Are questions more important than answers?
Let's do an experiment as we enjoy the life and art of William Steig
Why hello there!
Welcome to the last week of our William Steig study. Are you open to an experiment? I’ve had so much reading Steig’s books and looking at his art that I wanted to recreate the experience for you. So I took a bunch of pictures and compiled them in a short video.
Your job is to:
Choose a song you want to listen to as you view his art and play that funky music. (Or silence is a great option too.)
Press play on the video. Soak in the quick glimpses.
Now watch it again at .25 or .5 speed. Pause on the ones that intrigue you. Pay attention to how you feel.
Read about Steig’s life below the video (like his tendency to worry and his love/hate relationship with people and his absurdist approach to life.)
That’s it. That’s the experiment. You ready? Go!
Which one was your favorite? What did you feel as you watched and listened?
The life and art of William Steig
November 14, 1907 – October 3, 2003
His family were all artists.
William Steig was born in Brooklyn on November 14, 1907. His artistic parents were immigrants from what is now Ukraine. His father who was a socialist believed “you were being exploited if you worked a regular or ordinary kind of job,” so he encouraged his kids to go into the arts.
His big break was with the New Yorker.
After going to college for a little bit and not liking it much, the depression hit and Steig had to find a way to support his family. In 1930, his art was accepted by the New Yorker. They wanted a different artist, but due to encouragement from his mom, he refused. It was a wise decision as over the course of his 73 year career, he drew over 1,600 drawings and 120 covers for them and eventually they called him the “King of Cartoons.” But he “never did the topical drawings favored by that venerable magazine. He made this art for his own pleasure.”
His sense of humor established him as a unique voice.
His wife Jeanne described his humor as a “ridiculous, hapless sense of the world gone slightly awry…Both the humor and the meaning were tied to an existential understanding of life. Yes, true enough, we are each alone in a cruel and uncaring universe. But aren't we noble for putting up with it? Isn't this cockamamy world endlessly entertaining?” Bill held in his heart that one great question: ‘What's going on here?’ With every drawing he made a leap toward revealing at least the question. And sometimes, he even provided an answer.”
He started making children’s books at 61 years old.
Later in his career, due to an invitation by fellow New Yorker cartoonist Bob Kraus, Steig started making children’s books at the age of 61. He wrote and illustrated over 40 children’s books which received the Caldecott, Caldecott Honor, Newbery Honor, the National Book Award, and more.
He liked keeping his art spontaneous.
Jeanne described him as “an entirely intuitive artist, never the least bit interested in what someone else thought his work might mean.” On his intuitive process, Steig said, “If I change my paper and my pen, a whole lot of things happen, because sometimes . .. I've found a rough paper will steer you in a different direction, make you think along different lines - the fact that your hand is doing this (rather than that) brings something else out.”
In The Art of William Steig, the introduction states, “Like Picasso, whom he revered, William Steig was an artist of change, continually moving from one style to another, but always in the direction of the more spontaneous. Late in life Steig regarded any kind of drawing that required tracing or preliminary sketches an unwelcome labor. Only ‘free drawing’ brought him joy.”
He didn’t like cuteness or sentimentality in stories and, to avoid it, he pushed things to absurdity.
Steig said, “My drawings are the best part of me.”
He was an introvert who was fascinated by people.
It was hard for him to be away from his desk. Though he enjoyed his work, he didn’t like having to draw the same character across all the pages of the picture book. But he loved drawing people, especially faces. He doodled all the time–sometimes in his head even when people were talking to him.
He was really good at asking people questions, which according to his wife, “made his visitors adore him. That could be a problem, as Bill was not really crazy about visitors. He wanted to draw people, and wasn't much for hanging around with them. He asked questions, much of the time to avoid being questioned himself.”
His perceptiveness made him brutally honest.
Jeanne also talked about the dark side of his perceptiveness: “You can't have a good look at human nature without an awareness of its defects, and there was nothing hypocritical about Bill. If he saw it, he'd mention it…This sometimes dissatisfaction with his fellow beings is duly reflected in his work…Bill called himself a depressive. You didn't much see that in his behavior, however. He was cheerful and equable most of the time. It seemed to reveal itself in a reflective act- a kind of questioning. ‘What's it all about?’ he would frequently wonder. He never expected an answer, and would wave it off if someone offered. Questions mattered, answers were somehow beside the point.”
Steig himself said: “I’ve always felt that something went wrong and it was my business to find out what happened.”
I love how his daughter Maggie describes his “shot out of a cannon backwards” crazy hair and his “square hands” and “his beautiful blue eyes surrounded by smile crinkles.” She said, “He never forgot what it was like to be a kid–how little choice kids have, how unfairness feels. He hated injustice. Doing the right thing was very important to him. He was the most honest person I’ve ever known, and although he sometimes lacked a little in tact, you could count on getting the straight story from Bill. Like a kid, Bill saw things in black and white–you were a good guy or a bad guy, and there was nothing in between.
He loved children and animals.
Maggie said he loved children and animals the most. “Sometimes grown-ups get complimented on their patience in playing with children. Bill wasn’t being patient–he really enjoyed it, and whoever he was playing with knew it…His enthusiasm stopped the normal pace of life and helped us all enjoy the beauty at hand….His essential self was a great appreciator. When he looked at nature, when he looked at animals, when he looked at people he loved, his look always said, “You delight me.” His delight is in all his art, and it is how I remember him.
Worry and curiosity were his creative drives. And he loved candy.
Jeanne said, “He walked with his head bent into the wind that he knew, committed worrier that he was, would come. He did have an endless supply of things to worry about, few of which made the least bit of sense to anyone. They were, in some loony way, like a comfort blanket - something you could always turn to when things felt unaccountably disagreeable. You could not soothe him; life was curious and full of possible grief, and it was important to be on guard. That said, he had a wonderful time of it, most of the time. He would have been one hundred years old on November 14, 2007. He'd have nixed a party but been grateful for any amount of candy. Neither cigarettes nor booze carried him off; at the age of ninety-six he gave out peacefully. The last thing he said was, ‘Blue skies.’”
My thoughts
In my study, I’ve been fascinated by this man who took everything seriously and not seriously at the same time. Who ran out into storms to scream with the thunder but also preferred being the observer. Who was insatiably curious about people but also didn’t like hanging out with them once the kids went to bed. Who cared about questions more than answers.
From his work, I learned:
You can build an entire world with a few of the right words.
Specificity makes a character come alive.
Push it further. More absurd. Higher stakes.
Turn common themes or tropes upside down. See what happens.
Play with reader expectations. Challenge traditions.
Readers are more satisfied at the end if you take them through an intense emotional journey. Let them sit in the lows before taking them to the highs.
Satisfying endings are perfectly imperfect.
Use contrast to build tension.
The character determines the plot and not the other way around.
Trust your reader.
Illustration is more about expression than technical skill.
The key to a hopeful ending is not happiness; it’s acceptance.
Wonder is a respect for life.
Thank you so much for joining my study. I hope I was able to capture even a small part of how much Steig inspired me. And I hope to learn how to make books with magical specificity, show trust in my readers, and tackle difficult subjects with genuine hope (which, as I learned from this study, is really acceptance).
Oh, by the way, I’m taking the next few weeks off from AT THE KID TABLE for a very needed vacation. Toodles for now.
Your feeling-a-bit-relieved-as-this-Steig-study-took-a-lot-more-time-and-energy-than-anticipated friend,
Rachel
LOVE this post so much (I am a huge William Steig fan and see that I need to catch up on your recent posts) and am going to share it on other social media as well.
As someone who is both introverted and deeply interested in others, also filled with anxiety but basically content, I loved the Steig deep dive. I much preferred his animals to his children