Tag Archive for Nick Bruel

CULTIVATING CREATIVITY, Part 5: Nick Bruel, Suzy Levinson, and Nancy Castaldo

November 26, 2024 / / No comments

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Since this is the 5th post in this award-winning series (not really), you probably don’t need an introduction.

Here’s some links:

Part 1: The Letter

Part 2: Travis Jonker, Paul Acampora, Michelle Knudsen

Part 3: Diana Murray, London Ladd, Jeff Mack

Part 4: Vikram Madan, Lizzy Rockwell, Matthew McElligott

 

NICK BRUEL

 

I feel like the hardest part of cultivating ideas is respecting that they exist.  Let me explain… I had a teacher in college who posited that ‘writer’s block’ did not exist.  Instead, what we called ‘writer’s block’ was, in fact ‘pride’.  As creators, we are often guilty of imagining our ideas but self editing and not making them real because we’ve decided that they are simply not good enough to meet our standards.  I have come to believe this is true.  Here is how I combat this.  I have a disorganized mind and a disorganized office to accompany it, so when it’s time for me to contemplate a project I will simply take sheets of printer paper and write down every idea that comes to mind, good or bad, and not worry for a moment about the order in which they come.  When this happens, two things are possible… 1) Maybe it’s a lousy idea.  That’s okay.  I can either move on to the next or develop it into what I want.  It doesn’t matter, because I’ve made my idea real by writing it down and giving myself the opportunity to go back to it later, assuming I do.  2) Maybe it’s a pretty good idea; I just needed to make it real in order to recognize it.  This can happen more often when we think.  I will then stuff all of my idea sheets into a manila envelope that I label with a marker, and this only serves to keep my ideas collected together.  In the long run, all I’m doing is exercising a loosely organized form of daydreaming.

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For 20 years now, Nick Bruel has been herding Bad Kitty into one enormously popular sack, er, book, after another. And if you know anything about herding cats, you know it couldn’t have been easy. Nick keeps the series fresh and energetic and timely, and somehow manages to keep Bad Kitty under control. Well, not exactly control, but you get the idea. A remarkable achievement, still rolling along. Congratulations, Nick!

 

SUZY LEVINSON

 

In recent years I’ve noticed that my creative practice feels less like a practice, and more like a series of random, haphazard events. I’ll have a good idea, lightbulb-style! I’ll write fast, revise even faster, put the story out into the universe like some kind of speed demon! Then I’ll go utterly brain-dead for about a month, twiddling my thumbs until the next idea presents itself.

This doesn’t feel like the most productive use of my time.

In an effort to cultivate a more reliable creative practice and combat Brain-Dead Month, I’ve been mindfully gathering tricks that will shake me up and make stories fall out. I think my favorite’s the “fun title” trick, which works as follows: I’ll come up with a title, usually incorporating some kind of wordplay, the kind of title I can imagine popping on a bookstore shelf. I’ll go online to make sure the title’s not taken already. I’ll type the title at the top of a blank Word doc, type “by Suzy Levinson,” paginate into fourteen and a half sections, write the flap copy, and then all I have to do is write the story. Yes, it feels like working backwards, but it’s surprisingly effective.

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Readers will have to wait for Suzy Levinson’s next poetry collection, Dinos That Drive (coming in 2025!), but until then, don’t miss the book that turned this reader into a huge fan, Animals in Pants. Brilliant and hysterical. Animals in pants? What kind of twisted, demented mind comes up with this stuff?! And where can I get more??!!

 

NANCY CASTALDO

 

That’s easy. My creativity and my curiosity are sparked when I travel. I always carry a notebook or my phone so that I can easily jot down an idea when it arrives. An idea can arrive when I might be visiting a farm in Italy or just taking the train along the Hudson River near my home— which brings me to the second way I keep my home fires burning. I don’t stop thinking about what I already know and how that knowledge connects to everything else in the world. Sometimes you just have to be curious about the things that are familiar and see where that rabbit hole takes you.

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Nancy Castaldo has written award-winning books about our planet for over 25 years. She writes to inform, inspire, and empower readers about the world around them. She’s interested in wolves and whales, farms and seeds, rivers and dogs and astronauts and . . . the list goes on (seemingly) forever. And when Nancy is interested in a topic, a book often follows.

 

 

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Category: Cultivating Creativity, the writing process / Tags: , , , , ,

One Question, Five Authors #6: “Tell us about one detail in your new book that particularly pleases you — a sentence, an image, an idea?”

December 19, 2018 / / No comments

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No matter how they may feel about the book overall, all book creators can point to at least one small moment that gives them outsized satisfaction. So I put that question to a few talented friends: Nora Raleigh Baskin, Eugene Yelchin, Nick Bruel, Erin Dionne, and Alan Katz.

 

Nora Raleigh Baskin

I recently wrote a scene about a girl who is mourning the loss of her friend but doesn’t quite realize that yet. Throughout the book, and throughout her journey during the course of one day, her grief finds form and then wings and then she is able to let it go. Without knowing why, as I was writing some dialogue between my character and a stranger, I saw, in my mind, a heron lift into the sky. As my character listens to someone talking about her friend, the heron rises from the water and into the sky, until it is nothing more than a dot against the blue.
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“The heron hunches its shoulders, then spreads out its wings across the sky, past the sun, and lets its skinny legs dangle below.“
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Finding Joy by Gae Polisner and Nora Raleigh Baskin (Knopf Spring, 2020)

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Eugene Yelchin

The illustrated sequence that serves as the epilogue for The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, a book I co-authored with M.T. Anderson.  On the surface, our book is a fantasy narrative, but even a young reader will easily discern the parallels between the world of goblins and elves and the world we live in.

The formal tension in the book is between the written chapters (penned by M.T. Anderson) and the wordless ones (illustrated by me). The written and the illustrated chapters contradict each other. They are “at war” until a crucial moment in the book when the two opposing points of view converge.

During the course of our collaboration, M.T. Anderson had this brilliant idea of goblins shedding and preserving their skins as mementoes of their lives’ passages. As a result, I drew the epilogue sequence, in which Brangwain Spurge, who initially finds this skin business repulsive, sheds his own skin. As a metaphor, this metamorphosis is a complete character transformation, a complete reversal of one’s initial belief system.

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Nick Bruel

Nearly two years ago, I was driving to go pick up my daughter from school when a story on the radio came up referencing how the current administration had decided to cut the number of refugees allowed into our country to 45,000 (that number has since been reduced to 30,000), a moot number considering the literally hundreds of thousands of refugee applications this country receives annually. As the son of a woman who lived in constant fear inside war ravaged Shanghai and a man who fled from Belgium just prior to Hitler’s invasion, I took this personally.

Bad Kitty: Kitten Trouble tells the story of what happens when Kitty’s owner decides to bring three kittens into the house, and Kitty does everything she can to sabotage their presence. It’s my Bad Kitty take on the refugee crisis, conflict, and conflict resolution.

This is a single panel of a three page, wordless dream sequence Kitty has in which she essentially experiences the reality the kittens came from. The collar in the foreground belongs to Puppy, her constant foil in nearly every book, but his fate is uncertain albeit likely grim. To me, this is the moment she truly understands the severity of the conflict the kittens escaped. Meanwhile, a hardly discernible sound effect appears for the first time in the background, one that will grow with every panel over the next page. Telling my stories with both words and pictures affords me a lot of latitude in how I choose to depict drama. In this case, dialogue would have only interfered.

 

 

Erin Dionne

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It’s so hard to choose just one thing in Captain’s Log that I love, because illustrator Jeffrey Ebbeler did an incredible job bringing the words to life via his art. But, since you’re forcing me…It’s this page. Part of the text reads:

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Later. (Day 1.)
The first mate and I led a shore party onto the glaciers. The wind howled! Snow flew!…
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Jeffrey took those words and created a dynamic, funny moment that captures the story’s sense of imagination and exploration in a way I never would have expected. The Captain is bundled up in his winter gear, riding his “sled” (a battered folding chair), pulled by his trusty first mate. His expression and position convey his zest in the moment, and even the dog is into the romp!
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When I first saw this page, I gasped out loud. To me, it represents the best of an author/illustrator pairing–my words interpreted by his art combining to make a dynamic story. I’m so grateful to the Charlesbridge team, including editor Karen Boss, for putting Jeffrey and I together on this book.
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Alan Katz

I’ve written more than 35 books for kids, and I always tried to make them funny. I probably succeeded 14.34% of the time.

But for my two newest books, Awesome Achievers in Science and Awesome Achievers in Technology, humor was only half of the goal. I set out to write non-fiction profiles of unsung heroes; inventors and explorers whose accomplishments kids knew, but whose identities they probably didn’t. The inventor of Velcro, seat belts, the microwave oven, and more.

Frankly, I didn’t know if I could do that. But I did. Totally shocked and delighted myself. Wow, would Mrs. Furschmidt, who as you know was my sixth-grade teacher, be proud. Each profile is followed by several pages of funny; not mocking the achiever, but expressing creative ideas about how his/her work impacts my life.

My favorite marriage of non-fiction and humor came in the section about the inventors of Post-It Notes. Seems Arthur Fry had invented a slighty sticky glue, but had no market for it. Years later, he met a co-worker whose page markers repeatedly fell out of his hymn book. Voila… Post-It Notes!

Following their story, there’s a “letter I wrote to them,” offering up my inventions in need of partnership. Inspired by Mr. Fry’s non-sticking glue, I suggested…

Shampoo that won’t clean hair.

Scissors that don’t cut anything.

Dog food that dogs won’t eat…and more.

This, my friends, felt like the perfect blend of fact and humor, and I printed the pages with great satisfaction and stapled them together with my stapler that doesn’t hold staples.

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