Things I've Learned Along the Way: Boo!
By Paul Kupperberg
I recently saw a clip from an old interview with Alfred
Hitchcock. Mike Douglas asked him where his interest in mystery and suspense
came from and Hitchcock responded it came when he was still just a baby.
“I was just laying there in my mother’s arms, minding my own
business,” said the master (and I paraphrase), “when she looked down at me and
said ‘Boo!’ Scared the hell out of
me.”
Hitchcock was known for his sense of humor (often cruel; he
once fed a character actor laxative and then left the poor guy handcuffed to
the camera over lunch; another incident had him leaving his daughter, an
actress in several of his films and who suffered from a fear of heights, at the
top of a Ferris wheel at the end of the day’s shooting) and the story is, of
course, what my people call a bubbemeiser, or an old wife’s tale. But it was
(a) a great line, which (b) got me to thinking: Where do ideas come from, really?
Some years ago, the idea for a comic book series that I
wound up writing for almost 4 years popped into my head while I was sitting on
the crapper reading something that had nothing to do with the idea I just had.
I will not tell you which series that
was so as to deprive you all of the obvious critical ammunition that story
provides, but the point is (as I will get to in a later installment), “thought is the
enemy of art.”
I have had ideas, major ones for entire books, minor ones
that solved a current creative conundrums, triggered by a word, a thought, a
picture, a scent. Ideas are all around, in the air, along with oxygen, nitrogen
and all the other ‘gens’. They’re squatting beside that face you spot on a
bench or riding the subway. They’re hiding between the lines of a newspaper
article. They’re bobbing against the shores of a writer’s subconscious like
trash washed onto the beach by the tide. Not every idea is a gem. Please, don’t
ever think that. That’s death for a writer. The old truth got to be so old
because it’s so true, hackneyed though it may have come to sound: “Kill your darlings.” You’ve got to be
willing to sacrifice the best sentence ever written by a human being in any
language if it doesn’t fit or is a detriment to what you’re writing. The moment
you find yourself thinking “Gotta save this sentence/paragraph/image/metaphor”
is the moment you should be hitting the delete button.
Another hackneyed truth, Ted Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap.”
Books. Movies. TV shows. Paintings. Sculptures. Cooking.
Architecture.
Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. Crap. 90% of it. Including your precious ideas. And mine.
Especially mine.
Some are good, sure. I mean, c’mon, we’re talking about
hitting an average of 1 out of 100…a chimp can make odds like that work for
him. Trust me. I have. But you know it. Sure, write it down on your scrap paper
or in your hardbound vellum-paged memory book, just don’t fall in love with it.
It’s only gonna break your heart when it turns out to, y’know…suck. But that’s
cool. Part of being a pro (“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!”,
Hunter S. Thompson) is being able to separate the crap from the gold. A lot of
that comes with practice, which means actually telling someone these bad ideas
and being ridiculed for how lame you are.
Stop, think, percolate. Let ideas bubble around in your head
before you commit to them. Don’t rush them. Do I have to tell you what happens
if you don’t let a loaf of bread bake long enough?
Look, the idea for that long-running long comic series didn’t
just “pop” into my head while I was otherwise disposed. The need for the idea,
for a certain sort of hero in a certain genre had been percolating around in my
mind for a couple of weeks. My subconscious, my id, the little teeny-weeny man
with a word processor who test drives all ideas before feeding them into my conscious brain...whoever, whatever the hell makes it happen, I know
if I need something (a plot, a pitch), my best bet is to do my research, stir
it around with a little thought, maybe even jot some notes, and then forget
about it. Let the process do its thing and wait for the light bulb moment.
How does that work?
I dunno. I get asked all the time, “Where do you get your
ideas?”
I have a variety of answers:
(a) “A subscription service out of Altoona that sends me 2
dozen ideas every month that I pick from and pay for what I use.”
(b) “I steal them.”
(c) “Automatic writing. I just lay my fingers on the
keyboard and out it comes.”
And, the truth:
(d) “It’s my job.”
Does anyone ever ask a plumber how he knows how to fix a
clogged trap? Or, “Gee, doc, where in the world did you ever learn to remove a
spleen like that?” No, because they know that there’s apprenticeships and
schooling and residencies for doctor, etc. Well, the reason I became a writer
in the first place was because I had all these stories in my head I wanted to
tell, somehow. And, over a long apprenticeship, learning my trade through the
practice of it, I gradually started learning how to do it. Before I can take
out a spleen, I have to learn where it is, what it looks like, what it does,
and how it’s connected to everything else. Before I can write a successful
story, I need to learn all the same stuff, except no one dies when I made a
stupid mistake and there’s far less blood, except when I’m trying to change the
ink cartridge in the fax machine.
It isn’t magic or voodoo. It just feels that way, but it
works the same for writers and artists as it does for scientists and engineers.
You know Einstein had one of those “E equals mc hammer…nein, nein…mc,
mc…squared! Eureka!” moments while taking a dump, same as I did. It’s the way
the machine works, processing information like a computer, but instead of
crunching numbers, we crunch concepts and ideas, symbols and metaphors. Those
take longer, and, since the machine has so much else to process just in terms
of daily upkeep—driving, walking, breathing, what’s for lunch? Cheetos or Snickers
bar?—the complicated stuff processes in the background. When it’s ready, bing!, the little light goes on and the
punch card with the answer pops out.
Get the idea?
© Paul Kupperberg
Everything that you said can be precisely and specifically applied to art/illustration... especially so in the pictorial narrative (comic books).
ReplyDeleteDærick Gröss, Sr.
Nrich is my Google name.