Think Like a Cartoonist #2: Choose Your Words Carefully

What is "lettering" and why is it a useful concept for writers?

An empty tray from an old printing press leans against the wall in my office. It used to display knick-knacks, but it’s been empty ever since it fell off the wall and scattered little rocks and feathers and seed pods everywhere.  

Anyway, I like the tray because was used to store those old wooden printing blocks with metal letters. Printers lined them up by hand—letter by letter—to prepare a single page for printing.

Writers who were lucky enough to be involved in that process learned to feel the weight of each word, and it strengthened their prose.

Slowing down the process of word-making is good practice in spotting useless words.

And I think it’s even more important to practice this now, when most of us write by typing. Typing filler words costs nothing in terms of time, but they can fill your paragraphs with trash if you aren’t paying attention.

You know what else takes forever? Adding words to a comic.  

It’s called lettering because, when you make comics, you don’t write words in the blank spaces and speech bubbles—you draw them.

We all learned to write letters by drawing them. (Remember the writing paper with three widely spaced lines?)

In cartooning, we use them too. We draw the letters as if they were unfamiliar shapes to copy.

We even have a little tool called an Ames lettering guide for drawing those three lines where we plan to draw words.

Is lettering comics as tedious as adding one letter block at a time to a print tray? Maybe not quite.

But it slows you down, and that can be a good thing

Exercise: Letter like a cartoonist

1. Make three parallel lines on a piece of paper (or use graph paper).

2. Choose one sentence from a piece you’re working on. Copy it onto your lined paper—SLOWLY—as if you are learning to draw each letter, as if each stroke matters. (This should not look like your handwriting. It should look like a sheet of writing practice from first grade.)

3. Did you notice any superfluous words? Ones that wasted your precious lettering time? Remove them.

Circle back to writing:

The point of this exercise is not that writers should LETTER a whole book, but that the process of lettering (and choosing your words very carefully) carries over beautifully to the craft of prose.

Sometimes just imagining that you’ll have to letter an entire sentence is enough to make you realize you can throw half of it away. Life is short. You don’t have time.

P.S. If you did this exercise, send me your lettering! Did your sentence change?  

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