Welcome back to Graphically Minded, a publication about writing and storytelling, relating the lessons I’ve learned in a 20-plus-year career as a comic book writer and author.
During the early months of the pandemic, as the world outside grew ever scarier and the walls encroached ever closer, I found myself turning to the comfort food of the books, movies and TV shows that I’d loved in my adolescence. Batman the Animated Series and Looney Tunes shorts and 1990s superhero comics.
And Kurt Vonnegut.
If you’ve read Vonnegut, you might be thinking that his books were laced, no, ridden, with a determined bleakness. Each one a march toward entropy and destruction. Vonnegut created worlds that looked all too much like the one that ours has now become…and then he squashed them like a bug in his palm.
I’d read most of his output previously, but I decided to work through everything he wrote chronologically. (My mind straining to restore some sense of order to life, undoubtedly.) The TL;DR of it all—Bluebeard and Mother Night are his best books, and Breakfast of Champions is the most overrated.
Amidst this, serendipitously, a decades-in-the-works documentary on Vonnegut was released: Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (you can watch it on Hulu). The TL;DR of it all—you should watch it.
There was one particular thing that hit me the hardest. Early in Vonnegut’s writing career (when he really had no career at all), he was piling up rejection letters by the dozen. His family had little money. Not great prospects. And here he was, dreaming of becoming a Writer. Of taking the ideas in his head and broadcasting them to the world through text on a page, and of transmuting all of that into money and acclaim. Insane, when you say it out loud, isn’t it?
Which is probably what led Vonnegut to attempt a day job as a car salesman.
Vonnegut’s wife, Jane, took him aside and told him that his ideas were important. That he was important. And that he HAD to keep writing. That he needed to focus his whole life around his writing. That she would enable him to put his genius on the page.
And so she did. And so he did. And the rest, we all know.
If I started thinking back on all the people who told me I was foolish to want to write books, the list might spill onto a second page. Coworkers. Relatives. Friends.
They said it was too hard to break in. Impossible to make a living. Hinted that I wasn’t good enough. (At the time, I wasn’t good enough.)
I had all these stories between my ears, and I not only thought that I could and should summon them out and type them onto a page, but also that people would care about this stuff between my ears. That this stuff between my ears could make a difference.
There is no logic to that. No rationality. And so I couldn’t help but say that these people were all correct in their doubt. And so I doubted, too.
And yet.
Something kept me going. Something kept me up late, writing after a full day of work. Something told me ignore what’s rational and logical and to keep on, anyway.
Which is to say, I had faith.
One time I was talking to my Grandma Doreen about faith. She was a poet and English teacher, the woman who taught me to write, and the one who first put a Vonnegut paperback in my hand.
Anyway, I was just coming of age to look at the religion that I’d been raised in and to start interrogating the logic of it. And when I realized how illogical it all was, I was overcome with doubt.
I went to her with this doubt, and she looked at me kindly, and she said that faith is one side of a coin, and doubt is the other. If there is no doubt, then you don’t have faith. You have knowledge.
And so there will always be doubt. But faith…faith is a choice.
There are seasons in life. Ebbs and flows. Chapters begin and end. At some point, doubt will come on like a banshee and carve right through you. No matter how much success, how much acclaim, how much money.
What, then, do you do?
All I can tell you is what works for me, and it boils down to two things:
I remind myself that if I don’t have doubt, then I can’t have faith. The doubt will always be there.
I remind myself that I am not writing for me and my ego. I have a purpose, and that is to tell stories that I believe will create an influence for good in the world.
None of which is logical. And yet.
I remember a San Diego Comic Con a decade or so ago when I was doing a signing at the DC Comics booth, and a young man came up and opened his backpack, and pulled out a copy of my very first book, Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer (as silly and irrational a book as could be).
And as I autographed it for him, he started to tell me how far he’d driven to come to the convention, and how important it was that he find me, to tell me how this one particular scene had really struck him, how the stuff between my ears had gone onto a page and across the world and found him and resonated.
And I thought, by God, it’s real. It’s all real.
Kurt Vonnegut got his money and acclaim, and he moved to New York City and left his family behind—left Jane behind—and married again. And in his later years you can see it in his eyes, the regret. That he had faith incarnate, and he threw it away.
Damn, that breaks my heart.
Here’s an act of faith for you. I thought it would be smart to create an anthology comic book based on a deeply obscure, absolutely insane superhero from the 1930s. Well, that book is quickly becoming real.
As we hit our final week of crowdfunding the Stardust the Super Wizard anthology, we still need some more help to make this thing a success. I’d love your support, and I’d also greatly appreciate any help spreading the word.
You can get a copy and see preview pages right here.
As always, thank you for reading. If you’d like to learn more about me and my writing, please visit vanjensen.com. You can like and comment on the post below! Till next time…