Fast Talk: The Creative Impulse

A Creative Education

Rene Holguin

Vice president for creative services, Lucky Brand Jeans
Vernon, California

After college, I was working at a Polo outlet in Vermont when I got a call asking me to move to New York and work at what they call the "mansion" -- the 72nd Street flagship store -- in creative services, doing window displays, interiors, everything. What I learned in college, yeah, thanks very much. Working with Ralph Lauren became my real education. I was so scared -- terrified -- of going to work there at first. As soon as you walk in, you leave the world as you know it and walk into the world of Ralph Lauren. But that was the beauty of it. There were people there who saw that I had creative talent, and they drew that out of me.

In the early 1990s, Polo asked me to move to Mexico City to help straighten out one of the stores there. That was a fantastic opportunity, not just with the store or the company but also because I'm Mexican. So I was forced to go and learn about myself. The greatest part of that experience was just waking up to who I was, to my creative self. I became hyperaware of details. My father always told me, necessity is the mother of all invention. And boy do you see it there. I remember a mother dressing her kids for a cold day. All she was trying to do was keep her children warm. She didn't realize that the colors and patterns she just put together were beautiful. They were so simple and inspiring. She had no idea of the huge contribution she made to my life. If I've learned anything, it's that creative people automatically gravitate to things that trigger or register something within them. We may not know why we like it, we just know we do.

Before coming to Lucky Brand Jeans, Rene Holguin also worked with J.Crew and designed costumes for the film Big Eden.

Creature of Instinct

Asya Muchnick

Editor, Little, Brown & Co.
New York, New York

You can't predict what other people will read. If any of us had such great instincts -- that is, if we really knew what made a blockbuster or best-seller -- someone would have grabbed it and bottled it by now. I've been in publishing for seven years, which is not a huge amount of time. But I think that those instincts -- those feelings I get about what's right and what's wrong with a particular manuscript -- have always been there. The only thing that has really changed is my confidence in asserting those opinions and not second-guessing myself.

You only know what you love. If I find something unsatisfying as a reader, the only assumption I can make is that book buyers will also find it unsatisfying. I edited Alice Sebold's book The Lovely Bones. There were a lot of people at the company who fell in love with it very early on. But there were also quite a number of people who were fairly apprehensive. They wondered if people would be put off by the fact that it's a dark story.

The way I countered that is by letting the book do its own selling. Sebold's writing shows a real creative spark, and her characters have an ebullience that you want to follow. No matter how good an editor you are, no matter what your instincts are, it always begins with the talent of the writer. No one thought it would be a best-seller, though, much less this runaway phenomenon. There's an element of luck in everything.

The Lovely Bones spent 66 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Asya Muchnick also edited the best-seller The Dogs of Babel.