The evolution of ideas

What i'm still learning about writing!

A lot of my gag cartoon ideas spill out of my brain more or less fully formed.

Last week's New Yorker daily cartoon - the idea i sketched and emailed out at 12:13am vs. the final product published nine hours later. Very important commentary about rat supremacy in New York

Unfortunately, the case is NOT the same with my longer form written pieces. They roll around in my head for months before they become anything real. I hate this, because as far as I can tell, there’s no way to speed it along and no way to actually know when it will coalesce into a coherent idea.

My recent Sketchbook feature in the New Yorker is about my family’s obscure wedding customs, and how they were, in retrospect, a comforting foil to the otherwise soul-sucking arbitrariness of wedding planning.

shoutout to Western colonization’s chokehold on the wedding industry

I knew I wanted to pitch something about my wedding, and I have a Google Doc where I put all of my ideas that may or may not become anything. Looking back through it has proven illuminating (albeit cringey).