An Introduction
Somebody Write This Book
Hi! Hello! I’m Kirk Reedstrom and this is the Somebody Write This Book newsletter where I send monthly short and sometimes (okay, okay, often) absurd creative prompts to your inbox. You probably signed up for this on my website or Twitter. If you’d like to unsubscribe, just click that link at the bottom of the newsletter. One click, all done, goodbye and sayonara.
A Quick Note Before We Start:
This email is going to serve as an introduction where I explain my methods and give some background info about this project. Because I’m going over supplies and instructions, it’s going to be longer than usual. Bear with me.
A Little Background:
Every now and then I come across a news story, joke, or an image that screams it should be, must be, a book (I say book because I mostly work in picture books. You could also say flash fiction piece, story, poem, thesis statement, etc). I used to file these bits away in case I needed inspiration, but I hoarded so many that I realized I’d never get to them all. So, I did what any extremely online writer-type is wont to do: I took to the void of Twitter. Here’s my first one from 2019:
It’s been a few years now, and I thought it would be fun to take these little tweets a little further, so here we are. Once a month (because I have email fatigue and I bet you do too), I’m going to send a short prompt with a drawing exercise and a few questions. All together, these exercises shouldn’t take more than 40 minutes to an hour in total to finish. You don’t have to do it all at once. You don’t even have to do it at all! The idea is to have some fun and play with a silly idea. Maybe you’ll get unstuck from a funk, find you want to revise whatever you create, or throw your creation away and only think of it whenever you see a full moon from the corner of your left eye. Great! There are no hard and fast rules here.
Methods and Supplies:
For these emails, we’re first going to warm up by creating a squiggle character. I got this exercise from Lynda Barry’s squiggle monster game. It’s simple, fast, low stakes, and it almost always helps to get my creative juices flowing. If you don’t draw, it’s okay! We aren’t making masterpieces here. In fact, let’s make a squiggle character right now. Here are the supplies I use:
A Piece of Paper or Notebook:
I have a bunch of cheap, teeny, tiny notebooks that I like to use for my squiggles. They’re so small that just about the only thing I can fit on a page is a squiggle which makes it hard to overthink or tempt myself into drawing a different “better” squiggle (spoiler: the new ones are never better). That being said, use whatever paper’s around you. It could be notebook paper, a legal pad, even the back of a receipt is fine. I prefer doodling on paper because I find it keeps me looser than drawing on an iPad or tablet, but if you’re a digital sketcher, do whatever works best for you!
Pens, Pencils, Markers, Crayons, Etc:
Most of the time, I like to use just one pen to make my squiggle characters, but because you all are special, I’m going to start with pencil for the squiggle, and then go over it with a pen. If I use a thin line for a pen, I can get too precious with my drawing, so I’m mostly going to be using a Jinhao Fountain Pen with a fude nib. It’s short, chunky, and I’m not very good at using it, so I’ll get to embrace a lot of mistakes. For color, I’m going to use whatever’s closest to me. Do you have your supplies? Great. Let’s get started.
The Squiggle:
Step 1: Make a Squiggle
Here’s my squiggle. I know. Amazing, right? Somebody call the Louvre already.
Step 2: Look at Your Squiggle
This is my favorite part. It’s a lot like finding shapes in clouds. Take about one minute and see what pops out to you. Turn the drawing upside down and sideways to see how your perception of the squiggle changes. What do you notice? Does that lump look like hair? Is there a figure in motion? A Snout? Glasses? A hat? A character popped out at me the moment I flipped my squiggle upside down. Do you see it?
Step 3: Start Drawing
It’s time to put pen to paper! Start drawing over your squiggle, and let yourself be surprised by new things that appear while you doodle. My only guideline here is to try to not erase any line you make. If you make a mistake, move on or try to incorporate it into your image. If you’re very nervous about drawing, try doing this step with a color pencil or marker before moving on to pen. I like to use red or orange pencil.
Step 4: Add Detail or Color
Add some stripes, spots, shading, or color. This part takes me the longest, but I also find it the most relaxing.
Congrats! You just made your first squiggle character.
Next, A Few Questions:
After the squiggle character, I’ll ask a couple exploratory questions that delve into details about the prompt or your character.
So, let’s take that very first “somebody write this picture book” post from the beginning of this email. Let yourself be as silly, arbitrary, absurd, melancholic, or dark as you want. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
Does the house belong to the tortoise or its humans?
Why was the tortoise angry?
What was cooking?
How many gifts were under the tree, and who were they for?
Was the fire set on purpose?
What is the tortoise’s only regret?
Now take 23 minutes and write a 100-200 word story from the perspective of the tortoise, a member of its family (human or not), or their neighbor, and set the story three days after the fire. You can go over or under that word count. You can write for a longer or shorter amount of time. If stories aren’t your thing, try writing a poem or four panel comic.
Three Neat Things:
I’ll end these emails with three things I thought were neat, and possibly some kind of update about my own work. These things could be books, art supplies, poems, movies, a bug I saw, or whatever floats my boat. Hopefully you’ll think they’re nifty, too. Here are three things for this month:
A Book:
I want to give a big thank you to Amber Sparks for introducing me to scholarly books/writing about fairy tales and folklore. I had no idea I was missing out on such fascinating work. Right now, I’m reading Jack Zipe’s Fairy Tale As Myth/Myth As Fairy Tale, but if you want to go down this rabbit hole with me, I also highly recommend Maria Tatar’s The Heroine With 1001 Faces.
An Album:
Happy new S. Carey album day to all who celebrated.
A Poem:
“Listen: there was a goat's head hanging by ropes in a tree.
All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it
Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing
The song of a night bird…” -From Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song
Thanks for reading. If you’re hankering for more prompts, you can read the archives here (eventually). If you really enjoyed it, forward this email to a friend or arch nemesis.
If you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time (Hello, friend or nemesis), you can subscribe here.
-Kirk
www.kirkreedstrom.com