The material and bits that make the Art
What intellectual capital is
Everyday, write one joke. Then draw an X on the calendar. Don’t break the chain.
That is Jerry Seinfeld’s process.
Material
50 years of jokes, written and re-written somehow fit into a single accordion folder. During the pandemic, the whole thing was made into a book.
Everything that made up this mans career is a result of the material in that folder. In total it’s about 6 hours of jokes.
Reconfigured into different acts and shows this could be made into a comedy special.
Add a few actors and situations and this could be made into a sitcom.
Even the latest talk show ‘comedians in cars getting coffee’, is about comedians talking about the material in the folder and what Jerry has done with them.
Material is a technical word in comedy. It’s the funny idea that gets refined into a bit.
A bit is another technical word to mean a portion of comedy.
So it goes like this:
Material → Bits → Act/Product
The magic trick
Before comedians like Jerry revealed their process, you would be tempted to think some people just went on stage and started talking to you and they were very funny. It’s a reason they call that an Act. And it’s very convincing when it’s done well.
Apart from comedians, writer also seem to do this trick. When they deliver sentence after sentence perfectly placed in paragraphs. Upon investigation you will find this similar process of;
Material →Bits(drafts) → (Act)Product
Illustrations are also made that way:
Material → Bits(Sketches) → Product
Focus
The focus is always on the product, occasionally we take it apart and look at the bits. But the real value lies in material. The most prolific creators rely heavily on a well organised stock of material.
Collections of ideas and images carefully collected and ready to be fashioned into bits and products.
I fear we live in a generation that does a poor job of collecting and organising material. Instead they rely on algorithm based internet searchers. Ideas that are paid for and influenced by advertisers and tech companies are becoming the source material that our products are made off.
I think this has the risk of turning creators into part of a machine.
I think the way out is to build up a body of material through thoughtful curation. This will mean the time to get from nothing to final product will be slow in the beginning. But there is a threshold a point when the compound effect of having good material will allow you to create a consistent flow of quality products.
Accordion Folders
Jerry keeps his material in accordion folders. Others might have bullet journals or sketchbooks or diaries or Pinterest boards or digital files or baskets or drawers or index cards.
Work on the material, not just the product.
I’m becoming obsessed with this idea of building up a library of material. So obsessed I started a new newsletter on the topic. I called it ‘intellectual capital’. Since then I’ve realised that the management of another newsletter will actually take time away from writing. So I’ll be writing about this topic more and more here. And I’ll be using the terms intellectual capital and material interchangeably.
I refer to material as intellectual capital because I truly believe that building up a collection of ideas that are valuable and easily accessible is the capital that creatives can bring to any project get a share of the return.
I appreciate if you will leave a comment:
What do you think about this topic
Do you have a system for collecting material
Do you have questions about material
Do you have examples of artist who collect material
Do you have ideas on organising material
I really need to be more organised with this.
I scribble ideas down wherever I can at the time, so they are spread through my desk notebook (which is mostly used for my educational publishing work and domestic stuff, but doodles and notes end up creeping in there) a dedicated art business notebook, that wanders around the house and multiple sketchbooks. Oh and I also set up a folder recently in Fresco for ideas where I pop thumbnails or notes of loose ideas. What I should probably do is take a photo of anything that I scribble down in a notebook or sketchbook and then store them in that ideas folder. (Also have a sketches folder in Fresco where I can go to pick up a sketch and start working it up. But that's mostly been used for sketches I drew in Fresco - I need to start photographing and popping my physical sketches in there, too.).
Thank you, this is a useful thing to mull over and I definitely want to bring the organised me who shows up in my educational publishing work into my creative illustration work, because I think it will make a huge difference and help push me forward a lot.
1. It's a great topic, and an important one for creatives.
2. I may have shared with you before my PKM geekiness. I use a combination of Apple Notes and Obsidian for collecting and building on ideas that come to me. I also use PlayBook as a swipe file for more visual inspiration.
3. I'd like to read a little more about what you consider 'material', and the discernment process. It wouldn't do (for me) to simply capture and collect everything that catches me attention - a lot of it is true drivel, and I know I'm discerning truthfully. But I can't explain to you how that mechanism works, so I'd like to read a bit about how your mind processes things.
4. Hmm... will think and send links.
5. Beauty of a digital PKM system is you don't need to worry *too* much about organising, because as long as it's in there you can search for it. I just make sure I use some really obvious tags and back links to active projects that it could relate to. And I try to minimise collection of *physical* materials - because organising things isn't what I want to be doing with my time.