The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing

I had to start writing. I wrote an almost entire first draft of the book, and it was not good. I wrote it like two and a half times. And I couldn’t get there. There was one moment—I was supposed to have a phone call with the editor one morning. I was so desperate and sad—at my wit’s end, I just didn’t know what to do. The draft I had sent her, she

When you’re working, there’s so much self-loathing. Everyone feels like their stuff is awful. When I was at CalArts I was studying painting—I’m a terrible painter—but I remember there’s a stage of a painting that just looks like a mess and then all of a sudden it becomes a painting. Movies are like that too. Magically it starts to take shape. Now I

the notebooks do provide a pretty good snapshot of a creative brain moving very fast, while serving as an instrument of grounding and refinement.

This is a book about following associations—and about how they cohere into something tangible. And, in retrospect, this string (how my mind was looking to put something together before I was aware of it) was this book’s genesis: If I could somehow make the process legible, I might find making art myself less intimidating and begin to make headway.

Editing[*] is deliberating—choosing a word or a thought, dismissing or advancing; it comes up often in this book as a way to describe artistic decision-making. And in my journalism career, editing had served me well. My temperament was well suited to it. I always had trouble writing—I was too self-conscious (you can see a pattern). And I couldn’t b

The true value of unbaked scrawls and sketches and whatnot is as a window to an artist’s process. Process is an ugly-sounding word—pedestrian jargon for the inherently wondrous act of creation—but it describes a method by which a thing evolves, which has always had a hold on me.

Then Michael wrote Cooked, and his agent—this was Binky Urban, a really powerful agent—read the part of the draft which described me, and she said, “Oh wow, what a charismatic character. Does she have any book ideas?” And he said, “Well, yes actually, she has an idea.” So I told her what I was thinking, and she said, “Yes, this is a good idea but i

As I am writing this, I find myself constantly tempted to use the word miracle to describe the wonderful thing that art is. It’s such a ready description: a hardwired cliché. But I resist, because I am trying to describe art making to mean its exact opposite.

I had to start writing. I wrote an almost entire first draft of the book, and it was not good. I wrote it like two and a half times. And I couldn’t get there. There was one moment—I was supposed to have a phone call with the editor one morning. I was so desperate and sad—at my wit’s end, I just didn’t know what to do. The draft I had sent her, she

When you’re working, there’s so much self-loathing. Everyone feels like their stuff is awful. When I was at CalArts I was studying painting—I’m a terrible painter—but I remember there’s a stage of a painting that just looks like a mess and then all of a sudden it becomes a painting. Movies are like that too. Magically it starts to take shape. Now I