What It Is by Lynda Barry Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of What It Is
Book Review: She loved it!
Summary: 4 Stars
I'll admit I was completely confused and perplexed about the contents of this book. But it was on my good friend's wish list and I conceded...and she LOVED IT! I guess I'm just not the creative genius she is...Book Review: Takes you to the brink of your own wellspring of inspiration
Summary: 5 Stars
This is not just an exciting time to be reading comics and graphic novels. It's also a time when many people want to write and draw them too. With so many options available to share their creations (and several success stories that have come about from self-publishing startups), people who want to do more than read have begun to explore their creative sides. While the results of those efforts have been wildly diverse (for every great breakthrough, there have been more than a few clunkers), the excitement in the industry has created a small but valuable niches: the how-to guide.
Two recent books have set the standard for guides to creating graphic-novels. One, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, from the team of Jessica Abel and Matt Madden (click here for the Bookreporter interview of Jessica and Matt), gave a thorough, explicit, and delightfully well-rounded look at how to create a graphic story from start to finish. Do we really need another one after that?
The answer: If it's a book as wildly inventive as Lynda Barry's What It Is, then yes indeed. Barry is a respected creator often noted for creating rich subtext and resonating meaning that transcend her dense imagery; read between (and through) her lines and you find a powerful world of haunting memory. Here, though, she's come to show you how it's done. From the most basic--where do those crazy ideas to come from?--to the abstract--when an unexpected memory comes calling, who answers?--she delivers a jarring experience in the art of writing. She goes for the jugular of the whole creative process and lets it all come pouring out.
It's not a quick and easy experiment. But it's hardly long and arduous either. It's, of all things, actually fun. Barry's creative process is childlike, full of wonderment, hard to pin down, and gloriously all over the place. To that end, What It Is works not just as a jumpstart for creating graphic novels but for all writing. (A quick side note: Considering how well What It Is and Drawing Words and Writing Pictures complement each other, it's fitting that the books' three creators have recently teamed up as editors for the upcoming Houghton Mifflin release The Best American Comics 2008).
A cheeky tagline at the bottom of the book's cover promises it's "Dramatically illustrated with more than color pictures." And so it is. Barry throws pictures, images, and words at you at a breakneck pace, challenging you to write and think, relentlessly forcing you to get at the heart of what makes you tick, creatively. So what is it, exactly? Ah, that's the big question. Barry knows she can't answer the question decisively for everyone. But she can take you to the brink of your own wellspring of inspiration and show you how to drink from it in a new and unexpected way.
-- John Hogan
Book Review: Unlike Any Other "How To" Book Out There!
Summary: 5 Stars
I love this book. I love the stories in it (pretending to be turned to stone by the Gorgon), though many are heartbreaking; I love the questions ("What happens when we put words together? What happens when we keep words apart?"); and I love the method ("Look! a Clue! Thinking up stories is hard. Getting them to come to you is easier"). The last half of the book presents in detail the method she uses to help the stories, the Images, come to her. It works for me, too. The book in its entirety is an urgent call to pay respects to that story-making part of ourselves that we've ignored since childhood, and to start making stories again. And to write them down. Write now!
If you have a chance to attend one of her "Writing the Unthinkable" workshops, do it! She is great.
Book Review: Unspeakably Fun: A cheering treasure chest of fully operational mood transformers!
Summary: 5 Stars
This life enhancing activity toybox of a book does not merely instruct, it transcends, uplifts, jumps levels, like a good fairy tale. Follow Lynda Barry's breadcrumb trail through the tangled forest of Creativity to uncover your own treasure chest of images, stories, and creative insights. This book is Lynda Barry's Gingerbread Cottage---with full instructions on how to bake and decorate your own. Five stars? Not nearly enough!
Book Review: Way exceeded my expectations! The coolest book I own!
Summary: 5 Stars
I ordered this after reading about it on Kelly Kilmer's blog, where she highly praised this repeatedly and made me think that I was missing out on something wonderful if I didn't buy it.
So I bought it, and what I found out is that I had been missing out on something wonderful!!
I couldn't be more happy that I bought this book! First of all this book surprised me in that it is nicely sized 8.5 x 11 (approx) and it's much THICKER than I had imaged it, and it's HARDCOVER.(I was expecting a soft cover magazine type book)So, after I admired the outside, and opened it up, I was even more impressed and excited with what I found!! Yes, I thought I was in comic book/collage/art journal/writing prompt heaven!! With so much to look at, I just about wore myself out trying to look at/read everything. -Which is also a nice thing about this book, I am highly doubting that you'd run out of things to look at or read here.
This is kinda like looking at one of your school friends notebook, or journal, except SO MUCH BETTER! There are comic book pictures, random thoughts, journal prompts, drawings, ideas, etc, etc, etc. This is an awesome and inspiring book. This tops the list of coolest books that I own!!