Donna Barstow, a professional cartoonist, always thought it would be "neat" to have her own world. She's been creating that idiosyncratic world for more than a decade, with her cartoons appearing in The New Yorker, Sunday Parade, Los Angeles Times, and numerous other periodicals.
Barstow wasn't one of those kids who was always doodling, however. She knew it was the caption that was most critical. "After you read the words below the picture, your eyes go to the illustration," she told me in a recent interview, "and, if it's a good cartoon, you laugh in surprise."
She began her career by sending in a batch of what are called "gags" (captions, really) to three male cartoonists who had been published regularly in The New Yorker. They responded that they didn't buy gags, and she realized she would have to learn to draw her own illustrations.
"It wasn't easy to learn," she said. "Say I wanted to include a chicken in a cartoon. I didn't know what one actually looked like. Where do you put the feathers? How do the feet go?" So she read books by other cartoonists, and started an illustrator's "morgue" (collection of reference files and books) to teach herself to draw. Once she started submitting for publication, it took her only three months to sell the first two cartoons. That was encouraging.
Barstow has also branched out into cartoon calendars and books. Her first book, What Do Women REALLY Want? Chocolate!, is filled with cake and ice cream cartoons, and her second is called Love Me or Go to Hell: True Love Cartoons. She often posts cartoons on her blog, "Why I Did It."
HOW TO BE FUNNY
We discussed her creative process. "It helps when I have a narrow focus," she said. "The narrower, the better. Otherwise the world is too big!" The Harvard Business Review is one of the few markets that provides a topic list. She also self-syndicates restaurant-themed cartoons, one per week. She finds such constraint to be very freeing to her creativity. For her, that's part of the necessary "focusing in" aspect for getting into flow.
As a personal goal to keep herself productive, she aims to produce the number of cartoons a New Yorker editor told her he likes to see from serious cartoonists, which is a minimum of ten new ones each week. "Sometimes it's more or less, but having the goal helps."
Publication in The New Yorker is the Holy Grail for cartoonists. W. B. Park claims in an essay that a rejection slip from The New Yorker "is a reward unto itself." But, he adds more believably, it's only the occasional acceptance that makes the high rejection rate bearable.
TAKE A HIKE
To keep herself engaged and her work fresh, Barstow has recently begun creating political cartoons. So when she takes her evening walks, she may set herself a goal of coming up with three cartoons on Sarah Palin, for example. Walking, she finds herself able to focus inward without distraction.
Another cartoonist, Lilly Fluger, spoke in an interview about walks for the purpose of focusing, too:
"I used to take a walk, but I'd be on endless walks, and they were fun, but I never understood that I felt better cause I changed my focus by looking around observing positive stuff and breathing a lot. So when I came back I felt refreshed. I still love walks. But what I love is the understanding of exactly HOW I felt better and being able to do it for myself without needing to change anything external."
Barstow, of course knows this too, but when your job is as sedentary as ours is, taking walks serves multiple purposes. She runs every third day, in addition, to stay in shape, though the ideas aren't quite as freely forthcoming at those times. There's something special about walking—consider Wordsworth. As Malcolm Hayward wrote in an essay:
"Wordsworth was a poet adept at picking up poetic materials from those walks—a beggar, a leech gatherer, a field of flowers. Moreover, Wordsworth used walking as a compositional device, as he composed and revised his verses. In other words, for Wordsworth, walking was also a form of work."
CRACKING YOURSELF UP
Typically, Barstow can come up with five to seven ideas per day, and she jots them down. Over the following few days, she eliminates some of them, choosing a few and then drawing rough sketches of them. Finally, she draws the finished illustrations.
I was delighted to hear that Barstow's creative process conforms to one of my own favorite theories about entering flow. When she's drawing—which she admits is more of a challenge than writing—she'll frequently come up with a different idea for the caption, one which makes her laugh out loud. By accessing the drawing part of her brain—different from the part responsible for verbal fluency—she actually gets the benefit of more whole brain creativity.
Fluger, too, aims to make herself laugh. "I just start drawing anteaters. The key always is the expression on the face, in the eyes. I just do a bunch and try to do them so they look silly and ridiculous, so they crack me up."
Not everybody cracks up at their own work. Some are superb deadpanners. Collaborating cartoonists Guy Endore-Kaiser and Rodd Perry (no relation), creators of the comic Brevity, make light of their own dry wit and creative process in an amusing video interview.
And whether it's signaled by a guffaw or a slight eyebrow twitch, insight is at the heart of much humor. "An insight is a restructuring of information—it's seeing the same old thing in a completely new way," according to M.I.T. neuroscientist Earl K. Miller, Ph.D., whose work is discussed here.
You're looking, you're reading, and suddenly something shifts and you've got something new. Achieving that sense of novelty is a big part of the payoff for hard-working cartoonists like Donna Barstow.
