Olaf Lipro's Polo Flair

What do the Swiss spaghetti harvest, the tiny Indian Ocean nation of San Serriffe, Alaska's volcanic Mount Edgecumbe, a subatomic particle called the bigon, the tomb of Socrates, and a 168-mph fastball hurler named Sidd Finch have in common? All are among the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes as compiled by the online Museum of Hoaxes. Among my favorites are numbers 7, 14, 20, 36, 46, 59, 71 and 78.

Also from the same site, the Top 10 Worst April Fool's Day Hoaxes. Just in time to inspire you for Sunday.

Today's topic stolen from Mark Evanier.

Empathy and Characterization

Sometimes I think bringing characters to life so that readers empathize with them is the hardest feat in literature. Other times I think it's deceptively easy. It seems to me that readers want to be drawn into stories, want to identify with characters, want to fill gaps left by storytellers. I think our brains are hard-wired for it. All a writer has to do is meet us half way.

I got an inkling of that in Mom's Cancer when I received e-mails from readers saying that although they'd gone through completely different events with entirely different people, it was as if I'd been spying on their lives. None of the details were the same, yet somehow the overall story was true. They reconciled the differences ("Gee, except for the mother, the son, the daughters and the disease, this is just like us!") and, in a very real sense, became participants in the story.

(Incidentally, that's one reason my editor and I decided not to put a family photo on the back cover of Mom's Cancer. As cartoon characters, we were abstract representations--mother, son, daughters--that readers could map to their own lives. We thought showing our real selves might break that spell.)

Any time a book, song, poem, movie, television program makes me feel something, I try to go back and dissect how it did it. With respect to cartooning, I'm especially interested and impressed when I'm moved economically, with a minimum of words and pictures. I think this is a skill at which Charles Schulz, for example, excelled: within a few panels we not only knew a character but cared about him. I'm still trying to figure out how that magic trick works. Some examples from different media:

Example 1: Here's the very first Calvin & Hobbes comic strip by Bill Watterson:

Those four panels deliver a lot. Not only do you immediately get to know and like Calvin, his father, and Hobbes, but you're also dumped into Calvin's first pith-helmeted adventure. You want to find out what happens next. And it's funny! One of the great things that Watterson did very well was design his strip and premise so that a new reader could walk into it almost anywhere and very quickly understand the characters and their relationships.

Example 2: I recently heard the Gordon Lightfoot song "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," in which a lyric goes:

When suppertime came the old cook came on deck
Saying "Fellas it's too rough to feed you."
At seven p.m. a main hatchway caved in,
He said, "Fellas it's been good to know you."

Lightfoot doesn't tell us the old cook's name or what he looks like. But can't you just see him? Don't you care about what happens to him? In less than three dozen words, Lightfoot painted a portrait of a steadfast seaman who worked below decks all his life, did his job through a lot of close scrapes, and now faces his perhaps not unexpected fate with calm courage and wit (and see how that's the content I bring to the song as the listener?). I love the old cook, and I don't think the song would be half as effective or haunting without him.

Example 3: Luxo Jr. is a character in one of Pixar's earliest movies, a 1986 short film that marked John Lasseter's directorial debut. Meant partly to show off the capabilities of that new-fangled computer animation, the film has no dialogue yet still conveys a charming story about young desk lamp Luxo Jr. and his patient father (Luxo Sr., I suppose). Through their movement, interaction, and body language, they tell a touching tale with no words at all. The picture below is of literally nothing but two desk lamps shining on each other, but even without animation it very effectively conveys emotion and personality. We, the viewers, give it meaning.

Example 4: There's a possibly apocryphal story of Ernest Hemingway boasting in a bar that he could write a novel in six words. The challenge accepted, Hemingway penned:

Baby shoes for sale, never used.

Now, I won't quibble over whether that constitutes a novel. But as a lesson in immediately and economically drawing readers into a story and inviting them to fill in the blanks with details from their own lives, I don't know of better.

The trick is figuring out how to do it at will instead of maybe accidentally tripping over it once in a while.

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Style Over Substance

I enjoy writing. Maybe even more than drawing, writing provides the satisfaction of creative problem solving. It's very gratifying to "get it right" in both writing and art, and both offer endless opportunities for improvement. But writing feels like a deeper challenge to me. When it comes to cartooning, I draw well enough to illustrate pretty much any story I can think of; the hard part is the thinking--which is to say, the writing.

I very much believe that good, clear writing equals good, clear thinking. Conversely, I believe that someone who can't clearly communicate an idea probably hasn't thought it through very well. If I were a freshman English teacher, I think the first thing I'd do is strip my students' prose of all the baroque ornamentation and sparkly tricks that smart kids think make for good writing (and successfully bamboozle teachers). I'd force them to explain themselves in short, simple, declarative sentences. Then I'd slowly introduce complexity, and finally--when they demonstrated they could form a coherent thought and express it so anyone could understand it--I'd allow them to fold in some quirks that might constitute an individual "style." Break the horse before hitching up the cart.

One of the fun parts of knowing and working with people who write for a living is talking about style. In a journalistic setting, editors and publishers often impose a house style so their publication speaks with a characteristic voice pitched for their readers. "Scientific American" doesn't read like "Readers Digest." They sound different in your head. Digging deeper into the weeds, publications often have stylebooks that set rules for using words, abbreviations, punctuation, acronyms, titles and honorifics, etc. Most newspapers use the Associated Press Stylebook as their Bible, while larger publications often have their own guidelines. Smaller publications sometimes draft lists of supplemental rules that apply to local issues, landmarks, businesses, and people. Then comes the best part: arguing about them.

What inspired this post was my discovery that a monthly newsletter titled "Style & Substance," intended for the internal use of Wall Street Journal editors and reporters, is available online. This is where people who make their living with words hash out how to use them, debating the difference between "try to" and "try and," the origin and usage of "trans fat" (it shouldn't be one word but is of course hyphenated when a compound modifier, e.g., "trans-fat oils"), and whether you should capitalize "iPod" or "eBay" if they happen to fall at the start of a sentence (yes). The newsletter also points out misdirected pronouns, disjointed appositives, and embarrassing blunders that appeared in the Wall Street Journal's own pages, which speaks well for its dedication to self improvement and helps writers who wouldn't make the same stupid mistakes as those fancy-pants WSJ reporters feel better about themselves.

A similar online resource I enjoy is "The Slot," a blog written by Bill Walsh, copy editor for The Washington Post. Walsh wrote two books, Lapsing into a Comma and The Elephants of Style, that are similar in content and tone (and, I believe Walsh snarkily argues, superior in content) to the surprise bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The "Sharp Points" section of Walsh's website offers short essays, while his infrequently updated blog provides briefer insights. He's a pretty thoughtful and witty guy.

The best of the rulemakers acknowledge the arbitrariness of laying down the law in a frontier as messy as language. You'd think the job would attract humorless by-the-book pedants, and it sometimes does, but more often they seem pretty good-natured and open-minded. In that respect, they remind me of scientists who realize they're using imperfect tools to craft rules that are good enough for now but may have to be changed later. They hunt a mobile prey.

I love this stuff.
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Librarians Like Otis and Raina

The American Library Association, which late last year briefly considered naming Mom's Cancer one of the year's Best Books for Young Adults (and then thought about it and decided, "Nah"), has released its 2007 Top Ten List of Best Graphic Novels for Young Adults. I'm delighted to see that Oddly Normal by my friend Otis Frampton and Kristy's Great Idea by Ann M. Martin and Raina Telgemeier both made the cut.

Otis is a terrific guy who takes the responsibility of writing and drawing stories aimed primarily at kids very seriously. Which is not to say that adults can't appreciate his work, too, but I think he approaches the youth market with a professionalism and respect that's increasingly rare. Same for Raina, whom I've met a few times and like tremendously. A lot of creators, particularly in the broader comics universe, seem embarrassed to write for kids. That's sad. If they knew what they were doing, they'd understand how rich, complex, challenging, rewarding, and important youth literature can be. I think Otis and Raina know what they're doing.

The other eight books on the ALA's Top 10 List of Graphic Novels for Youth are:

Bumperboy and the Loud, Loud Mountain by Debby Huey
Kampung Boy by Lat
Castle Waiting by Linda Medley (met her briefly, too, and her book is great)
Missouri Boy by Leland Myrick
The Legend of Hon Kil Dong: The Robin Hood of Korea by Anne Sibley O'Brien
To Dance: A Ballerina's Graphic Novel by Siena Cherson Siegel
Girl Stories by Lauren Weinstein
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (winner of many other honors, haven't had a chance to check it out yet but I will).

Congratulations to all the authors, but especially the ones I know.
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Deadlines

It's time for one of my periodic apologies for not posting as often as I'd like. My excuse is always the same--deadlines--but I think I'll have some free time soon for blogging and many other fun things.

Here's a glimpse at my day job, which I don't write about very often. The project occupying most of my time right now is a 1200-page tome called the Underground Transmission Systems Reference Book. It's got about 40 authors from five or six countries, and if you're a utility anywhere in the world planning to bury a high-voltage electric cable, this is the book for you. Trust me, you cannot imagine the science and engineering know-how that goes into laying a wire in a trench. A friend of mine has been editing the book for about a year now and it's almost ready for publication; however, he had to go to Italy for a couple of weeks and asked me to step in and finish the job for him. Athough he got 98% of it done before he left, taking over a logistically challenging project involving several authors, three teams of graphic designers, and a highly technical topic I know little about when it's hurtling full speed toward a we-really-mean-it deadline has its challenges.

It also has its rewards. In addition to money--which I'm really earning this time--I get the pleasure of being suddenly, unexpectedly, harrowingly immersed in an unfamiliar subject and quickly learning enough about it to both discuss it with experts and explain it to laymen. I got the same satisfaction as a newspaper reporter a long time ago and a freelance writer more recently. It's what I find most interesting and fun about my writing career. Unfortunately, the knowledge I gain only seems to stick around long enough for me to complete the job. Ask me about underground transmission systems in a month and I'll give you a blank stare. I may not even recall doing the job (that's nearly true; I've had the unnerving experience of looking at published magazine articles I've written and having absolutely no memory of them). But right now... I am Mister Underground Cable.

It's more exciting than it sounds.
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