What It Is [Hardcover]

This book screamed "Buy me!" when I saw it at the Drawn & Quarterly booth at San Diego Comic Con 2009. It is that good!

With a brush in the right hand, and a pencil on the left, the multi-eyed monster on the back cover spoked, "Welcome to writing the unthinkable". That's the essence of this book created by Lynda Barry, putting vivid imagination onto paper.

What It Is is a scrapbook that's filled to the brim with sketches, coloured illustrations, collages, comics, autobiographical writing, random thoughts and even a bit on creative writing.

Every page is elaborately decorated, an exploration into the unknown realms of imagination. And every page is just fun to look at.

This book is creativity and self expression, great for flipping through when you're feeling random or looking for inspiration.

I'll give this book two thumbs (drawn with smiley faces) up.

By the way, What It Is won the 2009 Eisner award for Best Reality-Based Work, but I didn't know that when I bought it. It's also one of the top 100 books picked by Amazon editors for 2008.

There are more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.

"What It Is", by Lynda Barry, is a book of writing exercises, doodles, and autobiographical stories designed to teach you to find the imagery in a situation and discover your inner creativity. What It Is won the 2009 Eisner award for Best Reality-Based Work, which is a pretty high honour for a book filled with pictures of monsters.

Barry, an author, cartoonist, and creative writing teacher grew up thinking she wasn't any good at writing or drawing, and that she had no real talent, but used her pictures and stories as a way of distracting herself from a sometimes unpleasant home life. The book is a mash-up of her doodles, quotes from books (hers and others), comics, and examples of the kind of thing your mind comes up with when allowed to wander.

Some of the effects are meant to be visual, with scraps of book pages, writing and doodles on every page, and I stopped to read every word, even if it did not seem to have any direct correlation to the point Barry makes on the page, and served instead as an example of the kind of thing she was talking about.

The exercises she uses (continuous writing, keeping the pen moving even if it's only to doodle), list making (in 3 minutes name 10 cars you had when you were young), and drawing on memories for ideas are ones I have seen in the creative writing courses I have taken over the years, but Barry makes them feel more relevant. She carries the exercises on, suggests you do them several times (even leaving spaces for your writing in her book), and walks you through the process. The benefit of doing the exercises here is that you are never expected to show anyone (in fact encouraged, as she says, to walk away from your writing and re-read it a week later for a brand new experience), unlike in creative writing classes where everyone is expected to share or comment on everyone else.

Writing and reading (as Barry suggests) can take us out of our everyday lives (she likens this to kids playing, able to pretend to be anything from princesses to astronauts to mad scientists) or can help us find a place within our lives that we had lost. She reminds us that everyone is capable of writing or drawing, creative expression of some type and that it is in fact an innate part of human existence, as who hasn't drawn a doodle while sitting in a boring class, or on a long telephone conversation?

A must have for anyone that thinks they can write, thinks they'd like to write, and even more so for people who think they can't write.