Lynda Barry on writing without thinking
“Is this good? Does this suck?”
Last week, in an interview with the London Writers' Salon, I was asked a question that I don’t think I’ve ever been asked before:
If a writer has sixty minutes a day, how would you design that block based on your research?
In reply, I tried to say that one ought to be strict about finding that daily hour and protecting it from distractions and interruptions—but that the writing time itself should not have a quality of strictness. Instead, it should feel more like a gift to yourself: an hour in which to tinker, explore, follow things wherever they lead.
I think this is a decent enough answer—and yet, afterward, I felt like I had failed to give up the goods in some crucial way. Surely there’s more to it than that?
As I was mulling this over, I happened to pluck Lynda Barry’s 2008 book What It Is from my bookshelf. This hybrid graphic memoir/creative workbook was recommended to me years ago by B.A. Lampman of the wonderful newsletter Feed the Monster, but I had never gotten around to actually opening it. When I finally took a look—wouldn’t you know it, the book contains specific, detailed, and totally brilliant instructions for how to design a block of writing time.
Side note: I try not to get too woo-woo in this newsletter, but . . . this keeps happening to me? I will have a question or a dilemma in mind, and then the very next book I pick up will have exactly the answer I need. It’s eerie and wonderful.
My experience reading What It Is was sort of eerie, too. The graphic memoir portion is straightforward enough: It recounts Barry’s difficult childhood growing up with a sour, bullying mother; her discovery of drawing as a way of coping and processing what was happening in her life; and, as she got older, her development of crippling insecurity around her creative work. (More on that shortly.)
The workbook portion, on the other hand—I’m not sure how Barry did it, and it sounds a little cheesy to say, but turning these pages I felt like I was being lowered into a deeper layer of consciousness and then brought back up, like a teabag dunked in warm water.
I did not expect this! Normally, I find creative workbook–type exercises a little too paint-by-numbers to be impactful in any lasting way. But Barry’s exercises are deep, the result of her own hard-won insights into the creative process.
As I mentioned above, Barry had to overcome crippling insecurity to make a life as a writer and artist. (Now 69, she published the underground comic Ernie Pook’s Comeek for almost thirty years, has authored numerous graphic novels, and was awarded a 2019 MacArthur “genius” grant, to name just a few of her accomplishments.) In What It Is, Barry explains her insecurity as the result of two questions—“Is this good?” and “Does this suck?”—that at a certain point became “the only two questions I had about my work,” draining all pleasure out of the drawing and storytelling that Barry had pursued effortlessly as a child.
The goal of the workbook pages is to help readers escape this trap. And Barry’s great insight, for me, is that the thing you’re after in writing is not thinking. As she puts it at one point, “Thinking up stories is hard. Getting them to come to you is easier.”
OK, so how does one design a block of writing time that does not involve thinking? Below are the key components of Barry’s method: