After many years of taking it head-on and climbing and riding my fair share of birches, I’ve realised that maybe it’s simply about the joy, not the pursuit of making a grand, cosmic point. It’s all in the looking and striving, and the making. And the lessons we learn from hard work. Maybe it’s as simple as we sing for the sake of singing, even more than for the song. It’s about the doing, the minute-to-minute decision-making, the total focus, the mind and the eye and the hand all joined in dance.
Frank Miller is a comic book artist, screenwriter, and film director. This book offers a glimpse into his artistic journey and creative process, along with plenty of advice.
Here’s a podcast he did with Tim Ferriss.
Excerpts:
Despite what so many people tell you, go ahead and take criticism personally. Take it damn seriously. Let it hurt. That will make you remember it. That will make you learn from it. Humiliation can make you crumple, yes, but it can also make you tough.
Artists know how things work. They figure it all out on the page, on the canvas, on the whatever.
A dedication to craft and process and an undying commitment to hard work is the only true path to artistic achievement.
Rest easy, you’re exactly where you need to be–toiling in relative obscurity. “Paying your dues,” as they call it, and learning your craft, line by line, inch by inch: the anatomy, the perspective, the expressions, the buildings, the cars, the million drawing problems, the million drawing decisions, and the million cartooning decisions, all in your hands and nobody else’s.
So be diligent and bold, two essentials for living an examined, creative life.
I use tracing paper to rough out the images. With pencils and markers, I draw, redraw, draw over, erase, draw again; I wrestle with it until I find it: the lasting image that emerges from this search. Then I lay out the story on matte paper and , as I go, I cut and slash as if I were in a film editing room. A lot gets thrown away, like film on an editor’s floor. I can’t afford to be precious with the words or the pictures–if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. I’ve got a nice big trash can next to my drawing board just for this purpose. I’m not one to have quotes handing around for inspiration, but, if I did, the first to make the cut would certainly be the one from the British writer Arthur Quiller-Couch: “Murder your darlings.”
Pushing the wall in bold provocation and quietly honing your craft are not mutually exclusive impulses. The opposite is true, they often work hand in hand, and in most cases, if you have one without the other, you really won’t have anything.
What I really wanted to do was draw and write. The city’s chaotic thrum worked its strange magic on me and stories burbled in my head. I took my sketchbook everywhere and embraced spontaneity–I drew what I saw, and my mission was to see everything.
When I’m getting too precious with anything–writing, thinking, drawing–and trying to protect it from error and change, I’m sheltering it from life. And this tells me I’m afraid, and if I’m afraid, my art will suffer, my drive will weaken–and the work itself will become fearful and tentative.
So do just that: start over. Loosen up and play. Go back to using your whole arm when you draw. Mistakes aren’t your enemy; fear is.
Whether it was Son of Sam or urban decay, nothing stopped New Yorkers from getting on with their lives. Persistence: that was (and is) another one of my favourite things about New York City.
I sketched and worked on my drawing skills in the park. I did that everywhere, really, but Washington Square had it all: the fountain, the arch, the view up Fifth Avenue to the Empire State Building, and the people, all the varied and wonderful people.
Some simple story rules: (1) Start your story as late into the action as possible; end it as early into the action as possible. (2) Get your hero into trouble fast. That, or give the hero a pressing problem to solve. I work on the spine of the story and future out how it starts and ends, and then roughly plot the in-between. To do this, I make notes and create scenes that will advance the storyline, but allow room for digressions and narrative side streets. Along the way, I’ll make some preliminary sketches to illustrate some of my ideas so I don’t lose them in the burst and whirl of the initial creative process. But I don’t normally draw much of anything narrative until I’m comfortable with the outline and confident with the storyline. I want to be sure my story’s spine is strong enough to take a beating from the starts and stops, mistakes, and happy accidents that happen when I’m battling it out on the boards. Through it all the mission never changes: tell a good story. And tell it as concisely and drastically as I possibly can.
Eventually I learned that to get over any perceived failure, you just have to get back into the ring. You have to stay with it and keep at it, long enough for time to help you transmute the experience and derive some meaning from it.
I knew I was taking big chances. But taking chances is what it’s all about. If you’re not taking chances, if you’re not challenging yourself, you are not leading a creative life.
The ups and downs of Ronin taught me that, ultimately, it’s about the process, not the outcome. If you bravely put your whole self into the making of something, you’ll enjoy it, no matter how it shakes out. And that tells me that if you aren’t enjoying your work, then you are probably not being brave enough. Get out there, go beyond your comfort zone. If it all works out, so be it. If it doesn’t, so what? –there’s still the next thing, the next crazy idea, the next mistake. In the endeavour to make, that’s where the meaning lies.
Heroes, as they struggle to overcome the stacked odds, reflect back our innermost feelings–self-doubt, confusion, desire, loneliness, love, and hate. There is a commonality to these emotions: we all share them. So by tapping into a myth, you tap into the human experience writ large.
Criticism is a consequence of living a creative life.
Never forget: failure is your friend. It makes you reevaluate and reanalyse. Just as success can be a treacherous lover, failure can be a harsh sensei. Suffer it. Survive it. Be grateful for it. Nothing will teach you more.
The grand old philosopher Aristotle said that true happiness is a state where all your energies are channeled along the lines of excellence. Happiness isn’t something someone gives you or something that arrives, it’s something you achieve by way of work and fulfilling purpose.
If you’re not there, you don’t need a magic wand, just take a few simple steps in the right direction. And then a few more steps. Make these ones quicker.
My career is the result of hard work, persistence, and good fortune. There is the day-in-day-out labor of drawing and writing and the confidence that comes with that. Confidence that my ideas are worth pursuing, word by word, picture by picture, book by book, for as long as it takes, or that, worthy or not, right or wrong, I have to pursue them. That’s who I am. That’s what I do. It’s the result of feeding on the energy that comes from a life’s quest for artistic freedom.
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