Lynda Barry

Another thought from Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, her memoir about teaching her college-level creativity course.

To loosen her students’ creativity, Barry uses a handful of repetitive drawing exercises that on the surface may seem juvenile. For example, she has her students fill a page in their composition books with a giant spiral in pen, instructing them to keep the lines as close as possible without allowing them to touch. While they draw the spiral, she has them listen to a short recording about creativity. Barry believes that the repetitive motion helps her students loosen up their minds and their muscles, freeing them to be more relaxed and spontaneous when they draw.

She also has her students color pages from coloring books or other simple black and white printed illustrations, using crayons. As you might expect, some of the students question this exercise and suggest they would be embarrassed to be caught coloring in a coloring book as homework. But again, as with memory work in writing, Barry wanted her students to practice the physicality of making art more than she wanted them to create an original piece of work, at least right away. She wants her students to lose their inhibitions and judgments about their drawing ability, and instead focus on simple building blocks. I suppose if you spent the day coloring in coloring books, drawing a stick man doodle would seem like classical art in comparison.

Barry’s instructions included filling in as much of the white space on the page as possible with color. Anyone who has colored with crayon knows how hard it is to cover all the white. It takes repetitive strokes and heavy hand pressure to get those layers.

Initially, Barry told her students what to do but not how, and they generally accepted the assignment. In later classes, however, she provided a shortcut, letting students know in advance that they would have to press down hard with their crayons to achieve the desired effect. In contrast to the earlier classes, these students complained about the coloring assignment. They hated it, and Barry realized that the shortcut had taken the pleasure out of discovery. Instead of finding their own method through trial and error, and the pleasure of accomplishment that comes with it, the students experienced the exercise as mere drudgery. Worse, the resentment prevented them from getting into the spontaneous mindset that Barry sought to create.

Writers face this same conundrum. Though we may want someone to tell us how to write well, our teachers can only point us in the right direction. I struggle with plot and often wished I could ask someone what should happen next at a certain point in my story, but it doesn’t work that way. I could ask, I suppose. I might get an answer. I might even get a good answer. But it wouldn’t be my answer and I would never learn what I must if I relied too much on creative handholding.

You can find a lot of good advice and helpful tips for working through craft problems, but ultimately, the work is yours. No one can – or should – tell you how or what to write. Unraveling story knots can be as difficult as covering white paper with crayon. It takes effort and patience. You have to cover the same spots over and over and over. You hand might start to hurt. But when you figure out the solution, you’ll have gained more from the exercise than if someone had given you the cheat code.

Lynda Barry’s craft books are a great source for writing advice and inspiration. While focused on cartooning, the advice on memory work, creativity, and freedom from imposter syndrome are important for any writer. I’m not going to book-club any of them, because they are heavy on art class exercises, but I intend to share a few quotes over the next few weeks.

As in Bird by Bird, Barry recommends memory work in her own Syllabus, a review of her instructions and experiences teaching her college-level creativity class. In Barry’s case, she’s helping her students prime the pump for ideas for short comix, either 4 panel cartoons or short 2-4 page stories, with an eventual goal of creating a longer work as their final project.

In the first class, she gives her students a noun and tells them to write down the first ten memories they associate with that word. Then, each student picks the memory that piques the most interest and expands upon it, answering specific questions: where they are, the time of day, their age, who else is there, what they notice. Finally, using those notes, students draft a short narrative describing this scene and their memories and emotions. During the class, the students follow this process on their own, using prompts they find during their coursework.

Since this occurs early in the semester, Barry starts with an easy word: Car. This is a great word for memory work, because cars are ubiquitous in the western world. Even if your family didn’t have one, you knew someone who did. Most likely, you don’t remember your first car ride, because it occurred so early in your childhood, and you couldn’t possibly count the number of times you’ve climbed in and out of one.

But individual cars…those you remember. If you want to try the exercise, make a quick list of ten items. You can write down specific cars or experiences with cars. The family car, your uncle’s clunker, the first car you bought with your own money, the car you envied, the car that struck your pet. Pick one item from the list that jogs a lot of memory, and write down everything you see in your mind’s eye. Don’t worry about narrative – start with notes and lists and get down as much as you can. When you exhaust your ideas, now turn this into a short first-person narrative. You don’t need a great opening line, nor do you need to craft a story. Put the memory on paper as it comes to you and let it be.

Here’s mine:

I’m in the back of the Chevy II Nova, not wearing a seat belt. I’m 3 or 4 years old, the car is much older, from the 1960s, bought long before I was born. I don’t remember if there even were seatbelts in the back. It will be another 20 years before society gets serious about car seats.

It is mid-morning, Spring. The sun is high and warm, but not too hot. My mom is driving. It must be Spring because she’s brought me along on errands. I’m too young to be left home alone so my siblings must be in school.

The air is clear but the car smells of oil and exhaust, coming through the rusted out hole in the floor. Through the hole, the road zooms by, grey and black mottled with streaks of color. I slip from my seat to lay face down on the floor, eye pressed to the rusted hole. I do this quietly, as it seems like something I shouldn’t do – being curious, investigating, observing, having fun. No one has said explicitly that I shouldn’t press my eye to the hole in the floor while the car is moving, but small children know. We have an instinct for what will cause trouble.

But mom doesn’t notice. She doesn’t carry conversations well, not with her children. She probably assumes I’ve laid down to sleep. I’m not missed.

So I lay on the floor of the car, nose against the threadbare carpet, eye against a jagged opening, watching the world zoom by, lucky that I won’t lose an eye to a twist of metal or sharp stone.

In some recent posts, I’ve talked about reducing my focus on numbers-based writing goals and instead shifting to time-based scheduling. In the past, I’ve used daily and weekly word count goals to get words on paper, but as my projects evolve from brainstorming to actual writing, that mindset started working against me. At this stage, getting words down isn’t as important as finding the right words and imbuing them with meaning. I need to work on character, setting, and the emotional arcs, which is fun, but don’t necessarily add to the word count. This year, my goal is to work a set number of hours per week, moving through the novel chapter by chapter, and allowing myself to be happy with whatever I finish. This is working so far.

Of note, I came across an anecdote that affirmed my thinking on this. The graphic above is a clip from Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, a course outline cum memoir, in which she shares the instructions and requirements for her creativity course while also relating what she learned from her years teaching it and from her students’ work.

As coursework, students were required to keep a daily journal of what they saw and heard and to doodle cartoons. Generally, Barry directed her students to spend no more than a few minutes on each task. Time limits ranged from 2 to 7 minutes, depending on the assignment. Her intention was to help them tap into their creative spontaneity. She wanted them to write the first things that popped into their heads and to draw loosely, without overthinking. She also assigned other tasks, like memory exercises and coloring from a coloring book.

Of course, as students will, many of them procrastinated on their assignments and rushed to complete them before class. While they might have finished a cartoon or coloring assignment in time, Barry noticed these students didn’t learn what they needed from the lesson. They were missing out on the time to create, the mindset that develops when you relax into a creative session, and the sense of play and accomplishment. They were writing and doodling to check a box, not to develop their observation and creative skills.

That was an important reminder for me this past week. When I set aside time to write, I enjoy the time I have, and if that means I draft a chapter, rearrange some scenes, or rewrite a few paragraphs, that’s find. I allow myself to sink into the work, without fretting over how many words are in this file or that chapter. I’m resisting the urge to calculate how quickly I could finish my novel if I wrote X words per day every day for a few months. That’s not the point and it’s not the mindset I want to have this year. This year, I’m going to avoid checking creative boxes and let myself indulge the actual process.