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photo credit: Lisa M. Hamilton.
Tucker Nichols has had solo exhibitions at ZieherSmith Gallery (New York), Kunstpanorama (Luzern), Lincart (San Francisco), and the Brattleboro Museum (Brattleboro, Vermont). His work has been featured in numerous group shows internationally, including Rocket Gallery (Tokyo) and John Connelly Presents and the Drawing Center (New York). An exhibition of recent work will open in September 2007 at ZieherSmith Gallery.
Nichols’ book of drawings, Postcards from Vermont, was published by Gallery 16 Editions last fall. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Believer, Zoetrope: All-Story, and the New York Times. He also maintains an excellent image-of-the-day website called “What A Day.”
Tucker Nichols on the Web: What A Day, Postcards from Vermont, online gallery
Cecil Vortex: How would you describe your creative process?
Tucker Nichols: Recently I realized I’m trying to make work that freezes a moment in time that I would otherwise discard (or refine to make look like other images already in the world). In a text piece, that means writing something down that I’d otherwise pass by and then making a drawing of it later where it’s totally out of context. Or coming up with something slogan-like on the spot and painting it across a storefront window…. Planning a drawing is tempting, but I’ve found it rarely works for me.
With my abstract drawings, it’s more of a puzzle where I make up the rules as I go — like, what would it look like if everything’s being pulled to the edge on the left and there can only be two things and they have to be really different. I’m always trying to stop short of a completed thought because once it’s fully formed, it tends to lose some of its juice for me. Early thoughts have so many different possible outcomes; I prefer thinking about where other people might take them.
And then sometimes I have to draw a glove or a ketchup bottle or a branch because it feels like the right thing to do, and to not draw it would be adhering to some arbitrary rule about what kinds of things I am supposed to draw and what kinds of things I am definitely NOT supposed to draw. The early parts of thoughts don’t obey rules very well.
CV: Are there particular tools that you rely on to gather and develop new ideas?

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Image copyright (c) Dan Piraro 2007.
Dan Piraro’s Bizarro was first syndicated in 1985 and currently appears daily in around 250 markets on four continents. Bizarro won an unprecedented three consecutive Reuben awards from the National Cartoonist Society for “Newspaper Cartoon Panel of the Year,” in 1999, 2000, and 2001. Since 2002, Piraro has been nominated each year for their highest award, “Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.” In 2006, Abrams Books published Bizarro and Other Strange Manifestations of the Art of Dan Piraro, a retrospective that includes cartoons, fine art, commercial illustration, and images from his sketchbooks and comedy shows.
Piraro’s one-man stage show, The Bizarro Baloney Show, is a multimedia performance featuring stand-up comedy, songs, puppets, cartoons, animation, audience participation, and onstage improv drawings. In 2002 it won “Best Solo Show” at the New York International Fringe Festival. Piraro also works as an activist for animal welfare, public health, and environmental concerns. In 2007 he became a regular contributor to Veg News Magazine, with a monthly humor article on vegetarianism, veganism, and animal rights. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, Ashley Smith, a full-time animal welfare activist. They both sit on the board of Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in Woodstock, NY. (woodstocksanctuary.org)
Dan Piraro on the Web: bizarro.com, fine art gallery, Bizarro and Other Strange Manifestations of the Art of Dan Piraro
Cecil Vortex: What do you think is the key to good cartoon writing?
Dan Piraro: I have this ongoing effort to create humor in fewer words because I’m very wordy. I always have been. I was that way in school. When a teacher would say to write a 500-word paper about something or other, I would write 750 just because I’m a wordy person. So something that I’ve done over the years, especially in recent years, is try to reduce the number of words in my cartoons just because I think it’s funnier to say things simply and quickly than to over explain. But my cartoons still tend to be pretty wordy.
One of my favorite cartoonists in the world is Sam Gross. He’s most notable from the New Yorker magazine. His work is just fantastic and he rarely uses words. And when he does, it’s almost never more than three or four. I’d love to be able to do that, but it’s just not the way I think.
CV: There’s some kind of irony in somebody who feels they write too much creating a single-panel comic.

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Photo credit: Meredith Heuer 2006.
Welcome to the second half of this two-part interview with Daniel Handler, author of the best-selling An Unfortunate Series of Events, a collection of books for children, as well as three books for adults: The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and, most recently, Adverbs. If you haven’t already read the first part of this interview, in which Handler talks about making the switch from poetry to prose and why he loves it when things are going badly, you can find it here.
Daniel Handler on the Web: Adverbs: A Novel, lemonysnicket.com
Cecil Vortex: The plot for A Series of Unfortunate Events is incredibly rich. How did you approach plotting the series and how much of the plot was worked out before the first book was published?
Daniel Handler: Some of it was planned. And then more and more of it was planned the more I wrote. I’m a big outliner and note-taker, so I had a bunch of things [worked out in advance], but I also left myself room to improvise. I didn’t want A Series of Unfortunate Events to feel like a coloring book that I had to fill in for the next few years.
So I would think, “Well, the twelfth book is going to take place in a hotel, and it’s going to have this kind of revelation and this kind of action,” and then I would say, “Okay, that’s enough that you know. That’s five books ahead or four books ahead.” Every so often I would make a note of something specific that I wanted to put there. But I tried to discipline myself to be undisciplined. I wanted to get there and feel like there were all these vistas to explore, and not that it was a specific path that I’d already assigned myself.
CV: Reading the last book in the series, which deals in part with the trade-offs between security and personal freedom, I wondered if what’s been going on in the real world was informing that?

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Photo credit: Meredith Heuer 2006.
Daniel Handler is the author of the bestselling A Series of Unfortunate Events (under the pen name Lemony Snicket), a collection of books for children. He’s also written three books for adults: The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, and, most recently, Adverbs. In addition to his writing, Handler’s an accomplished musician and has played accordion on a number of recordings including the acclaimed 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields.
This is the first part of a two-part interview. You can find the second part, in which Handler talks about plotting A Series of Unfortunate Events and how real life influences his work, here.
Daniel Handler on the Web: Adverbs: A Novel, lemonysnicket.com
Cecil Vortex: Do you remember the first thing that you wrote that you felt, “Well, that’s something”?
Daniel Handler: By the time I was in college, I was writing a lot of poetry that was being published in tiny journals and was winning little student prizes and things like that. And I think that was probably the first time that I began to think of myself as a writer who was producing work that was of merit, at least for the age that I was.
I actually visited my high school literary magazine yesterday — I grew up in San Francisco. And they had found some of my old poetry on file and given it to me. And it was pretty interesting to read. It was lousy of course. But I felt like it still had some respectability to it.
It was two poems that I had written shortly after I had started having sex, and so they’re both about love and sex. And so of course they’re mortifying. But they have an air of detachment, I guess, and one of them rhymes. And it’s interesting to me that I was already trying to find an acceptable format for perhaps embarrassing ideas.
CV: Do you still write poetry?

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Photo credit: Jen Pollack Bianco.
John August’s feature directing debut, The Nines, premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. As a screenwriter, John’s credits include Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Big Fish, both Charlie’s Angels movies, and the upcoming Shazam!. He also wrote and co-produced Go, which debuted at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. For television, August created the short-lived show “D.C.” for The WB, along with pilots for Fox and ABC.
John is a frequent advisor to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. He also runs a website aimed at budding screenwriters, johnaugust.com — an exceptional and highly recommended resource accurately subtitled “a ton of useful information about screenwriting.” Born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, John earned a degree in journalism from Drake University in Iowa and an MFA in film from the Peter Stark program at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.
John August on the Web: johnaugust.com
Cecil Vortex: You’ve written an impressive number of scripts over the last several years. Were you always this creatively productive?
John August: I’ve always written, but it wasn’t until I started approaching writing as a full-time job that I really felt any mastery of it. Sometimes I’m an artist, but mostly I’m a craftsman. I write for very specific purposes, and I can sort of switch it on and off. That came with experience.
I think “productivity” is a pretty limited concept. If you’re writing a lot, but you’re writing crap, that’s not particularly helpful. I think what I hit in my early-to-mid 20s was a sweet spot between Getting Stuff Done and Getting Stuff Perfect. My first drafts are pretty strong. They feel like the final movie. Some writers do what they call a “vomit draft,” which is long and messy, then edit it down. I don’t. I write the script that could be shot.
I labor pretty hard over each scene in its first incarnation. I play the entire scene in my head, in a constant loop, until I really feel I know it. Then I do what I call a “scribble version,” which is a very quick-and-dirty sketch of the scene, handwritten, which would be indecipherable to anyone but me. Then I write up the final scene from that.
In terms of the number of scripts with my name on them, that really comes from picking projects carefully. The frustrating thing about screenwriting is that you can spend a year working on a project that never gets made, and it’s like you never wrote it. I like to say that my favorite genre is, “Movies that get made.”
CV: What drew you to screenwriting, as opposed to other kinds of writing?

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Photo credit: Terry Lorant Photography.
Throughout the 1970s, Jon Carroll worked at magazines and papers that ranged from Rolling Stone and the Village Voice to Oui and WomenSports. Since 1982, he’s written a regular column for the San Francisco Chronicle that you can find on the back page of the “Datebook” section — more than 250 columns a year at 900 or so words a column for a total of 5+ million words and counting.
Jon Carroll on the Web: SF Gate, Subscribe via RSS
Cecil Vortex: Over the past twenty-five years, you’ve written well over six thousand columns. Were you always this creatively productive?
Jon Carroll: There are a lot of writers in a collateral branch of my family — John Gregory Dunne is a cousin of mine, and his brother Dominick Dunne. And my father was Irish, and of course there’s a tradition there. And I put out a neighborhood newspaper when I was nine. In high school I worked for the literary magazine and the annual and the newspaper, writing for all of them. And I was sort of the all-purpose go-to guy for captions and intros and all of that stuff that needs doing and nobody else wanted to do. And I loved doing it. I still love doing it.
Here’s a story: When I got to the Chronicle, I was nineteen and I was working on a section that no longer exists called “This World,” which was sort of a news round-up section…. The first day I was there, I was given assignments, and the idea was, you’d turn it in and they’d give you another. And I did six stories. And an old hand came over and told me to slow down, that I was making the rest of them look bad, and that I should know that my quota was around three. So I took it to heart. I didn’t want to piss anybody off. So I did the three.
CV: When you moved into column writing, was that a relatively easy transition?

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