copy like an athlete
I'm not a talented artist. It's something I've never tried. Recently I've been thinking about why this is.
When I was at school, I loved Calvin and Hobbes. I still love Calvin and Hobbes now and realised later in life how profound it is. Go and read for yourself. One day in art class we were told to draw something and due to the hour or so I spent on the school bus to bookend my day, I had one of the Calvin and Hobbes collections in my bag.
My friend and I got the book out and began to copy the drawings, deceptively simple lines that brought the characters into vivid existence. Hobbes morphs from rounded shapes and small features into a tall, angular, tiger full of personality when no-one's around. I read on Twitter that the real transformation occurs in Calvin, who becomes witty, wise and wonderful in Hobbes' presence while the rest of the world sees and treats him as a naughty little boy. This revelation blew my mind.
So my friend and I had managed some passable imitations of Calvin when our teacher, strolling around to see what we were all working on, became almost apoplectic. She said we were ripping off an artist's work and that it was no way to develop our own ideas. Chastened, we threw our sketches in the bin and spent our future art classes throwing clay onto the ceiling and pissing about. I admire art, I enjoy learning the reasoning and process behind great work, but I've never attempted my own practice.
Until recently I wasn't a writer. Perhaps I was in sensibility, just not in practice. Apparently, if you're the sort of person that doesn't join in with a Mexican wave in a sports stadium, you have a writer's temperament. Or maybe you're just a sour killjoy.
Anyway, I became an author by writing stuff and making it into a book. It's gone better than I thought it would. The point is that I wasn't that thing until I did it.
And how did I do it? I've written a bit about this and want to do so some more but, I began with things that I knew and liked. With things that existed already. With the work of other people.
When you watch children play football, what do they do? They imitate their heroes. They wear a shirt with their name on the back, they copy their tricks and shout their names as they kick the ball around. They copy them.
No one tells them off for this; it's really rather sweet. It's also a route to success. With videos of not only how the best play but also crucially how they train, available instantly wherever you are, you can go to your local park, get videos of the best free kick takers in the world up and practice until your heart's content. This is in fact what top professionals do:
“Watching David Beckham and Ronaldo scoring all these free-kicks, I was in awe. I’ve worked on it for a very long time. It doesn’t always come off. It’s a very difficult technique, but when they do it feels brilliant”
No one criticises Mount for this approach, it seems sensible and obvious. He'll have watched Beckham and Ronaldo as a child, spent hours copying their famous free kick techniques and now he plays for England. He's an exciting young player who plays in different positions to Beckham or Ronaldo but even if he did, no-one would be criticising him for being a copy. If anything, they'd be delighted that we had 'the new [insert name]' doing their thing for the national team.
When writing my book, I had tens of sports books to draw on having read plenty of them. I knew what I liked and what I didn't like about them. I settled on one with a similar subject to my own as a structural mentor and another less related book as a sort of technical ideal, where if I could approach its level of prose and insight, I'd be delighted. I've written about these books previously so won't repeat myself but it makes sense right? Find what works but also crucially, what you like, take it and give it your twist.
I was never going to copy Calvin and Hobbes to sell it. Watterson could be one of the most bootlegged artists in history anyway, his refusal to sell merch or develop a cartoon creating income for all sorts of intellectual pirates. What it might have done though is help me develop a drawing sensibility, internalise a similar technique. I'd never do Calvin and Hobbes better than the person who created it. Plenty have tried anyway!
I don't mind now as the lessons I've taken from his comic strip are plentiful: Profundity is possible in any medium, you can create meaning in seemingly simple things, the importance of play and joy in your art.
I recently did an online course with The Do Lectures which encouraged us to copy out famous adverts to get a feel for the copy. Then when writing headlines, the advice was to write far more than you'd ever need, 30 or 50 being bandied around I can't remember. Hunter S Thompson famously typed out whole pages from The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, “just to get the feeling of what it was like to write that way” according to Louis Menand in the New Yorker.
Johnny Depp went further, telling The Guardian in 2011 that Thompson had more than once copied out The Great Gatsby in its entirety. Why?
“He wanted to know what it felt like to write a masterpiece”
He later wrote one himself in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The original title was The Death of the American Dream, which Menand surmises was inspired by Fitzgerald’s first Gatsby title, The Death of the Red White and Blue. I've never read it but I doubt that it owes too much in style to Fitzgerald.
If I wanted to draw now, I'd do the same as I did when I wrote my book. I'd find the best version, a version that I liked and I'd try to get under their hood. Like Mount and Thompson, I’d want to feel what it was like to make something great.
I'd get Calvin and Hobbes and draw it over and over again.
But inevitably, when it came down to the act of creation, my work would never be the same as Watterson's. Because it would be mine. With my interpretations, my perspectives, perhaps a stuffed penguin instead of a tiger.
Copy copy and copy some more.
