Some Memoir Prompts

Recently I finished a week-long workshop in memoir comics at the Center for Cartoon Studies, taught by Melanie Gillman.   They are an excellent teacher, and I had wonderful classmates, and so I learned a lot during the week.

One of the practices Melanie recommended was creating journal or diary comics every day or as often as possible and putting these on social media.  This keeps you practicing and gets you into self-publishing and hopefully building an audience for your work.

These comics are meant to be completed, start to finish, in 30-50 minutes or so (we had 50 minutes in class and it was amazing what people could do in that time).  For inspiration we looked at (among other things) a web comic called Deep Dark Fears and an anthology called Lies Grown-ups Told Me.

Here's an example of my comic (done in 50 minutes, remember!) for a prompt like "tell me about a lie a grown-up told you that you believed at the time."

For short comics like these, I don't want to spend time thinking up subjects, so it's a case where a writing prompt is really helpful to me.

But to really spark my imagination, I find I can't come up with the prompt myself.  It's best if it coms from outside of me, from something random, like pulling a paper out of a hat.

So where do I find such prompts?  Below are a few sources.  These are all prompts intended for prose, but I don't think it really matters that much in terms of prompting one's thinking.

 I think reshaping them to fit a daily journal comic, something you could do in 50 minutes, is probably most important.  For me, no matter how the prompt is written, I always try to rephrase it:  "Tell me about a time that..."  That helps me.

So a prompt like "How good are you at saying goodbye?" becomes "tell me about a time you said goodbye and felt really good about it (or really bad about it)."   Or "how comfortable are you with lying" becomes "Tell me about a time when it was the right thing to tell a lie."  That sort of thing.

Anyhow, my favorite book of prompts is Natalie Goldberg's Old Friend From Far Away.  I also love her classic book Writing Down the Bones, which has some prompts and also some thoughts about writing.

I also very much enjoy this huge list from the NYT.  It is intended as a list for teachers to use with students, but with a little revision as suggested above, I think it works well for one person.  And it's such a huge list you are bound to find something there to prompt you!

I find two other online collections valuable for inspiration as well: the essays collected at This I Believe and the work done at StoryCorps.  Both of these have huge online archives you can explore for ideas.

Also, if you haven't seen Lynda Barry's book SYLLABUS (also her book What It Is), check those out, as she has some excellent methods for helping you develop your own prompts.

On memoir as a genre, I love Mary Karr's book, The Art of Memoir, and Marion Roach Smith's book, The Memoir Project.  Notably, Marion Roach Smith is strongly against "prompts" and exercises as they distract you from writing your "real" memoir.

I think this is a terrific point.  Doing exercises without a clear intent can be a waste of time and energy.

This is why the idea of a daily comic which you SHARE in some way is so attractive (and perhaps terrifying).  You have a prompt, you have an hour, and you learn to focus and complete quickly and in a way meant for readers.  And then you pop it up on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or share with family and friends in some other way.   You can find me on Instagram:  @Elizabeth_Trembley .

The best writing book EVER is Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.  No prompts, but just the best writing book ever.  :-)

Sketching a Carving of St. Francis

One thing that Jill Badonsky draws inspiration from, she told us at Sketchkon, is sculpture. 

I love a carving we have of St. Francis.   Here I took some liberties to bring him to life.

What carvings or sculptures do you have in your home or workplace or town that you might use as inspirations for drawings?

Sketchkon Sketches #16 The Los Angeles Zoo Part Six

Lions.

They were asleep in full view and no one was around.

These were my last sketches of a fantastic sketchcrawl!

Sketchkon Sketches #15 The Los Angeles Zoo Part Five

Gorillas. 

I struggled drawing these.  I tended to make them look too human.

The Roz Stendahl, our guide for our sketchcrawl, advised to study the shadow shapes, especially on the face.  That would help us see the real animal in front of us, and not fill in with human features.

This helped!  You can see the progress, I think.

SketchKon Sketches #14 The Los Angeles Zoo Part Four

The African Wild Dog.

I had the great pleasure of seeing a pack of these on a safari in South Africa in May of 2018.  The guides there told us such a sighting was quite rare.

There coloration reminds me of my own Dutch Shepherds.  Stripes and blotches designed to help them disappear in the shadows...

Sketchkon Sketches #13 The Los Angeles Zoo Part Three

Birds are so like dinosaurs.  I think of it every time I draw them.

Sketchkon Sketches #12 The Los Angeles Zoo Part Two

I spent a lot of time observing the double-wattled cassaway.

This is a bird I have never seen before.  Roz pointed it out as something she had seen as a child, but not since.

It was so strangely put together--a real treat to try to draw!!  Also, frustrating!  Because my brain didn't know what to make of it!

Sketchkon Sketches #11 The Los Angeles Zoo Part 1

When Sketchkon officially ended on Sunday at about noon, a bunch of us took a trip to the Los Angeles zoo to sketch.  Roz Stendahl served as our fearless leader.  She's a master at sketching live animals in places like zoos and local fairs.  Check out her blog for loads of great information on all things about keeping a sketchbook!

I had just purchased a uniquely shaped sketchbook at the Kon and I decided to take it along to the zoo.  I thought it's format would force me to think differently about what I was seeing and how I would place it on the page.  And it did!

Sometimes my sketchbook pages get messy.  You can't always stay neat when standing at a fence, in the sun, being jostled by crowds

Sometimes it was just so crowded I would sketch a shape and move on. 

Other times, I'd find myself with lots of elbow room and time to toss down some colors.

None of this sketchbook work is, for me, about creating beautiful pictures.  I want to observe, learn, and record the animals.

“Instructions for living a life. 
Pay attention. 
Be astonished. 
Tell about it.” 
― Mary Oliver

Sketchkon Sketches #4 -- Lawlor and Reim Workshop Part 2

Continuing with sketches from my full day Urban Sketching Boot Camp workshop with Veronica Lawlor and Melanie Reim...

After drawing 20 thumbnails in 20 minutes, we chose three of those thumbnails to explore further.  In each thumbnail we had to identify three specific objects.  Then we had to do a variation on each thumbnail moving each object through foreground, middleground, and background.  

I sort of screwed it up in the first example, but in the last one you can see I finally got the hang of it, with the person, the tree and the wall occupying different picture planes. 

This was, for me, a mind-bending exercise.  I LOVED IT.

A bit later we walked to a church and our assignment was to draw it in several ways, thinking about depicting emotional content.  How does this building--and all it signifies for you in your life--make you feel?

That was fun and really tapped into my storytelling impulses.

Sketchkon Sketches #3-- Lawlor and Reim Workshop Part 1

As part of Sketchkon, I signed up for a full day workshop with two of my sketching heroes, Veronica Lawlor and Melanie Reim.  We drew for hours in this Urban Sketching Boot Camp.

We started by learning about and practicing quick thumbnails.  We had to sketch twenty in twenty minutes.

What a great exercise for exploring ideas and space.  Twenty in twenty minutes meant you had to keep looking always for the next idea.  I'd be in the middle of drawing one and thinking about what would be next!  And you couldn't stop to criticize.  And you couldn't even attempt to draw more than just basic basic shapes because you didn't have time.  

Bonus:  what a great exercise to help you BE IN A MOMENT and in a space.  You pay such close attention to where you are when doing this.  It imprints the whole scene deeply into memory.

SketchKon Sketches #2

Travel from Detroit to Los Angeles.  

I confess I did not sketch on the plane.  I watched movies instead.  And napped.  Big days coming up!

Celebrating Goodness from 2017

On this happy New Year's Day, I want to start a series of posts sharing my sketches from one of the many great goodnesses of 2017:  SketchKon!!

SketchKon was a sketching "konvention" held by the folks who run Sketchbook Skool.  I've posted many times about what an amazing impact that program has had on my life!

I got to attend the workshops in Pasadena, California last November and I learned and experienced more than these will show.  

Packing art supplies was, of course, the hardest part!

Sketchbook as Safe Space

A recent journal entry...

In Honor of American Thanksgiving, Let's Draw at Taco Bell!

A terrific post from The New Yorker about drawing in public.  Live subjects.  And at Taco Bell.

Learning from Hatke

Now and then I sit and copy ideas from a graphic novel I admire.

And I really admire the work of Ben Hatke.  I recently read Mighty Jack and the Goblin King.    In the course of that story I noticed some images that could inspire some of my own drawings on the memoir I'm working on.

So I copied them, modifying them to look like me (and not so much like the character Jack). 

Continuing my work of copying and modifying... I used a car drawing from the book and transformed it to my station wagon.

Sketching from TV

Sketching while watching Ellery Queen on TV with my nephew.

TV is a fun source for sketching because it moves so fast.  It helps me practice visual memory.  Very different than drawing from life, and I know that working with 3D subjects has been terrific for my improvement... but this is fun now and then.

I used a water soluble sign pen and some spit on my finger!

On this next page, I got out the water brush to activate the ink.

Nikolaas Napping

Here's my Dutch Shepherd, Nikolaas, napping.

Done with a water soluble pen, on multimedia paper, wet with a water brush.

Sketching in Church: The 150th Anniversary of Grace Episcopal Church

I really like to sketch in church.

I have permission from the priest, fyi, so no worries there.  And I always show my work to any parishoners who ask, so people know I'm not goofing off.  They know that, in fact, I'm probably paying better attention than many others.  My mind can't wander.  I'm capturing the service.

These pages capture my attendance on a Sunday which opened the year-long celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Episcopal Church in Holland, Michigan.    Instead of using a "sketchnote" form, I used more of a "comics" form, with panels and speech bubbles and the like.

All of these were done live, during the events. 

I captured some of my favorite moments from the liturgy.

I captured some details from the reading of the gospel and the sermon.

And after the sermon concluded, some of the special announcements.  And communion.  All are actually really welcome here.

And today, after the service, we all went outside for the dedication and unveiling of a new historical marker commemorating the church in the State of Michigan.

South Africa Sketchbook Part Fifteen

This is my final entry featuring pages from my sketchbook from my trip to South Africa with the Hope College Chapel Choir in May of 2018.  It was a great gift to me to be able to travel with a choir to this amazing country.

I'm sharing these pages to show yet another sort of thing I did in this sketchbook.  During the very long (30+hours) trip home, I captured details of the trip (making a super short connection in DC) along with things I remembered from the trip.  I drew  from memory.

By now I had gotten pretty good at the dimensions of a rhino's head, because I'd drawn and redrawn it many times. 

And while I'd never drawn our breakfasts during breakfasts because we were always in a rush, I had certainly admired the available food every morning for two weeks!  So I captured what I remembered being the most fun to experience.

You can see that I never got around to watercoloring these.   You know how it goes:  you return from a long vacation and suddenly there are a million things to do.

Someday I hope to do some paintings and other art using these sketches and my many photographs as inspiration.

South Africa Sketchbook Part Fourteen

Here is another page from my sketchbook on which I recorded a story told to us by our Afrikaans guide.

It captured my imagination to think about how a society, so split by racial violence and injustice, could ever come together in peace.

And how something small, like traffic courtesy, played a big part in it!

This makes me think a lot about the state of things in the USA, with road rage, mass shootings, and our divides over racial and economic and political issues.

Maybe we just need to get out of each other's way now and then and think "I see you.  I honor you."