My Life with Charlie Brown

Creativity

89 Creativity s urroundings play a definite role in my kind of creativity. I have found from experience that it is best to work in one single place and have a regular routine. The beauty of the surroundings is not necessarily important. In fact, I feel more comfortable in a small, plain room than I do in a fancy studio. My present studio is a very nice little building near the edge of Santa Rosa, California, and it suits our needs quite well. We have many people visiting us each week, and we need considerable storage space and a surprising amount of office equipment. When I first started drawing cartoons, it never occurred to me that I would someday need such things as typewriters, a Xerox machine, a postage meter, and all different types of stationary, mailing tubes, envelopes, 90 My profeSSIoN and wrapping paper. There are five of us who work at the studio: two secretaries, an accountant, and the president of our firm, which we call Creative Associates. Evelyn Delgado and Pat Lytle are our two secretaries, and Ron Nelson is our accountant who handles all of my financial affairs. Warren Lockhart, the president, spends long hours helping our various licensees to work together and maintaining quality control. It would be very difficult for me to survive without the help of these people. I have never had anyone work as an assistant on the actual comic strip or comic pages, partly because I feel that there would not be much for them to do. The drawing is relatively simple because of the style I have adopted, and I have too much pride to use anyone else’s ideas. Our day at the studio begins at 9:00 in the morning, but for myself, I find it very hard to get started until the mail has been distributed and I know if there are going to be any special projects for that day. That means that I rarely begin drawing until 9:30 or 10:00. I have also found as the years go by that I am getting to be a very slow starter. It is nice to come to the studio in the morning having at least one idea to draw, but if there is no such idea, then I have to get out my little pad of white paper and begin searching for something . Sometimes ideas come very rapidly but, unfortunately, there are also days when no ideas come at all. If I could know I was going to draw a blank day, then I would go off someplace and do something else. But I always hate to stop trying, so I sit there and make up little conversations with myself, thinking about the past, drawing Snoopy and the others in different poses, hoping something new will come along. There are days when I would like to draw something very philosophical and meaningful, something to touch the hearts of everyone, and find it absolutely impossible. One solution I use at these times is simply to get back to basics. Cartooning is, after all, drawing funny pictures, something a cartoonist should never forget. If a cartoonist remains within his own medium, if he does not let himself become carried too far afield and always remembers that his 91 Creativity business is to draw funny pictures, then I believe he will have a minimum of bad days. It is nice to be surrounded by reference books and be where it is quiet, but being in the same place each day is more important. When I first started drawing Peanuts, I was sharing an apartment with my dad on the second floor across the hall from a dentist’s office and above a drugstore and liquor store. My dad’s barbershop was downstairs and around the corner, making it very convenient for him to go to work each day. I used one of the bedrooms of this apartment as my studio and was quite proud of it. When I was first married, we lived with my dad and stepmother for a short time until we could complete preparations for a move to Colorado Springs. During this interlude, I basically drew the comic strip on a card table in the basement of my stepmother’s home. In 1951 we moved to Colorado Springs, and I again tried to work at home in one of the bedrooms, but found...