Gabriel Garcia Marquez did not merely write of “trees”; he wrote of almond trees — from a generic group noun to something specific. We can say that Mansa Musa was a “very wealthy king”, or we can say that when he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca he left behind so much gold that he ruined the Egyptian economy. The words “very wealthy” are abstract and conceptual; the fact that Mansa Musa was rich enough to give away sufficient money to damage an economy — that is an action, and it is concrete. A handy question, one asked most often by those in the copywriting business, is: “can you visualise it?”
Consider the King James Version of the Bible, compiled by a committee of forty-two translators and published in 1611 under the patronage of King James I. It is probably the most influential single book ever written in English; the King James Bible has shaped the English language itself — how it was spoken and written — for centuries thereafter. And little wonder! Those translators wrote a work of exemplary literary and linguistic clarity, simplicity, dignity, and elegance. They also had a wonderful penchant for using highly specific, marvellously concrete language. Consider this verse, where the Israelites are turning against Moses as they look back fondly on their time in Egypt:
We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick: But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.
Despite setbacks, he kept reading, writing, and cataloging.
Sometimes we don’t even know we’re preparing for our big project. At this point in J.A. Baker’s life he was back in Chelmsford, unemployed. But…
He was not disheartened. As far as he was concerned his real work was going very well: in the three months between returning from Roffey and starting work in London he had read almost sixty books; such ‘aesthetic stimulus’, as he called it, was far more important to his long term goals. Now that he had time on his hands, he was keen to devote it to his literary projects. Days and nights were spent feverishly reading and writing.
He built up his personal library. Something he’d continue to do through his lifetime:
By the end of January 1946, Baker’s library had grown to remarkable levels. Dozens of books of poetry had been consumed as he made his way through the canonical writers of the nineteenth century, including Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Browning (as well as translations of the French and German poets Rimbaud and Rilke), and moved on to modern writers: John Masefield, T.S. Eliot (whom he had grown to like, despite not having been offered a job at Faber), Cecil Day Lewis and Stephen Spender. He discovered a love for the lilting style of the ‘ultra-modern’ Dylan Thomas, whom he thought perfectly mirrored his own memories of childhood and love of the countryside.
and Baker practiced his writerley scales:
Exercise books were filled with notes on form and metre, and hundreds of poems carefully copied out. Study was an outlet: it helped him to stave off bouts of depression that continued to threaten.
The simple fact is that there is no job or career in which keeping track of your learning isn’t useful.
Ted Gioia
We tend to think of note taking as short hand, or jotting down quick partial sentences. Lamp post notes that will shine a glimmer on a distant a idea when we revisit them. (If we revisit them).
Some examples of lamp post notes are:
Cornell notes.
Bullet journaling.
But Gioia’s note taking method advocates for writing notes in complete sentences and connecting paragraphs. A more demanding, but more rewarding form of note-taking.
These pamphlets in Wes Anderson’s Criterion Collections are worth the price of admission. They’re filled with drawings, interviews, and behind- the-scenes insights. An analog version of a blu-ray’s bonus features.
Here Wes shares a glimpse of his process:
When I’m writing, I keep notebooks of my ideas for sets, props, and clothes. I incorporate some of these ideas into the script, but I set the majority of them aside to give privately to the different department heads during preproduction. In the past, I have occasionally forgotten some of my favorite ideas until it was too late – – for example, after the movie is out on video. To prevent this from happening on THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (which contains more perhaps unnecessary visual detail than both my previous films combined), about three months before we started shooting, I asked my brother Eric, a skilled illustrator, to help me create a set of drawings that would include much of the information I wanted to communicate to the crew — and that would also suggest the overall look and feeling of the movie.
We had already found the house where I wanted to film (in the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem), and our production designer, David Wasco, had provided us with a set of blueprints, so I was able to very specifically plan the contents and arrangements of each of the rooms, and Eric was able to meticulously render them. Eric was, in fact, so meticulous that many of the sets had already been constructed by the time he finished the drawings. Eventually, however, his illustrations became the standard equipment on the walls of the production offices and art department and in the notebooks of everyone on the crew — a sort of manual to keep next to your script. We include a copy here for you.
— Wes Anderson
Criterion Collection Pamphlet. The Royal Tenenbaums
Is Wes Anderson the filmmaker with the highest percentage of his movies in the Criterion Collection? 9 from 10? I’m sure the French Dispatch is lurking at the door.
You have to stop thinking about anything other than what happened when you were a little kid, and you laid on the floor, and you drew. And you lost yourself in that drawing. And in the end, you absolutely loved that drawing because you made it yourself. And the drawing got hung up on the fridge regardless of how good it was, because your mom loves you and everybody loves you. Why can’t you be that kind to yourself?
Jeff Tweedy‘s book, How to Write One Song, applies to anyone who makes things. Music is the medium he reflects on, but when you read the book, swap the word “song” with anything you make – paintings, birdhouses, stock cars, stained glass windows.
To accomplish this he set himself a simple goal. Sit at the piano for three hours everyday. He didn’t have to write any music. But he couldn’t leave his piano bench either.
Those were the two options he gave himself. Do nothing. Or write music.
The discipline needed for composing was a different matter altogether and required more ingenuity. My first goal was to be able to sit at a piano or desk for three hours. I thought that was a reasonable amount of time and, once accomplished, could be easily extended as needed. I picked a period of time that would work most days, ten a.m. to one in the afternoon. This allowed for my music classes and also my part-time work at Yale Trucking.
The exercise was this: I set a clock on the piano, put some music paper on the table nearby, and sat at the piano from ten until one. It didn’t matter whether I composed a note of music or not. The other part of the exercise was that I didn’t write music at an other time of the day or night. The strategy was to tame my muse, encouraging it to be active at the time I had set and at no other times. A strange idea, perhaps, undertaken as an experiment. I had no idea whether it would work.
It’s encouraging to learn that one of the world’s foremost composers had to build up their discipline. Passion will get you sitting on the piano bench, but discipline will keep you there.
Glass is honest when describing his early method. The boredom beat him down.
The first week was painful-brutal, actually. At first I did nothing at all during those three hours. I sat like an idiot without any idea of what to do. When the three hours were up I bolted for the door and practically ran out into the street, so relieved was I to be away from the piano. Then, slowly, things began to change. I started writing music, just to have something to do. It didn’t really matter whether it was good, bad, boring , or interesting. And eventually, it was interesting. So I had tricked myself into composing…something.
Here Glass is an excellent example of independent thinking. Before the days of productivity coaches and time management blogs. Before the term “deliberate practice” was coined, Glass devised his own practice schedule to coax his muse into action.
How worthwhile could it be if we tried something similar? Instead of rushing to the internet for guidance we thought through what specific skill we were trying to learn and devised our own plans to execute?
To the absolute best of your ability, create an exact replica of your favorite page. Do not trace. Any deviation from the original should be unintentional on you part; ineptitude and sloppiness are charmless when deliberate.
Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, pg 60. Brunetti, Ivan
Brunetti then urges his students to pay close attention to each element of their comics page:
Pay close attention to what you are copying. Think about the artist’s decisions regarding page layout, panel compositions, design, characterization, dialogue, gesture, captions, balloons, word placement, sound effects, line, shape, texture, etc. Hopefully you will gain some appreciation of their working and thinking process… and the difficulty of creating a comics page.
Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, pg 60. Brunetti, Ivan
Brunetti practiced this version of copywork in his own career.
He took on the Nancy strip for a time. The pressure from the syndicate to copy Ernie Bushmiller‘s style precisely, further developed his cartooning technique.
I can tell exactly the time period in my work when I was doing these-the syndicate were such nitpickers about me copying Bushmiller’s style exactly that my approach to cartooning got much more precise as a result. I went from doing strips just to amuse myself, without a grand plan, to focusing on formal aspects of cartooning much more: where to place a word balloon, the composition of every panel, and the flow of panels.
In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists, pg 279. Hignite, Tom
Brunetti enjoyed the project while in the learning phase, but admitted it was an unpleasant way to work:
When you’re copying someone else’s style exactly, you can theorize about it, and actually break it down into a set of rules. So they way I was working by imitating him had almost nothing to do with the way he was working…I also realized that working this way was totally unpleasant, because there are very strict parameters you have to follow, rather than discovering the rules that work. The project was fun while I was discovering all of the rules; I would notice that he would never put certain kind of marks next to one another because they’d look wrong. I became very aware of every penstroke, where he used a ruler, where it was freehand. He had an intuitive sense of what looked good, so for me it was trying to codify this into a set of rules, which made me realize the importance of the consistency of your cartooning vocabulary.
In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists, pg 279. Hignite, Tom
Could Brunetti’s copywork exercise translate into other disciplines as well?
If you’re an aspiring graphic designer you could recreate your favorite logos, stroke by stroke, in illustrator?
Or if you’re a programmer, instead of cutting and pasting, you typed out lines of code, line by line, character by character?
With thought and imagination, copywork exercises can be applied to every discipline.
I would like to begin by asking how you started. How did you become a writer? What was the first thing that you ever wrote and when?
DONALD HALL
Everything important always begins from something trivial. When I was about twelve I loved horror movies. I used to go down to New Haven from my suburb and watch films like Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Wolf Man Meets Abbott and Costello. So the boy next door said, Well, if you like that stuff, you’ve got to read Edgar Allan Poe. I had never heard of Edgar Allan Poe, but when I read him I fell in love. I wanted to grow up and be Edgar Allan Poe. The first poem that I wrote doesn’t really sound like Poe, but it’s morbid enough. Of course I have friends who say it’s the best thing I ever did: “Have you ever thought / Of the nearness of death to you? / It reeks through each corner, / It shrieks through the night, / It follows you through the day / Until that moment when, / In monotones loud, / Death calls your name. / Then, then, comes the end of all.” The end of Hall, maybe. That started me writing poems and stories. For a couple of years I wrote them in a desultory fashion because I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be a great actor or a great poet.
Then when I was fourteen I had a conversation at a Boy Scout meeting with a fellow who seemed ancient to me; he was sixteen. I was bragging and told him that I had written a poem during study hall at high school that day. He asked—I can see him standing there—You write poems? and I said, Yes, do you? and he said, in the most solemn voice imaginable, It is my profession. He had just quit high school to devote himself to writing poetry full time! I thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever heard. It was like that scene in Bonnie and Clyde where Clyde says, We rob banks. Poetry is like robbing banks. It turned out that my friend knew some eighteen-year-old Yale freshmen, sophisticated about literature, and so at the age of fourteen I hung around Yale students who talked about T. S. Eliot. I saved up my allowance and bought the little blue, cloth-covered collected Eliot for two dollars and fifty cents and I was off. I decided that I would be a poet for the rest of my life and started by working at poems for an hour or two every day after school. I never stopped.
One question in and I already have to recommend the rest of this interview.
Floodlights and Goalposts 