Each Friday, I send advice, ideas, stories and tips to 25K creative people like you. Author of 13 best-selling books on creativity. Founder of Sketchbook Skool w 50k+ students
📚 Random thoughts about my longest love affair.
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As a small child, I would rearrange the books on my little bedroom bookcase by color and height, alphabetizing authors, titles, subjects — a four-foot librarian. A book has always been a place for me, more than just an object. A place of adventure, discovery, and safety. I can do anything inside a book and never worry about the consequences. Be a pirate, a wolf, an astronaut, a king. I would walk down the street reading, lost in my book, transported, bumping into trash cans and grown-ups’ knees. I was taught early to revere books — never read with dirty hands, don’t rip the pages, or draw in the margins. Keep reading until you've turned the last page. Books were things to collect and keep, to line up on shelves, to round out the complete set, to hold onto till the time when I would read them once again. The Wind in the Willows. The Jungle Book. Five Children and It. The Peculiar Triumph of Professor Branestawm. Beano Annual 1965. Many of my books have been with me my whole life, traveling with me around the world, emerging from battered cardboard cartons to perch on different bookshelves. Familiar faces in a strange town, making a new place feel like home. I like to peruse the bookshelves when I visit someone’s home. Standing apart from a raucous cocktail party, running my eyes across spines, I feel I can tell something about the owners by what they read or, at least, own. Yesterday I had a long talk with a friend who’d also just finished the last book I’d read, sharing favorite passages, talking about the discoveries we’d made, the horrors. But usually books are a solo adventure, to be read in the hour before sleep, dreamt about, then added to the bubbling cauldron of inspiration in my head. Books give words and the people who write them a special legitimacy. When you are a published author, your words count more. They are worth chopping trees down for. A publisher stamps your name on a book jacket, and you enter a special class, one I always yearned to join. So I began writing and making my own books when I was in kindergarten. Filling pages bound together with a staple connected me to those big people who made ‘real’ books. My books weren’t just stacks of paper. They were real books too. Now I write books every day. Published books. Notebooks. Sketchbooks. My sketchbook is a special place I can unlock and enter, leaving the world behind. I can share that space with others, but I can also keep it to myself. Safe to take risk, screw up, fly. Whatever I do in that space will be honored and preserved. By drawing in a book, I am breaking that rule my elementary school librarian drilled into me: Don’t read a book while eating a jam sandwich. I can mess up pages, pour ink on them, write curse words, and draw in the margins. I rebel, in a safe place. When drawings are encased in a sketchbook, they become special, too. Even if it’s just a feverish scrawl or a dubious scribble, the drawing I am making in my sketchbook becomes Art to me. It will join its many thousands of brethren arrayed at attention on my bookshelf, assured a place in my heart for the rest of my life. What magic resides in these little parcels of paper and glue, twine and board. Your pal, Danny |
Danny Gregory: I help you make art again
Each Friday, I send advice, ideas, stories and tips to 25K creative people like you. Author of 13 best-selling books on creativity. Founder of Sketchbook Skool w 50k+ students
When I was 27, I almost learned to play the piano. I’d gone to a dinner party, and the host—a film editor, not a musician—sat down at an old upright and played something slow and emotional. It wasn’t flashy. He used both hands, sure, but he wasn’t showing off. It sounded like he was speaking with the keys. I remember thinking: I want to do that. The next morning, I looked up local music teachers in the Yellow Pages. Then I paused. It would take years to get good. I imagined scales, clunky...
For the last quarter century of his life, my grandfather spent hours each day at his word processor, writing recollections, essays, and articles. He had been a doctor, but like many aging artists and writers, he turned to the page to make sense of the life he had lived. Every decade, he wrote a new version of his autobiography—hundreds of pages of translucent, onion-skinned remembrance. Some he mailed to me or my mother, but most sat in desk drawers or binders, unread, unappreciated. When he...
Each morning, I would stagger out of bed and sit at my kitchen table with a journal and a pen. For the next fifteen minutes, I would fill three pages with whatever oozed out of my bleary brain — anxieties, questions, nightmares, prognostications. It was part of my quest for clarity and perspective, a journey that had led me through religion, philosophy, self-help, and finally to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Her book prescribed a weekly artist’s date and morning pages, and I had dutifully...