Whenever I hear people in publishing talk about inspiration, it’s always about books. “I loved them as a child”, “they saved me”, “I can’t live in a world without books”. So, what does it mean for someone like me who didn’t ‘grow up with books’?
As someone who isn’t natively a ‘book person’, it can be difficult to fit in. “What was your favourite book growing up?” is a question that comes up a lot at conferences and the like. And, whilst I fallback on things I do remember (like Mr Men, or Grug) they are very fallbacks because my favourite stories came from movies – Indiana Jones, The Goonies, Back to the Future, and especially Neverending Story (yes yes, I know it’s a book). But, no one ever asks about them. In fact, they’ve even cut them out of interviews and say things like, ‘because our readers like books’.
Writing (and words), have always seemed intellectually superior to me, whereas drawing has always felt ‘basic.’ People talk about the “great novels” but, at least in the circles I grew up with, people never really talked about the “great comics.” It’s enough to make one feel as though you’re not a real writer until you can write with words.
But, as I’m growing into a version of myself that’s becoming more certain about who I am, I’ve realised that some of the best writing happens with pictures – we just don’t notice it as ‘writing’.
There’s probably some scientific reason why images and words are perceived differently to one another – the latter requiring more ‘effort’ and therefore being more ‘cerebral’ than the other. But, what I know is that images are, quite truly, a universal language. They work on a different plane to words – they provoke emotion and communicate messages far more efficiently than words. One only needs to look to our accelerating, globalised culture for evidence of this. And, in a world that is seeking faster and more efficient, pictures win.
Both words and images are simply abstract marks on a surface; that surface might be a page, a piece of light-sensitive film, or even a cave wall 20,000 years ago. Making any of those marks is fundamentally human and so, instead of focusing on words or pictures, maybe it’s about words and pictures – whatever it takes to think better and tell a good story; the ultimate human act.