How to Draw A Monster

PLUS: Charts for talking to people, Halloween nostalgia, a special guest artist

A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day

I first heard this story on a Tara Brach podcast, but it originates with the late contemporary artist Howard Ikemoto. Here it is, in his own words:

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw.

She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, ‘“You mean they forget?”

My own daughter, who will turn 3 in November, draws constantly, and always has, at least since she could hold a crayon. Her early artwork is black scribbles with bursts of this or that color. She’d stumble into the kitchen with her forearms and clothes covered in black wax. I felt very proud.

Early T artwork. Which I did frame, btw.

Now, she makes monsters. I’m using the word broadly: her obsession since last spring has been spooky things of all sorts — especially, for whatever reason, the basic-bitch vampire. But hybrids are also popular: she likes to do a vampire who is also a ghost, or a mummy who is also a cat. I’m lumping all this under the category of “monster,” although she also makes monsters (generic), and monsters who are bumblebees, etc. She does these drawings every day, for sometimes up to an hour at a time, filling books of once-blank pages with pumpkin-heads and zombies with glasses.

From left: skeleton, fairy vampire, ghost at a dance, ghost with pet cat ghost.

For the most part, I’ve never liked spooky stuff. I like people who like it (hello, witch-girl-crush), but I’m too sensitive. (I do like when people describe scary movies to me, and make a bunch of asides about the characters’ outfits and bad decisions, which is what “Too Scary; Didn’t Watch” is, for those of you who asked last week.) I tried to figure out what tipped T off to her own love of the macabre, and I think it was this trio of Magic: The Gathering cards Luke handed her one day in April. They had monsters on them; one of the monsters looked like a worm, and the other one had the head of a goat. She was so fascinated with them that I pulled out the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual for her, and that was a HIT. Not only does that book have a ton of weird creatures, it is organized alphabetically, and therefore has BIG LETTERS on the tops of the pages. (T is also obsessed with letters.)

A T drawing containing letters. (Astronaut cat holding a pumpkin bag, and bunny.)

I briefly got into Dungeons & Dragons when I lived in New Orleans, and if I’m being honest with myself, it was to impress my sister Alexis. I’d dated boys who liked D&D and thought it was unforgivable. How could a person sit in any one place for four hours? But when my sister got into it, it seemed suddenly cool and edgy. She asked me if I’d like to join a “campaign” (you need a different word for “game” when the game lasts a thousand calendar years and occurs across numerous sessions), and I said yes. (As I write this, it kinda makes me feel like I had a crush on my sister? Which I guess I sort of did, in that way that sisters can crush on each other. If you know, you know.)

Alexis designed an immaculate campaign. I still remember the plot; it was scary, and involved missing children being transported in barrels. Mostly, it became clear to me that D&D could be whatever someone wanted it to be. There were rules, but there also weren’t. The sessions reminded me of how it felt, as a child, to play. There was this kind of interior blossoming of all the things that could happen, of the possibilities that spilled beyond the edges of one’s own imagination. When was the last time Alexis and I made up a weird fantasy game in a hotel swimming pool? For the most part, you don’t know that a last time is happening when it is happening. Anyway, grown-ups need structure around make-believe, I guess. At some point, we seem to forget.

From left: a friend “at the Trader Joes,” a vampire singer, a monster, a princess dragon dinosaur, a swimming snowman friend, a witch man.

I didn’t care about the monsters in D&D; I was more caught up in the conversations my character could have over mead or whatever. Monsters hadn’t felt interesting to me in a long time. When Alexis and I were 9 and 11, we went to England (lucky children!), and I remember us drawing a ton of creatures and monsters on the airplane — we got obsessed with naming them and categorizing them and coming up with personality traits for them. I can still sort of feel the echo of the experience of drawing a monster: It could be anything. I could draw these forever. There would never be an ending to what they could be. This is the feeling that made it impossible for me to understand the concept of boredom. It’s the joy of making as a holistic experience; an unselfconsciousness that seems to belong only to children. 

Monster with many eyes “who can make fire.”

The etymology for the word “monster” is kind of interesting, as etymology usually is. It comes from the Latin monstrare (to show) and monere (to warn). Once, people believed that seeing strange creatures, or animals with biological abnormalities, was a bad omen, foretelling a major disaster. Monsters weren’t scary in and of themselves, but they demonstrated something crucial. Andrew Mangham, the author of We Are All Monsters, writes: “In one important time in history, monster also meant creative, experimental, and ever-changing.”

Watching T draw her monsters is hypnotizing. I often draw next to her on the ground, and while I am looking around for something to copy – a picture of a vampire, something hard and solid in the room, her Elmo finger puppet – she is going going going. She talks about what she’s drawing: “This is a mommy skeleton-dog-ghost. This is the Dada. This is the Susan. This is the Hank. This one is carrying a pumpkin. The pumpkin has a baby, too!” In truth, I feel something like jealousy: she’s flowing. She can’t see her own ceiling. There are no limits to what she believes she can make.

Multiple monsters in one house.

Today, while she was at school, I thought, “I’m going to try to make a monster.” I started with a blob, and then I didn’t like my first blob, so I painted another one. I felt unhappy with both of them. But why? What had I wanted them to look like?

 When the paint dried, I thought I’d go in and add features. I added lots of eyes. Lots of legs. Teeth. But I am so caught up in what I think creatures have to look like that my monsters look like people dressed up like monsters. Why have I made such a box for myself? When did I forget?

One of the reasons Halloween is so fun is that there’s an amount of Why not? to it. Why not cover your lawn in fake spiders? Why not see if you can turn yourself into a cactus? From campy to terrifying, silly to scary — all interpretations are welcome. We’ve been driving around to find the spookiest front lawns on the weekends, and the really good ones look like junkyards, with little cohesion. A skeleton pole-dancing next to a werewolf who really growls next to a mannequin being a mannequin. Drawing a monster was hard for me; but also, it was easy. Monsters can be anything.

So! I invite you to draw a monster. You may be reading this well after Halloween, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stop what you’re doing and doodle a little guy in your notebook. I’ll wait. [Waits.] Did you do it? Can I see? … Wait, he’s so good! I LOVE HIM!

Once, you weren’t scared of drawing, and you didn’t care that there wasn’t a point to it. Once, you just drew stuff. You got a picture in your mind and you tried to put it down on paper, and when it was done, you looked at it and you thought, “That’s good enough for me!” I wish that same lovely feeling for grown-up you, too. 

Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.

Love,

Sophie

Housekeeping

• I had a piece in The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts last week!

The story behind this one: Sammi and I were pitching jokes one week and I tried to pitch some version of this Venn Diagram about how basically everyone is asking everyone else how they’re sleeping, because no one is getting enough sleep. It was too complicated an idea for a one-panel, so I expanded it.

The most popular slide in this series was this one —

though some people on Instagram dragged it because “we should all be striving for radical honesty all the time.” And… sure. But sometimes you just have to buy a can of black beans, and so what are you going to do?

• I’ve been underwater with deadlines and edits for my two book projects. I have turned in the first complete draft of KIN: The Future of Family, and while I know it has a long way to go, I’m also happy with this draft. It’s a version of the book I wanted to write. Good enough for me!

• Things are about to really amp up at the paid tier. Lots of fun surprises coming. Get on board!

Loose Thoughts

• Happy Halloween! This was my favorite holiday as a child — I loved costuming most of all, and remember being on long, boring car rides where we listened to Spice World on CD and I’d gaze out the window, considering what I wanted my costume to be, starting in August. One year I really wanted to go as the pink panther, but alas, that costume never materialized, and the fact is that it never will.

• My favorite Halloween costume? Thank you for asking. One year Alexis and I went as Dr. Evil and Mini Me. It was topical at the time. At that year’s Halloween Party, we performed a flawless choreographed dance to the parody of Just The Two of Us from the Austin Powers sequel.

• Last year, our neighbors came over for Halloween and seemed to want to hang out, and we were confused about that, because we were just eating soup and handing out candy. But later, we learned that it was because I’d said something like, “You should come back here for Halloween! Our street gets really into it. We pass out full bars.” Handing out full-sized candy bars is a point of pride for me. But they heard, “We have a full bar.” As in, “Parents! Come over! Let’s drink!” Whoops.

• Thank you for dropping your soup suggestions in last week’s comments. I’m working my way through them and will report back.

• I don’t really think any of us should start any new routines until daylight savings time .

• I know that election season is a time when people get annoyed about being texted by constant bots, but I think it’s fun. I like to respond to the “HAVE YOU VOTED?!” texts as though an actual friend sent them to me. “I promise I’m getting to it. Now. Have you broken up with that musician yet? A bunch of us were talking and he is not good enough for you.” Or, “DID YOU KNOW THIS ELECTION IS IMPORTANT?” Response: “Yes, I know. Did YOU know that I have a yeast infection? Do you want to talk about that with me? I feel so alone.”