Eddie Campbell is guest blogging over at Powells this week and wrote yesterday about how writer's block played a big part in his new graphic novel, The Fate of the Artist. I read the book a few weeks ago and was quite impressed - I loved a good gn because it is such a singular art form. I get asked all the time why I still buy comics (because I read them dammit!), but Campbell's is a perfect example of just how "literary" a gn can be. For writers in particular this is the sort of story that should be read - it is partly the informal investigation of the disappearance of an artist named Eddie Campbell but more importantly it look at how the creative process works and doesn't work and where the mind of a writer and artist will travel to when he is struggling to make a story happen.
Oh, how I have been there.
I hate it when I read that an author considers writing to be work - I know it is nuts and bolts work (Jane Yolen's famous "butt in chair" philosophy is certainly a creed to live by) but it is not work like my father had going to the waste water treatment plant five days a week and dumping chemicals in sewage.
That's work and we all should know the difference.
Writing is hard but not in a coal mining, truck driving, steel plant operating, landing on an aircraft-carrier-in-a-jet-that-has-no-fuel-left-for-a-go-around kind of way. It is luxury work, it is chosen work, it is never life threatening work (at least not usually anyway). I understand struggling with the craft and becoming frustrated beyond measure with it. I've been there many many times myself. It is still amazing to me that my AK flying book exists, that so much of the YA urban fantasy (Hurricane Angels as it is titled right now), is up and running so well, that I can do any of this successfully at all. On the days when it doesn't work, writing well seems quite miraculous.
But still, it's not lifting manhole covers for a living.
Read The Fate of the Artist to see a very interesting and gorgeously done (and also quite witty and sly) look at the artistic struggle. Then put your butt in the chair and write and remember to consider yourself lucky to have found this particular kind of work.
June 22
2006
04:48 PM
Dear Colleen,
What you say is absolutely right. We who write succcessfully should be thankful for getting away with it. I love the way Posy Simmonds lampoons complaining authors. I can't remember the title she was using for those cartoons, but I saw some on the net, probably at the Guardian (uk) site.)
Thanks muchly for the good words. I found your page while running a check to see if the powell's appearances were worth the effort i've been expending on them. looks like a yes, i guess.
very best to you
Eddie Campbell