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How’d You Make That?
Three masterpieces from glimmer through struggle to breakthrough.
It wasn’t entirely abrupt: In my work, I always found it satisfying telling stories in photographs and graphics and drawings, and in spare moments — a whim at first — I picked up a paintbrush to try making images myself. These three origin stories are adapted from The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing(Penguin, April 16), a book tracing the evolution of 43 novels, paintings, poems, movies, jokes, and more, using the notebook pages, doodles, and sketches that were the artists’ tools. He told me had an idea for a novella: “What I wanted to do was to [construct] an absolute stream of consciousness of how I arrive at, let’s say, a given line or lyric or the birth of a rhyme.
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