Skip to the Fun Parts: Cartoons and Complaints About the Creative Process

Description

The perfect companion for anyone struggling to keep their sense of humor while staring at a blank page, Skip to the Fun Parts offers next-to-zero creative advice, and is instead filled with cartoons, commiserations, and jokes about the creative process. Like you, syndicated cartoonist Dana Maier wants a creativity shortcut-a magical fairy who will both come up with brilliant ideas and grant the energy and discipline to churn them out. This book is not that magical shortcut-you won't find stirring literary quotes or a foolproof system for sparking inspiration here-but it does provide commiseration, comics, jokes, and reflections about the often-painful act of making something original. Drawing on her experience as a cartoonist for The New Yorker and other publications, Maier explores topics such as embracing the agony of the creative process, how the pandemic has affected creative people in different ways, and the power of channeling your inner six-year-old. While more traditional creativity guides often make readers feel judged, Skip to the Fun Parts offers amusing insights about the realities of the creative process-highly entertaining for artists of all kinds and 100% advice-free!

Dana Jeri Maier is an artist, cartoonist, and author whose work explores the agony and joy of our modern life. Whether it's her viral cartoons for The New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs," her syndicated cartoon series "The Worried Well," or her artwork and murals for brands like Politics and Prose, The Phillips Collection, and CHIKO, Dana knows what it means to create (and struggle to create) art. She lives in Washington, D.C.