So, about last night...
where we know the stories won't write themselves
Wednesday mornings are typically quite productive for me. I teach early on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so on Wednesdays, I like to get up, make coffee, and get to the job of writing before the realities of life worm their way into my brain and consciousness. I try to avoid the news, emails, and texts until my 500 words are written, until I can spend some time in my imagination with my fictional astronaut or insects. However, I knew even yesterday that today wouldn’t be that kind of Wednesday, no matter the results.
And of course, it isn’t.
I woke up around 2:00am when I heard fireworks and honking outside, and knew that wasn’t a good sign.1 I felt sick. I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I read for an hour. When I can’t sleep, when I am trying to sleep, I often think about processes and tedious tasks. It’s sort of like counting sheep for me. Sometimes this might be thinking about taking a bicycle apart, piece by piece, and putting it back together. Or walking myself through some project I’m working on. Not any sort of creative part of it. Just the task of making the thing. I am deep into sketching a dummy for the insect stories, and “working” on that, in my head, at 3:00am last night, is what eventually calmed me down.2
Nothing interesting comes from this sort of processing. It’s not like that weird ethereal creative period just before I climb out of bed where new ideas live and story problems get solved. It’s just to get back to sleep. But it made me think of books like those that we make, as children’s writers and illustrators.
A lot of artists, at least a lot I see on social media, maybe just a lot of people in general, use mornings like this morning to sort of hide away and cease to function. And that’s valid. Cope how you need to cope. Hiding under the sofa is what I’d planned to do, too. I felt terrible. I worry about my kids. I worry about friends, and I worry about people I don’t even know. There’s a lot to process here. It’s different from 2016. A friend messaged me and asked how I was doing. I said I feel like crawling into a hole and lying in a fetal position for the day.
But then I put the phone down, went for a run in the woods, showered, and came to the studio to draw. Maybe it’s a dumb connection. But these little bugs and birds I’m writing about somehow made me feel better last night. At least feel temporarily better enough to get back to sleep. And isn’t that one of the jobs of the books we make? I don’t want to retreat from that. That’s the opposite of what I want to do.
I don’t know. All this, I guess, is to say that I decided not to cope with my own anxieties and fears by putting this work on the shelf. Instead, I’m in here trying to get that which is in my imagination into real life. Because these books aren’t going to make themselves.
Hope you all got some sleep last night.
I knew that in the same situation, Harris supporters would probably pour a glass of wine, post a meme on Facebook, and go to bed. Not go outside and wake everyone up.
In this case it was thinking about using Adobe InDesign, one of the world’s most tedious pieces of software, to layout the pages. And then using my ink pens to draw hundreds of insects and flowers and plants and birds. So many insects and flowers and plants and birds.
Thanks for this, Brian. I speed-wrote a whole picture book manuscript yesterday (which I’m scared to look at now, haha) in anticipation of today’s probable coma state. I’m making a promise to myself this time around to not let Trump to have a hold on my daily mood, attention, or output. (Starting tomorrow.)
Stay strong, man. I spent the morning writing about birdsong (in video games), so we're on a parallel path.