NEWSLETTER

See all articles by this contributor

INTERVIEW BY AMY KELLNER

From What It Is (Drawn and Quarterly, 2008)

Did you know that Cruddy is in our top five all-time desert island books? What would yours be?

I’m so glad to hear that! I adored writing Cruddy. It was the best time. I was having just as good of a time writing the novel I’m working on too—I could really feel it moving. I miss it as badly as I miss a person I love. But anyway, my desert island books are: a complete anthology of Dr. Seuss, D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality, the complete poems of Emily Dickinson, the whole George Smiley series by John le Carré, and an anthology of talks given by Shunryu Suzuki.

Is it true you wrote Cruddy entirely by hand, in cursive?

I wrote it with a paintbrush on legal paper. I don’t think it would have happened any other way. I came to that way of working because I had been trying to write a novel on my computer but the problem was that dang delete button. You can get rid of something before you even know what it is. Also there is all the difference in the world between tapping a finger to make an “a” and drawing the letter “a.” For me at least, it’s the movement of my hand that makes a story come to me. After ten years of trying to write a novel on a computer in the way I thought novels were written, I gave up. I remember walking around my workspace saying “OK! OK! If I were doing this, how would I do it?” And I realized that all I needed to do was do what I did when I made a painting or a comic strip. That meant slowly and by hand. It seems like writing a novel with a paintbrush would take a long time but I finished the first draft in nine months. I had the best time working on it. The story was so alive and unexpected. It seems like slowing way down is no way to write a story but it made Cruddy the way it is.

The weirdest thing about that book is the day I finished it, the book really ended. I never saw Roberta or any of the other characters again. I think of them, but they don’t think back to me the way they did when I was working on it. I was really lonely for them until the new book showed up. Now I think to the characters in it and they think back. It’s been especially hard not to work on it. I believe I will again after this turbine stuff is settled. I feel a real longing to be with the characters inside of it. To see what they are up to, and what happens. I love the not-knowing part, and at the same time having the feeling that they know, the characters know, they just have to move my hand on the page like a Ouija board for a while to tell me.

You have such a cool way of writing dialogue for your characters, especially for kids. The weird phrasings and grammatical strangeness is like a whole other language.

The language comes from handwriting. It really comes from the motion of the hand. Like a hand puppet—you start moving its mouth with your fingers and you look into its eyes and you get the feeling it is saying something and the it that is doing the saying is a little bit different than you. Different puppets have different ways of talking. My characters are like that. I crack up when I hear the next sentence they say. They make me laugh really hard sometimes. I know it’s me! But it’s also not me. The best part of this is there is nothing magical about it at all. Human beings have been doing it for a very long time and we all seem to be able to do it. Once I saw two guys do a scene from Romeo and Juliet using garbage they had just found in the street. It was at one of those freaky Renaissance fairs and I was not finding the groove of the situation at all until these two young men picked up a bottle cap and cigarette butt and did Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene with them, and I stared at that cigarette butt and bottle cap like they were actually talking. It was mind opening.

From The Freddie Stories (Sasquatch Books, 1999).

In your book, one of the writing exercises you describe is using specific words or phrases like “car” or “other people’s mothers” to bring up memories that can then be described in detail and begin to tell a story. So, can you tell us a quick, short story about, I don’t know… “haircut” or “mosquitoes”?

I could if I had more time. I’d have to do it by hand and I know that my head won’t go there today with all the turbine stuff hanging over me. But you should come to my class and I’ll show you how to do it. It’s a lot of fun! You can find out information about the class on MySpace—do a search on “writingtheunthinkable.”


CONTINUED
LYNDA BARRY | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |

< PREV

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

NEXT >

POST A COMMENT [SIGN IN] Hi, in case you haven't heard, you can now sign up to become a "member" of Viceland.com, which entitles you to all sorts of amazing benefits like pictures and a nickname. Click here to make your own profile. You can still comment if you don't, but you gotta do it all 'nonymously.

Name:
Comment: