About

For many years I earned a living sculpting superheroes and cartoon characters for Nickelodeon, DC Comics, Warner Brothers, Pixar and others. I once flew out to George Lucas’s ranch in California with a sculpture of Jar Jar Binks and for years I worked with the creator of Miss Piggy at Children’s Television Workshop. For a long time everything I owned was embedded with tiny pieces of clay and my clients all knew which sculptures were mine because they were embedded with dog fur.

When my older brother was diagnosed in his 30’s with

early onset Parkinson’s Disease, it rocked my world. I quit sculpting and started writing and then to my surprise, publishing short stories. I have had no formal education as a writer, so I never took my prospects seriously.

But I discovered that the years I spent adding

and subtracting and carving away bits of clay proved to be exceptional training for the work of writing. In many ways the process of finding a character in a hunk of clay is the same as finding a story on a blank page. You must work a piece from all angles, and recognize the dangers of focusing too quickly on details when the structure and form have not yet been fully established. Life as a sculptor taught me how be alone and how to maintain focus. I learned to be patient, persistent and disciplined and to sometimes let a character emerge on its own.

Fiction writing is many things. It is a mining and sifting through of the raw material of life until something of substance emerges—a story line or character worth pursuing. But the true task of a writer is to elicit an image—a rich and expansive picture of the world written on the page. As an artist, the craft of writing for me has less to do with the study of literature, or even with writing proficiency, and much more to do

with the disciplined skill of seeing.

We see not only with our eyes, but also, and sometimes more powerfully, with our imaginations. 80% of what we perceive is visual information. The retina is not only part of the central nervous system but it is also the only sense organ that is part of the brain.

In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Everything in the universe goes by indirection.” I believe it is the artist’s responsibility to organize life’s random elements and hold them out to an audience in a way that makes sense. Whether working with random patches of color, or clay, or in the writer’s case, the random events of life, the greatest task of any artist or writer is not just to see, but to see deeply and to look beyond the chaos to a new form, one that holds together and sheds light. To be able to take that journey time and time again and to understand this process has been the greatest privilege of my life. Please visit my workshop page for more on this topic.

CHARACTER