Letting Creative Work Marinate
Creative work is sometimes painfully non-linear. To those struggling with the twists and turns, here's the story behind making my poetry comic collection "Stardust" and three key takeaways.
Last week I announced that my poetry comic collection “Stardust” is available for pre-order! Thank you to everyone who has pre-ordered so far! It’s really encouraging to see your orders come through! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
The longest poem in the collection is called Thriving vs. Surviving. It was also the most difficult and took a long, meandering path to the finish line. I also spent an inordinate amount of time feeling ashamed and frustrated about my lack of efficiency and was debating how to frame up today’s newsletter! In the midst of it, I stumbled across an informative and creatively affirming post from author
titled “How I start a new book.” This particular sentence jumped off the screen and helped me flip the script on the entire process of making Stardust:“Books cannot - and should not - be created in an efficient way. The wrong turns and dead ends are what bring them to life.”
~Katherine May
Ah, what a relief! This helped me get out of my doom spiral and appreciate the twists and turns and breaks I took during the process of creating this collection of poetry comics and, specifically, Thriving vs. Surviving.
I started Thriving vs. Surviving last spring thinking it would be a small 8- to 12-page zine containing one illustrated poem. I even started writing about it in Part 1: Thriving vs. Surviving and again in Part 2: Allowing Ideas to Bloom. Then I hit pause because I simultaneously changed my mind about the direction and details of the project, while some major life changes cropped up, including starting a new job and moving. I couldn’t do all the things. I gave the project some space.
Life calmed down, and I made some other poetry comics, including Enough, Temporary, and Pressing on the Bruise. Suddenly I wanted to create a collection called “Stardust,” and I wanted this collection to include Thriving vs. Surviving. I changed the page size and color palette to align with the other poems in the collection, which was a decent amount of rework.
I started with a black and white color palette in mind. Then I tried adding a red color pop as shown in the image above on the far left. I tried it on a few other pages, and the color pop wasn’t adding to the meaning of the poem, so I moved away from it. I liked the warm brown color palette for the dormouse, but not for anything of the other pages! Eventually I went with the palette on the far right. I also made the dormouse smaller and added a “hero” leaf that shows up throughout several panels of the poem to signify stages of grief and the process of holding on and letting go. The dormouse blends in more in the final version, which is by design. Especially when sleeping, dormice blend into their surroundings to stay safe! Sometimes dormice also climb plants in adorable ways, like this:
Images like this helped me feel like I was on the right track! But other times, while I was struggling with color palettes and important storytelling elements, I felt like I should abandon ship. I kept asking myself, “Why do I insist on making this project anyway?!”
Eventually, I revisited an approach that has helped me get unstuck in the past: printing it out. I hung it all up on the wall so I could see all the pages at once. I hemmed and hawed. I moved things around, I cut pages up. I made new sketches. I got it off the screen.
Here are pages strewn across my floor while I tried to I figured out a bunch of transitions in the second half… The complete poem is 18 pages long!
These are my key takeaways from this project:
Don’t jump into final art too soon — I started final quality art way too soon on this project. More sketching and planning up front would have eliminated some of the painful rework I had to do. At the same time, this haphazard, jump-in-with-both-feet approach resulted in some “B-sides” that sparked other worthwhile finished pieces. So it wasn’t a total loss… but it was definitely more frustrating than it needed to be at times!
When you can’t force it, let it marinate — This is a tricky one because I’m a big believer in forging ahead on projects even when you feel resistance. Usually the resistance is fear, which means there’s something really worthwhile on the other side. But sometimes resistance crops up when a project needs more time to marinate in your brain. In this case, giving the project some time and space allowed me to develop more cohesive and meaningful ideas for the imagery. It also gave me time to develop the project into a collection of poems instead of releasing Thriving vs. Surviving by itself. Stardust wouldn’t exist as a collection if it weren’t for time spent marinating!
Print it out — It never ceases to amaze me how important this is. When I’m working digitally, I absolutely need to print pages out in order to problem solve at various intervals. I need to hold the pages in my hands. I need to lay them out. I need to move them around. It helps me 100% without fail.
I’m glad I stuck with it and have a tangible collection of work that communicates what I’ve been trying to adequately articulate for the past year and a half — the power of grief, gratitude, and surrendering to change.
Timeline Update: Pre-orders will be open until January 31st! Pre-order to get a free surprise bonus zine with your order! I’ll order extra copies, so if you miss the pre-order window, or if you get your copy and decide, “I need another for my friend!” — you’ll still be in luck! I’m just using pre-orders to help me estimate how many copies to order, so thank you!!!
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