What It Is, by Lynda Barry, is a book of writing exercises, doodles, and autobiographical stories designed to teach you to find the imagery in a situation and discover your inner creativity. What It Is won the 2009 Eisner award for Best Reality-Based Work, which is a pretty high honour for a book filled with pictures of monsters.
Barry, an author, cartoonist, and creative writing teacher grew up thinking she wasn't any good at writing or drawing, and that she had no real talent, but used her pictures and stories as a way of distracting herself from a sometimes unpleasant home life. The book is a mash-up of her doodles, quotes from books (hers and others), comics, and examples of the kind of thing your mind comes up with when allowed to wander.
Some of the effects are meant to be visual, with scraps of book pages, writing and doodles on every page, and I stopped to read every word, even if it did not seem to have any direct correlation to the point Barry makes on the page (incidentally I do the same thing with cereal boxes, magazines, etc., if something with words is placed in front of me I read them all), and served instead as an example of the kind of thing she was talking about.
The exercises she uses (continuous writing, keeping the pen moving even if it's only to doodle), list making (in 3 minutes name 10 cars you had when you were young), and drawing on memories for ideas are ones I have seen in the creative writing courses I have taken over the years, but Barry makes them feel more relevant. She carries the exercises on, suggests you do them several times (even leaving spaces for your writing in her book), and walks you through the process. The benefit of doing the exercises here is that you are never expected to show anyone (in fact encouraged, as she says, to walk away from your writing and re-read it a week later for a brand new experience), unlike in creative writing classes where everyone is expected to share or comment on everyone else.
Writing and reading (as Barry suggests) can take us out of our everyday lives (she likens this to kids playing, able to pretend to be anything from princesses to astronauts to mad scientists. I distinctly remember pretending to be a ninja cat with some cousins as a child) or can help us find a place within our lives that we had lost. She reminds us that everyone is capable of writing or drawing, creative expression of some type, and that it is in fact an innate part of human existence (who hasn't drawn a doodle while sitting in a boring class, or on a long telephone conversation?).
This was a library grab for me, so I'm doing the exercises on scraps of paper and loose leaf, but I think as soon as I'm able I'm going to hunt this one down and buy me a copy. More people need to remember how to pretend. This book is a must have for anyone that thinks they can write, thinks they'd like to write, and even more so for people who think they can't write.
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