The Horse In The Stone

An essay on style and originality…

As is so often the case, when I started this blog I didn’t have much of a plan.

Originally I wanted to write family stories so they wouldn’t get lost because when your brother gets a job repossessing cars (basically, stealing cars for banks) and repossesses a car for the very first time and eventually realizes there are two kids sleeping in the back so he’s technically a kidnapper (or maybe “actually a kidnapper,” you’d have to ask a lawyer) and has to get the car back in the owner’s driveway without waking the kids, that’s a story worth saving.

The same brother once drove a propane truck for a living which becomes a lot more interesting when you add the fact that he’s a chain smoker. He also once won $100 by putting his tongue on a bug zapper (turns out that’s a bad idea if you like how food tastes) and due to a bizarre set of circumstances “accidentally” escaped from jail and then there’s the time I dropped a completely different brother off a mountain.

I’ve also got tales of marriages to homicidal strippers and group fights in a pizza parlor and a police foot chase across the lanes of a bowling alley and another off-road police car chase that ended with a wrecked cop car or the time my elderly, half-blind mother tried to make a call on her cellphone, but was actually holding the TV remote, etc. and so on and by now I’m guessing you get the picture.

The first time I saw Raising Arizona I thought it was a documentary.

But then I started running out of stories that didn’t involve felonies by family members, so I started writing about my cartoons and why I drew them and threw in a baseball story whenever I felt like it.

Which—apparently—was a mistake.

Turns out I was supposed to “brand” myself and stick to one topic – like being the guy who hates Donald Trump five times a week – but instead I write whatever I feel like writing whenever I feel like writing it and a while back wrote about writing and what my favorite author, Elmore Leonard, had to say about it.

I figured that post would sink like the Titanic on a bad night—but it didn’t.

Reader reaction was surprisingly strong which made me dig this piece up and finish it, so here you go; my thoughts on “style” and where it comes from.

Feel free to skip it and wait for the next rant about Donald Trump or What’s Wrong With Baseball today, but if you ever thought about art of any type – painting, writing, music or pole dancing – this might interest you or even help you produce art of your own.

And a-way we go…

Supposedly (more on that in a moment) someone asked Michelangelo how he created his sculpture of David and he said:

“It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.”

Turns out nobody knows for sure who said that and in some versions of the story the block of marble contains a horse and in another version it’s an elephant, but a lot of people eventually said something like that or claimed they heard somebody famous say it and I’m not going to be much help if you want to know the quote’s original author, but I can tell you I totally agree that in many cases producing art is a process of subtraction, not addition.

To explain what that means, let’s go back to the beginning of my career…

If you decide you want to become a political cartoonist you quickly to discover two things:

1. It’s a dying profession, so maybe you should take a course in air conditioning repair instead, and…

2. There is no school that teaches you how to be a political cartoonist.

So at the beginning of my career I did what every other wanna-be political cartoonist did before and after me: I copied the work of successful cartoonists.

For the next couple decades I did third-rate imitations of Jeff MacNelly, Pat Oliphant, Paul Conrad and any other political cartoonist who caught my eye. I’d buy a cartoon collection by a Canadian cartoonist and start drawing like I grew up in Saskatchewan and the most interesting thing about this sentence is I spelled “Saskatchewan” correctly without looking it up.

Don’t know if/and/or why you should care, but at that time Canadian cartoonists used a lot more cross-hatching than American cartoonists and now that I write the first part of this sentence I’m solidly in favor of moving on to the next one.

Anyway…

That’s what bad artists of all types do; they copy the work of others and as a result end up creating clichéd horseshit which I’ve since discovered will not keep you off the New York Times Bestseller List.

But successfully imitating another artist can be a trap because if you’re making other people money by ripping off another artist, the people making money don’t want you to stop ripping off another artist and do something crazy and unprofitable like producing anything original. They just want more of the profitable crap you’re producing.

But I wasn’t making anybody that much money (including me) so I felt free to experiment and attempt to produce something completely my own, so I quit looking at the work of other cartoonists and just started drawing.

And drawing a lot.

I figured if I stopped looking at other people’s work and drew enough cartoons, something unique would have to emerge: it might be awful, but it would be mine.

As some political cartoonist once said, you got a thousand bad cartoons in you and you need to draw all of them and get them out of your system to have a shot at producing something good. (In my case, that cartoonist severely underestimated the number of bad cartoons I had in my system and to be completely honest, it’s a lot like malaria: you’re never really over it.)

In any case…

Go back to what Michelangelo or somebody else said: discovering your style is like chipping away at a block of stone, you get rid of the stuff that isn’t you and what you have left will be original.

But “Original” Does Not Automatically Mean “Good”

As anyone who has ever been kidnapped and forced at gunpoint to listen to a Yoko Ono record can testify (and I really can’t imagine any other reason for listening to one) just because something is original doesn’t automatically make it good.

And I’ve also heard it argued that Yoko Ono wasn’t all that original; she was imitating other avant-garde artists which may or may not be true because I don’t know much about avant-garde artists unless they’re the ones who paint dogs playing poker.

But as somebody else once said: “Interesting people create interesting art.”

And this time I know exactly who said it because it was one of my sons and he said it in a Mexican restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard while we were talking about music. So now we’ve gone from talking about how you say something to talking about having something to say.

As author Andrew Vachhs once wrote: “You can always tell when a sex scene is written by a virgin.”

So it helps if you do something interesting which gives you something interesting to write about, which is great advice even if you’re not a writer because now if you get caught having sex with the wrong person (or wrong people…I wouldn’t want to limit your options) you now have a top-notch excuse; you’re writing a one-act play and doing research and the only downside to that excellent advice is if you get caught banging your sister-in-law now you have to write a one-act play about it.

As I was saying…

When you steal your “style” from somebody else you’re letting them make all the hard artistic decisions; coming up with your own way of doing things is a lot harder and along the way I also discovered that “style” is not something you put on like a new coat—buying a book of cartoons and suddenly drawing like a Canadian cartoonist is phony.

Your style is already inside you – the way you think, the words you use, the stuff you find funny, the tools you like to use, even the way you draw a line – and you have to do enough work to flush out all the bullshit which has been packed tightly inside your brain by your Parents, TV, Religion and Bad Movies before you can do anything true and honest and uniquely your own.

I once heard Charles Schulz (the guy who drew Peanuts) speak and he told a story about him and his grandmother going to a movie and how he turned that incident into a cartoon strip and he pointed out he was the only cartoonist in the whole wide world that could draw that strip because it happened to him and nobody else.

Along those same lines…

When Jason Alexander first started playing George on Seinfeld he was doing a bad Woody Allen imitation until he objected to a script and said this would never happen and even if it did, no sane person would react that way and say the things his character was saying.

A pissed-off Larry David said it happened to me and that’s exactly how I reacted and what I said and Jason Alexander quickly figured out he should base his character on Larry David which was a great decision because Larry David’s been mining his own life for material, so it’s material that’s totally original.

Bottom line:

As near as I can tell, there is no discernable connection between quality and success, but if you want to do anything original you have to put in the work which most people don’t want to do which explains all the crappy art that gets produced.

And now…

What Good Writers Have To Say

In the prologue to his book “Hombre” – maybe my favorite Elmore Leonard book of all time – the narrator says he wants to tell the reader a story, but doesn’t know how to get started, until someone advises him to:

“Imagine I was telling it to a good friend and not worry about what other people might think.”

In an interview Leonard also said:

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and the rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing.”

Leonard wanted to write the way people actually talked, which is good advice from one of the best writers to ever put words in a row.

Painter Thomas Hart Benton struggled with his “style” until he did some sketches of what he thought was ordinary stuff like guys working and noticed that people were fascinated by those sketches and it dawned on him that he should spend less time thinking about how he painted and more time thinking about what he painted.

BTW: Real Life Is Pretty Interesting

I decided to read a book by a very famous author who had written a lot of books and had movies made from them and was always on the Best Seller lists, but the book was mediocre and the dialogue unbelievable and at one point he had his main character say, “Oh, my darling” to the woman he was boinking which made me wonder if the very famous author had ever actually boinked a woman because Real People don’t talk like that.

(And if you do talk like that, maybe you should consider the possibility that you’re not a Real Person and have been cribbing your dialogue from Romance Novels.)

In the introduction to his novel “Winter Prey” one of my other favorite authors, John Sandford, talked about covering two fires during a Minnesota winter as a newspaper reporter, then using the details from those real fires in a fictional story.

Stuff happens in real life – like firefighters being covered in ice from water blown back in their direction – that you’d never think up on your own. The most realistic and believable fiction, at least for me, derives from scenes observed, rather than scenes totally imagined.

Herman Melville went to sea and worked on whaling ships before he wrote Moby Dick.

Sandford – who also spent time covering the police – had a scene in which a bad guy pulls a gun on two cops and one of the cops almost shoots himself in the leg when he pulls his gun and instead of shooting the bad guy, manages to blow a hole in the side of a house.

The other cop says maybe we won’t mention that in our incident report.

Details like that make fiction ring true, but the problem here is you gotta get up off your ass and go out and watch firemen work a fire at 3 AM when it’s 19 degrees below zero or spend a bunch of time talking to cops and a lot of writers don’t want to do that much legwork.

Elmore Leonard is praised for the gritty realism of his books and it turns out he eventually hired a “legman” who would go get the details necessary to make a story believable (at one point the legman was researching profanity used in the late 1800s because Leonard was writing Cuba Libra, a book set during the Spanish American War and Leonard wanted the dialogue to be believable) and if you don’t want to do the work (or in Leonard’s case, pay someone else to do it) your clouds are going to remain fluffy, your sighs will be heaved and your apologies heartfelt.

The point (and I’m almost sure I had one when I started this) is your style – whether you’re a writer or a sculptor or second-rate (or if you’re a Republican, definitely third-rate) political cartoonist – already exists.

You just have to do the work to chip away at the bullshit surrounding it.

Now start chipping.