Recitation #5 - The Creative Process

And if you replace the word 'cynical' with 'insane', this process covers basically all comics.

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Just for further edification, there's a couple lines from a 2006 interview with Gary Larson (creator of The Far Side) that addressed how difficult channeling the creativity can be:

"It was 15 years of deadlines," he grimaces. "It can be torture. The clock is ticking on the wall and I'm thinking 'Where is this going?' and staring at a blank sheet of paper."

"Every week when my batch of weekly cartoons would go to FedEx it felt like a small miracle. Then in a few days, it's 'Here we go again.' "

After 15 years of grinding creativity, Larson had had enough. He says he respected the readers too much to ever start phoning it in. And he feared the fate of what's known in the cartooning world as "The Drawing Dead," cartoonists whose work goes on for decades without ever changing.

"You know, those cartoonists where you think 'Isn't he dead?' or 'Shouldn't he be dead?' " he says.

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