anyway this is called the Sun Giant and my idea here is to extend the taking a line for a walk idea to writing by putting together a short story just from this image. It's not a cure for writer's block because a novel needs to have a cohesive, thought out plan if it's to be a novel. But I think it's an interesting experiment (moar science) and let's see how it goes. If you made it this far THANKS. One again I'd really appreciate some criticism.
Peace out.
Your droarings are so good
ReplyDeleteThe drawings are fantastic. Keep going....
ReplyDelete