508 - The Real Magic of Finding Your Creative Voice with Brian Selznick

30:10It's in our DNA for whatever reason, for whatever theory you may have about that. But we make stories happen. Yeah. And I've been interested in the ways in which we retell our own stories about the thing that happened to us or the things that happened to us. and that the way we decide to tell the story can affect how we feel about it. You can change how you tell the story. And it's the same story. But it can make you feel differently. It's dramatic. Yeah. Like, for instance, when people first started going out again when the pandemic began to open, I met an artist and I asked her how she was doing.

30:54And she said, great. And I was like, who the hell says that? And I was like, what? I was like, what do you mean? It was fascinating. And she said, well, you know, I have this really nice studio and I used to go in and I would just feel bad about my work. But I walked in the other morning and the sun was coming in and it was beautiful. And I had all this work ahead of me that I could do. I didn't know what I was going to do. But I and I just thought, like, why do I feel bad all the time? I'm going to I'm going to feel good about what I do and the fact that I have a nice studio and I can come in and paint what I want.

31:28And I said to her, I'm going to do that. And I did. I actually consciously did. And I think it actually made a difference for me. So if you had asked me before that what my process was like, which a lot of people had asked me that I love talking about my process. I have told this story. I mean, I've told the story about my process publicly before. And it was always my process is really hard. I feel bad all the time. And every now and then I have a moment where I figure something out, where I fix a plot point. Something comes into focus and I feel great for a second. but then i dive back into despair because i don't know what happens next and then after three years of pain and suffering i have a book yeah and then i feel good because it's finished that was that was my narrative yeah and after me to the narrative yeah oh my god like people used to come up to me and be like thank you so much for talking about the pain like that's how i feel all the time and I was like, I know, I know.

32:33And, and, and it's only because it's real. Like, it's like, that is, that is a real thing. But I began to notice I was living inside of that pain. And I like, I have a nice job. I like my job. I have a nice husband. Like my house is nice. Like, like I, I, I was like, why do I feel bad all the time? Like, why am I making myself feel bad all the time? There's enough things out in the world that, you know, they're to feel bad about. Like, I don't also have to make myself feel bad about myself. So the story I then told myself and that I now talk about is my process is I have these great moments where I have a moment of inspiration, I figure something out, and it feels incredible as the story comes together.

33:21But those moments often have long periods of pain between them. And they often have long periods of frustration between them. But at the end, I know that I should keep going because I'm curious what's going to happen in this story. It's not that I've figured things out in the past. That never really actually seems to help you with the current story. Having figured something out before doesn't mean you're going to figure this one out. Yeah. And, but, but I'm curious about why I'm thinking about it so much. I'm curious about what, what's going to happen. And then I keep working and eventually the book is finished and I feel good.

34:01And so it's the same story. It's not denying the pain. It's not denying the difficulty, but I have found that by telling it the story from that point of view, I feel less bad all the time. So that when I do get into those periods of being stuck and feeling bad, I can think to myself, oh, this is part of my process. Sometimes there is just time. And I also am working on more than one thing at a time. I'm often working on a drawing for one thing or an adaptation of one thing for a different medium at the same time. So I have something I can turn to when I'm stuck in the story. And if I don't, I can take a break or I can go to a museum or I can, you know, or sometimes I will just sit and try to figure out the next thing, right?

34:45It's not like I'm only writing when I suddenly feel inspired. Sometimes you do have to force yourself into it with an open notebook and a pencil. I find that getting bigger thoughts is easier with pen and paper or pencil and paper. And then going into it in more detail, I transfer everything over to the computer. But I generally start or do big changes with pencil and paper. And usually it's like first it's usually present tense lists like the boy goes over here he does this she does that yeah in order to figure out the changes but but but again like it it's telling the story from your own story from a different point of view that i think can help and then that can translate to other stories or it has translated to other stories i would tell about myself and realizing that some stories aren't actually that fun to tell anymore.

35:44And so I don't need to tell them. And other stories I can figure out ways to tell them that don't then plunge me back into the pain of the story if it is a painful story. Sometimes it's helpful to think of myself being like a reporter, you know, reporting a story as opposed to feeling it. Because I think a lot of times when we retell our stories, we can also be living them again. Yeah. And that I don't always want to do for myself. Yeah. But creatively, it has helped me feel less terrible all the time. And I'm appreciative of that. You know, I love that. I really appreciate you. You know, as you were setting it up, I think subconsciously I'm thinking, oh, this is going to be a dramatic shift from this super negative story to all positive story.

36:33and it's really great that you highlight like no the pieces are there it's just different emphasis different arc and it reminds me of um one thing that was a breakthrough for me because when i got into the storytelling side of it i had that same experience where i'd have these euphoric moments of like oh the metaphor clicked or you know whatever it is and for a while i felt kind of bad about it because i was like i know there's so much pain associated with this am i doing like the wrong thing? Am I just not good at that? But then I really like when that moment happens. And I reframed that as, well, I think it must be like, if you loved wrestling, if you loved wrestling, you know, part of what you like about it is the pain.

37:15Like that's part of this, you know, sport that you're doing and this creative sport that I do, a big part of it is kind of hurts. And so I love what you said about that.

37:44I want to talk about critique and breaking the form, which I'm sure you've been asked a million times, but I think I want to tackle this hopefully a little bit differently. Because when I think of your work, that's one of the first things I think of is this is a really different. These are really different types of books. Um, and I love what you said earlier. I, I talked, uh, I think a lot about creative stuff as, um, there's this great bit of, uh, George Steiner talking about how this fake utopia where there's no critics and the only critics that exist are people that make their own version of something.

38:27So if you didn't like it, you remake it and change what you didn't like. Um, and I, and I, and then he makes an argument for saying like the great works of fiction are a critique of the previous work of fiction. I love when you were talking about your, your taste and sensitivity of moving through this book, loving this book until the magic actually comes into the book and being like, I'm going to do one where that never happens. Um, I, I really, I love that. I think that that's such a good takeaway for people to be able to see that critique and that criticism as a creative prompt. But in that line of thinking, your books are really interesting because they break the form in this really interesting way that I don't have great comparisons to and that they're highly illustrated and lots of prose.

39:19And so I think a lot of people are going to think, oh, these things are just really, um, contrarian to the form. But then when you read them, they also feel very classic. And so I'm wondering if, um, how do you move through that in terms of how do I, how do you know where to, cause like you said, you have these structures that reappear and there's some really classic storytelling things going on. How do you move through? When is it time to break rules? When is it time to, you know, just play by the rules? Do you think about that? Yeah. And it just, it just has to do with the story. It's only what does the story demand?

39:59And so when I began the invention of Hugo Cabret, it was supposed to be, it was a 98 page novella with one drawing per chapter. That's what my original contract said. And it opened with a three page written description of the train station. And I had a sense that each of the drawings that would accompany the chapters would have some kind of purpose, although I didn't know what they were yet, but I was just writing the story. But after about a year of writing the narrative and not being able to figure out what each of those drawings, the one drawing per chapter would be, I began to reassess thinking about what the pictures could do.

40:42And somehow, I can't remember exactly how it happened, but I found myself thinking about where the wild things are, I guess maybe because I think about it all the time, but you know, Maurice Sendak's great masterpiece. And if you go back and you look at the structure of that book, of course, it's mostly white space in the beginning with a little rectangle of a drawing. And it says, on the night Max wore his wolf suit, he made one kind of mischief. And then you turn the page and another, and the picture gets a little bit bigger. And every time you turn the page, the pictures get bigger and bigger until by the time you get to the wild rumpus, there's no more white space.

41:15There's no more words. And it's just six pages of moving through these full page bleed illustrations. So you're moving the narrative forward. And then you come back to text after that. And I was thinking about cinema because the story was about George Maliez who made the first science fiction movie, was one of the pioneers of silent film. So I was watching a lot of movies, looking at films that were made in France in the 1930s when the story took place. And it just somehow eventually made the connection that I could possibly tell part of the narrative with pictures, the way that I'm telling the narrative with words.

41:59So I went back and I took out all of the language that I thought I could describe with pictures. Yeah. So every, everything that was actually literally a description I took out everything that was movement I took out because I could show a character on one page doing one thing and then on another page doing the next thing. So I could imply movement. uh i took out every yeah everything that i felt i could draw which meant i had to leave in dialogue because i knew i didn't want to do speech bubbles like a graphic novel or a comic i had to leave in sounds i had to leave in smells and i had to leave in some thoughts but i was also able to take out almost all or a lot of emotion because I could show it on the characters faces.

42:51So the three page description of the train station that I wrote, which I thought was very nicely written, which involved setting us in Paris, introducing this boy, moving through the train station became, I believe, 30 pages, 30 drawings, which is 60 pages. I can't remember exactly how long it was now. But where we see the moon over Paris, then we turn the page and we see closer to Paris, and then we see the train station, then we see a boy, then we go into the train station with the boy and we follow him through the crowd and we get to the metal grate that he climbs through. And so it went from being three pages to being, you know, like whatever it is, 60 pages.

43:36And I, and then it also meant that the pictures were appearing randomly throughout the story. So sometimes there was six pages of text between two drawings and sometimes there was one sentence so i had to then have a lot of white space between you know on on the on the text pages and that's just that's just technical because i that's all the words i wanted between the picture sequences and then when i finished hugo and and it hadn't been published yet and i didn't know if anybody he was going to read it. I was aware that I learned a lot of things making the book. So I wanted to take what I learned and then do something new with it for my next book.

44:17So I actually started the book that became Wonderstruck before Hugo was actually published. And my idea for the second book was a structural idea before I had a narrative. So it was the opposite of Hugo. My idea for Wonderstruck was to try to tell two stories, one in words and one in pictures, have them weave back and forth and then eventually come together. And I coincidentally came upon a documentary about the history of deaf culture, where they talked about how deaf people are the people of the eye, because they experience most of the world visually when they can't hear, because they can't hear.

44:55Sign language is a visual language. And I thought I could tell the story of a deaf person entirely in pictures, because that would parallel the way they experienced the world. And then the Marvels became an experiment in memory, where the first half of the book is entirely illustrated, 600 or, I don't know, whatever, 300 pages of pictures. And then that story becomes a memory for the characters who seem unrelated in the second half of the story, which is told all in text. Yeah. So, so the create, it's not even like the breaking of a structure. It's more of the creation of a structure is happening because I know what the story is that I'm telling.

45:44Yeah. And that has, yeah, that's always been what's guided me. You're trying to find the most effective way to tell that story. And you, yeah, yeah. I am super inspired by that. I have my bestselling book is called invisible things. And so I think a lot about what you can show in pictures. And I, my favorite definition of illustration is writing with pictures. And I love what you described because I, when I say that often, I feel like people give me a blank look, like they don't know what I mean. And I'm like, well, you can take a, you know, a bunch of texts that tells you everything about this scene and all of that stuff and then show a picture.

46:26And then you've just written that. with the picture. And that's what illustrators, I think, do. And so I love this idea of all, and you know, the categories and invisible things are feelings and sounds and smells. And they're all these, it's kind of a flip of that. But I, when you went to go write the, this notion that you could take out all this text and that the pictures and the text would be telling essential parts of the story, but different parts, was that something that you intuited or is it something that you learned? Like I've, I've heard, um, illustrators talk about this and that being kind of the purpose of having, you know, you know, as you're editing a picture book, that's something an editor is going to talk to you about, um, or has talked to me about of like, you don't need to say this because you show this, or was this something that you learned in school or how did you come upon that?

47:22Yeah, it was, I guess it was intuited. Yeah. I, I had become friends with Maurice Sendak right before I started working on Hugo. And it was actually my conversations with him that in many ways led to the making the invention of Hugo Cabret and talking about why, why, you know, a lot of things that Maurice is, Maurice Sendak has talked about publicly, which is, you know, why you use pictures, the difference between illustrating and illuminating. That's what he was interested in was illuminating a story. So you're actually, you know, you're creating a third thing. So there's the pictures, there's the words, and then there's the thing that is created by the combination of the pictures and the words.

48:01And that's interesting to me. I've been very, very inspired by the work of Edward Gorey, who is where the gap between what you see and what you read is often extremely wide. And you are left as the reader to fill in that giant gap. And what is created in your mind is horrifying and hilarious and often shocking. But he very rarely draws things that are actually shocking. Right. He's he's drawing the thing that leads up to the shocking moment. He's leading the aftermath of the shocking moment. And you and he'll indicate the shocking moment in text, perhaps, especially if, you know, the sort of the supreme example of this is the Gashley Crumb tinies, where he kills 26 children.

48:51And you're generally seeing them right before they ingest the ink or are eaten by the bear or fall through, or sometimes just after. I think maybe we've seen the person just after they've fallen through the ice. But what's being done is forcing you to become complicit in the storytelling, in the murder. You're the one picturing it. You know, you know, he didn't draw it. Yeah. You know, you have to do that. And, you know, it's sort of like, you know, famously, Steven Spielberg had trouble with the mechanical shark when he was making draws. Yeah. And you and you were supposed to see that shark from the first shot of the movie.

49:34But because they were having trouble with the shark, he was forced to find creative ways to imply the shark. Yeah. So when we see the woman be killed by the shark in that opening, that extraordinary opening shot, we see her being pulled under. We see her being pushed through the water. We see her rising and falling and being pulled back down. And it's much, much more horrifying because we're imagining what is happening under the water. Yeah. And I think about that a lot. Me too. I think about like some of my biggest influences are things like the little prince where it's the inside of the elephant or walking in my pocket where there's characters you never see.

50:16They're like under a rug. Right. Brain is just like, no, what is that? It's so frightening. So, yeah, I love that. So, OK, I got to respect your time here. And I wanted to tell you, first of all, or first of all, last of all, hopefully I'm just getting started. I wanted to say massive thanks because I believe it's through your work that I discovered Remy Charlip, which ended up being one of my biggest influences and influenced that book, Invisible Things. So thank you for that because I don't know if I would have come in contact with his work otherwise. A lot of people aren't familiar with Remy Charlip.

50:56Even in the kids' book world, I'm kind of surprised by how little he's known in America, at least from my experience. Yeah, he's fallen through the cracks. He was a very influential writer, dancer, theater maker, really extraordinary person, and intersected with a lot of the great artists in the 50s and 60s in all different fields. and he's now most famous for a book he made called fortunately which some people still know yeah but one of the things that i feel has become a mission of mine is reintroducing people to remy charlotte who made all the books i most loved as a kid including 13 and mother mother i feel sick call for the doctor quick quick quick book he did with margaret wise brown called the dead bird which one of the great books for children and very young people about death.

51:50He's an extraordinary and experimental maker of children's books. He actually ended up posing as George Melies in The Invention of Hugo Cabret, because I met him right when I was working on Hugo, and he looked just like George Melies. But he wrote an essay called The Page is a Door, about all of the extraordinary things that can happen within a book. And if you want to read that essay, it's on my website, bryanselsnick.com. There's a section about Hugo. And then in the section about Hugo, there's a section about Remy Charlotte. I just read it, and I highly recommend it. It was very inspiring to both my wife and I, who both make picture books together.

52:29Yeah, and he wrote it in the 60s before there was anything like an e-reader or like the graphic novels that are designed for computers. and he envisions a lot of those things in this essay. He sort of predicts a lot of things that we, a lot of technology that we now have, but he's mostly concerned about what happens when you physically turn the page in a paper book. Yeah. And that is, has always been a guiding light to me as well. And I love the nonsense of arm and arm and there's just so much play and I highly recommend people go check that out and check out that. I'll put it in the show notes as well.

53:14What is it called? Every book is a door. Is that what it's called? A page is a door. Well, that's excellent. Last thing is, is there anything that you want to mention about the book or anything we didn't touch on? I'd hate to leave that out. Yeah. I will say that run away with me. I'll talk about the plot for a second. It's about we never actually got to it. It is about two 16 year old boys who fall in love in Rome in 1986. It was inspired by a very strange moment during the pandemic where my husband won something called the Rome Prize. And they somehow got us to Rome six days after the insurrection at the height of the pandemic.

54:00And we were able to live there for nine months. And we had the city to ourselves. And I got to go to the Sistine Chapel by myself. I got to go to the Pantheon, the Colosseum, all these places. Essentially, we were by ourselves. And as I was walking around and talking to other Rome Prize winners, my husband was writing about an Italian architect. Everybody who won the Rome Prize was working on a project about Rome. And I heard about the history of the obelisks and the history of mosaics and the history of churches and excavations. and sculptures. And I just kept thinking to myself that all these stories should be in a book.

54:39And I created a kind of imaginary map in my head. So when I got back to America and began to put the story together, I wanted to create a situation that would bring together all my favorite places in Rome. And even when I was there, I began to imagine these two 16-year-old boys falling in love, although I didn't know who they were. Eventually, I decided one would be American, and one would be Italian. And then I began to think of other queer love stories through history, one in the 1940s, one in 1900, and one in the 1600s. And it's about the way in which, as queer people, we often don't know we have a history.

55:16We're often born into straight families in the straight world. And sometimes it takes us a long time to discover we are part of a culture that dates back to the beginning of time. And I wanted to look at that and look at some moments from that history, because when I learned that history, it gave me a sense of stability when I was feeling very destabilized. And these are particularly destabilizing times. And I find that the knowledge of this history, especially when we are currently being faced with an administration that is actively trying to erase us, to know that you can't erase us. People have tried to do it before.

55:52They fail. They make our lives worse. They make our lives harder that is real but they can't get rid of us yeah and and so i wanted to look at that in a narrative fashion within the story and the last thing i'll say given what we've just discussed is the book was originally supposed to have no pictures it was supposed to be my first book with no illustrations i wanted the words to do what they do in a novel with no pictures which was paint the images in the reader's mind. So the reader becomes the illustrator. But my editor, David Levithan felt very strongly that we could probably find a use for pictures.

56:31And I think he, you know, was aware that I can draw. So he, you know, thought, thought it might be a good idea to see if we could possibly find a reason. Yeah. And even though the book isn't a pandemic book, and it's set in 1986, I do, I did, I did want to get across the feeling of what it was like to be in that empty, dreamy version of Rome, which also did have fear and death stalking everywhere because it was the height of the pandemic. So we had the idea to open the book with this walk through an empty, almost empty version of Rome. And I realized as we were thinking up this idea that what would happen is that by the time you got to the text, and unlike Hugo, I didn't take out any of the text I wrote.

57:17I essentially kept everything I had written. But what it meant was when we got to the things we had seen in the pictures, the Pantheon, the Elephant Obelisk, the talking stat, the speaking statue where people leave notes, I wouldn't need to describe them very much because we would have already seen them. And for any reader who had not been to Rome, which I knew would probably be most of my readers, the pictures will give you a sense of having been to Rome when you're reading the text, because you'll remember having seen all of those places. And then I should also say that for anybody who goes out and picks up a copy of Run Away With Me, there are also pictures at the very end.

58:00So it's bookended by images. But I would suggest, if it's possible for any reader to not flip ahead and look at the pictures at the end. See if you can wait until you get to them to see what they are, because I think they will work a little bit better. If you do flip ahead, it'll be fine. It won't ruin the story per se. But I enjoy telling people not to look if they can. Yeah. And I'm glad you ended up adding them because I think They're very effective, especially the, the, the back half, I think, uh, does something really incredible. So, uh, well done. And, you know, a little bit, as I'm talking to you, I'm thinking, uh, man, the, you got to meet Marie Sendak and Remy.

58:47And did you say it's Charlotte? It is actually saying that wrong with an SH sense, even though it's CH. I'm glad I know that now. Charlotte. Uh, I'm listening to you tell these stories and I'm like, damn it. I want to, I wanted to have those experiences. And then I thought, yeah, but I'm getting a piece of that, getting to meet you and talk to you and, uh, you're passing that on. And it's just an honor to speak with someone with such great work. Um, so thank you so much for doing this. And I hope everybody goes and checks out the book. Thank you. It was really, really great to talk to you.

59:28I love you.

59:58in the realism. It's an incredibly powerful feat and I really enjoyed it. So thanks for the book. Everybody go check that out. I'm back for our creative call to adventure. This one's called Time Piece. And I wanted to prompt you with some of the themes we were talking about from this episode of seeing yourself not as this isolated thing, but as part of a greater through line, both in terms of your identity and your experiences and your culture, your interests, your style, your influences as a creative person, like you are not an isolated event. And so I think it can be powerful to look back through out time, back into the past and see like, what am I kind of picking up the torch with in my creative work?

1:00:50One of the people that I see as, I hope I have some connection to in the work that I do is Jim Henson. And I called this CTA, Time Piece, because he has a little short film that was really important to his creative development called Time Piece. It's all about time. It's kind of an avant-garde little short film that's really fun and cool. And when I started thinking about like, okay, what is the connection that I have to people like Jim Henson or Tova Jansen, the creator of Moomin. And I think a really big part of what I'm trying to be a part of is this idea that what makes you great is what makes you different and that what makes you belong is what makes you different, not necessarily what makes you the same.

1:01:47and that we are better off when we have a diversity in our groups and in our families and in our culture where, you know, from my perspective, I'm really thinking about it in my work. You know, I think diversity is great in all kinds of ways, but I feel compelled by my own neurodivergence and the idea that we're all bringing very different brains to the table. And that's a good thing. And so I think the Muppets and Moomin were a great celebration of that. And I'm happy to be a part, a small part with the books that I make in that kind of lineage. And what I like about that too is I don't need to do everything.

1:02:37I can ask myself, okay, what does that look like in 2025? And that doesn't need to be the end of that journey either. It just needs to be a small part. So it doesn't have to compete with. It doesn't have to conclude that mission. It just has to participate. And so I can take the pressure off a little bit and just do my little part in this day, in the era that I'm making stuff. and I hope that if you think about your influences and you think about what were they doing, what were they accomplishing, what was their mission and how does that connect to what you're doing today and also imagine that there will be people coming after you that will pick up that work and finish it or continue it that you don't need to do all of it here and now.

1:03:32And so I think it's really inspiring to think about the context in which you're making your work as a part of a rich history of people that came before you. So I hope that encourages you and inspires you. Massive thanks again to Brian Selznick for all the time and energy. Love this chat. Huge thanks to Sophie Miller for being an editor and producer on the show and helping me form this episode. Thanks to Connor Jones of Pending Beautiful for audio and video edits, animation and sound design. Huge thanks to Yoni Wolf and the band Y for our theme song and our soundtrack. And thanks to all of you for listening.

1:04:12Until we speak again, stay pepped up.

1:04:34Okay, the podcast is over, so I don't know why you're still listening, but I am glad that you enjoyed it enough to stick to the end. I have one more thing for you. If you're in a place where you're feeling a lack of clarity and you want to figure out your industry market and niche and find the perfect strategic side project to do next, go sign up to our newsletter at andyjpizza.substack.com and you will get a confirmation email that will give you the download of our creative career path hand booklet and the whole process is in there and you might also get a few bonuses in there depending on when you sign up but again thanks for listening glad you enjoyed the episode and stay pepped up y 'all Hello, this is Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast.

1:05:27For the past 10 years, I've been talking to novelists, biographers, and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world and the men and women who wrote them, like our recent episodes on Dante and Love, a starter pack of 10 Indian classics, the pop culture that influenced Sylvia Plath, and a talk with scientist and novelist Alan Lightman about the wonders of nature. Join us at the History of Literature podcast wherever you get your podcasts.