Transcription
Hello everybody. Welcome to the main stage here at the National Book Festival, where everyone is going to go ahead and see the Great Raina Telgemeier.
[applause]
We've got one or two housekeeping duties. Welcome to the 19th Annual National Book Festival, brought to you by the Library of Congress. This festival is free of charge, thanks to the generosity of donors large and small. If you wish to make a donation, please do so on the festival app under the word Donate on the app's home page. We appreciate your support for this great celebration of books and reading.
One of the things that we would like to do is also get people to actually come to the Library of Congress, see the books, and also see the great temple that was built to the library. The Jefferson building is one of the great pieces of Beaux-Arts Architecture, and it is indeed a temple to books, and everyone should visit it.
The National Book Festival is going to start being a year-round festival. So stay tuned to the web page. Sign up for emails, and there are going to be more and more events over the course of the year that will go ahead and fill in the entire 12-month calendar.
We welcome questions at the end for Rayna, but I ask you to keep your questions brief and to the point. You are giving us permission to use it for the webcast, so anybody who comes up and asks a question, you are going to be recorded.
So my name is Warren Bernard, and I am the Executive Director of the Small Press Expo, and we are one of the sponsors of the National Book Festival. And it is especially exciting for me to be up here, because Raina got part of her start, coming to shows like Small Press Expo, and selling her mini comics. She would make her own mini comics, and sell them for the outrageous price of 50 cents each. And back then, you know, you could go walk up, talk to Raina and stuff like that, and then she got into The Babysitter's Club, and the lines got a little bit longer. And then when Smile came out, the lines got really, really long to see Raina at any of the festivals. And it is totally mind-boggling for me to see this amazing crowd welcome Raina here to the National Book Festival.
Anyway, here's Raina. You are definitely going to enjoy it.
[Applause and Cheering]
Hi! Wow, this is a lot of people! Before I do my talk, is it okay if we take a selfie together? Okay, cool. The best way to take a selfie together is for all of you guys that are holding books in your hands to hold them up, and if you don't have a book, then just like, make yourself look as excited and cool as possible. And this is going to take like three photographs, because there's so many of you here. So, are you ready? Okay, on the count of three...
[laughs]
1, 2, 3!
[Applause]
I am just like, so washed out! Yeah! Okay, one more. Oh my gosh, yeah! Thank you!
[Applause, Cheering]
Thank you National Book Festival! Thank you Warren, thank you everybody for coming today. This is so lovely. We are going to start my slideshow. So as soon as I can tell where it's being projected, I will start talking. There it is! Awesome! Okay, and I have a clicker. You can tell I've done this a few times, right? Because I'm like, "What's happening!"
Okay. So my name is Raina. And I'm going to give you the pronunciation guide for my last name. It's Telgemeier, which rhymes with the name Helga, and tire, so Helga-tire, Telge-meier. Yeah. It's tricky. It's German! So
[laughs]
Those are some of my books.
[laughs]
I am a graphic novelist.
[cheering, applause]
Which is awesome, it's the coolest job in the world. And today I have three pieces of advice for all of you. And those pieces of advice are: read books, talk to people, and share your story.
So let's start with the first one. Read books. Pretty simple, right? Books are something that I've liked to read since I was pretty young. This is a picture of me in fourth grade. And I am smiling in this picture, but I was kind of a shy kid. I didn't tend to raise my hand in class or put myself out there when something cool was going on. I was kind of just like, hm, in the corner. But I really did like to read books. And I got a lot of my books from the Scholastic Book Clubs, and the Scholastic Book Fair. You can see in this slide, there's like, a Babysitter's Club book, and I got my Babysitter's Club books through the book fairs and book clubs, and then in the middle, there is a Calvin and Hobbes collection, and that was another thing that I loved to get from Scholastic, was the comic book collections of newspaper strips that I used to read.
So one of my favorite comic strips is Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, and if you haven't read Calvin and Hobbes, it's about a boy named Calvin and his tiger, Hobbes. And these two have big imaginations and big adventures, and most of the adventures are in Calvin's imagination. So they go back in time. They hang out with dinosaurs. They go into space, or the future. And so it's a lot of fun to read. It's really well-drawn. So it's fun to look at, and the thing about Calvin, and the thing about a lot of kids, is that with a big imagination comes sometimes the idea to imagine that something is wrong with yourself. So Calvin would sometimes experience anxiety. And in this comic strip, he is imagining that one night when he is very sick that something might be really wrong with him and that maybe he is going to die of his, like, illness that he's suffering from. And then in the morning he feels better. But that's not unlike what I experienced as a kid. That every time I didn't feel well I would sometimes panic. And I would say that it made me feel less alone to see it in a comic strip and to read about a kid like Calvin, who felt the same way.
Yeah, this is the reality of my life, that happy thought-- you know, smiling, class portrait was part of it, but I also was subject to panic attacks, and worrying that something was really wrong with me. I was also a big fan of the Babysitter's Club books, and these were just the novels, these were just words on paper, back before they existed as graphic novels, and what a cool thing that 20 years later, I got to adapt and illustrate these books into comics. But back in those days, I was just interested in the characters and their stories.
So, this is one of the books in the early part of the series, The Truth About Stacy, and the truth about Stacy is that she has got diabetes. And that is an invisible illness. It's not something people can see when they look at her, but it does affect everything about her life. It affects the way she eats, it affects the way she talks to her friends and the way she handles her own life. So seeing that in a book also gave me a lot of courage, because even though I didn't have diabetes, I did have another invisible illness, called irritable bowel syndrome.
[laughs]
Or IBS. And what that means is you have a lot of stomach aches, and you don't know why. And there is no medical reason for it. And this is something I started suffering from when I was in elementary school and I still suffer from it to this day. And I am proud to tell you that at this present moment, I do not have a stomach ache, so knock on wood that is not the case, but it's something that I deal with. And it's something that is really hard to talk about. It is hard to say to somebody, you know what? I have got to get off stage right now, because I've got to go to the bathroom. Or if you're in class, and you know, you need to leave class. Or you need to like, get out of the car, or off the bus. Like, how are you supposed to handle that? And it's something that we just don't talk about that much. It's like a reason to feel embarrassed. But reading about another character that had something about themselves that they weren't sure how to talk about was super helpful for me.
Speaking of comic strips, I've been a huge, huge fan of Lynn Johnston's, For Better or For Worse, since I was a little kid. And the coolest thing about For Better or For Worse is that all of the characters started out young. I was about the same age as the kids in the strip, and then they aged in real time. So, over the years, it is kind of like we grew up together. I felt like I had been friends with the Pattersons, and their friends, and their family for most of my life. So in this particular strip, Elizabeth, who is the daughter in the Patterson family, is getting teased by a classmate, because her classmate got her ears pierced, and Lizzy really wants to get her ears pierced too, but she won't-- her parents won't let her. So, she is feeling teased. She is feeling, you know, belittled, and I could totally relate to that, because I also had friends who gave me a hard time, and it's unclear why kids give each other a hard time so much, but you know, we are all kind of reflecting what goes on in our minds, and in our personal lives, and sometimes we take it out on each other. But I didn't understand it. All I know is that seeing it in media really helped me.
And so after all of this, I was about 10 years old. I was a fan of comic strips. My dad noticed that I was reading a lot of comics, and he handed me this book, which is called Barefoot Gen. Subtitle, A Cartoon History of Hiroshima. Cool.
[laughs]
So parents probably know, and some of the kids might know, that Hiroshima is the very first city to ever have an atomic bomb dropped on it. And this is a true life story of the survivor of the bomb. So you get to know the characters. Gen is the middle brother in the family, and you get to know him and his younger brother, and his family, and his friends, and his neighbors, and it's hard to read, but you still feel a lot of sympathy for these characters, in this war-time setting. So I'm reading a comic book, and I'm thinking, well, it's definitely going to have a happy ending in the last chapter of this volume. The bomb falls and half of the characters in this story die, and I was shocked. Because I thought that comics were supposed to make you feel good. And it turns out, comics can make you feel a lot of different things. So I was mad at my dad because I felt like he had tricked me by giving me a comic about something so serious, but I was also just really mad at the world for being such a difficult place. But it kind of turned me into a little peace activist, I would say. And it is part of why I've realized the power of comics, and that they could tell just about any kind of story. So I also experienced a ton of empathy for these characters, even though I've never lived through an atomic bombing, thank goodness. I hope none of us ever have to see that world, but it made me think of how awful it would have been to be in Gen's shoes. And so that also is the power of books, the power of reading, the power of putting yourself into somebody else's world and experiencing it through their eyes. So it's super important to read books, because it can help you feel less alone.
So, the next thing is talk to people. Which sounds about as simple as reading books, right? Talk to people. Yeah, talk to anybody who is around you. Talk to your friends, talk to your family. My Siri is asking me what I'm talking about right now, so I'm just going to turn my phone off.
[laughs]
It asked me something about what song I was listening to, and I was like, what did I just say that triggered it? Talk to Siri, that's my advice.
[laughs]
No, talk to people, talk to your friends, talk to your family. Talk to your teachers, talk to everybody. Maybe it's just about comics. That's what I used to do. I used to talk about my favorite comics, and my favorite cartoon shows, and I was not that big of a talker as a kid. I was kind of shy, like I said, and kind of nervous all the time, but when it came to talking about stuff I was passionate about, you couldn't shut me up. So that was good. But I had a really hard time talking about what was really going on inside.
So my mom started to notice my anxiety, and the tendency to kind of shut down when things were bothering me. "What is it that you're so afraid of?" "Well, I had trouble in school, you know, I had bad grades sometimes, and a lot of times, when I would feel anxious about something, my stomach would hurt, but that's not what it was." "What are you so afraid of?" "You know, I also got bullied in school, I had a lot of classmates who I didn't get along with for whatever reason, and it made my days pretty stressful. But that wasn't the thing." "What is it you're so afraid of?"
So now I'm going to talk about the thing that scares me most in life, in front of 4,000 people, because that's a cool thing to do. I'm afraid of throwing up.
[laughs]
That is my biggest fear. It's not snakes, even though I've talked about being afraid of snakes in my previous work. It's not even going to the orthodontist, which is another thing I've talked about in my previous work. It's being sick. For some reason, the idea of being sick scares me more than the thing itself. So the idea of throwing up is probably the worst thing that you could possibly do to me. So you know, like, you know how sometimes you're in class, and somebody goes [grunts] and like, makes a noise? Like that would freak me out. And if somebody in my family was sick, I would freak out and leave the house, so that's it.
[laughs]
That's my biggest fear. And somehow just talking about it makes the fear seem a little bit smaller, and a little bit less scary to me, and that's exactly what Guts is about. And it's another cool double entendre, because guts is literally what is going on inside your belly, but it's also about finding the strength to face those fears, and to face those anxieties and insecurities. So I do talk a lot about that stuff in my book. It's not too graphic, I don't think, but it does kind of put you into the experience of another person's panic attack. And it's not easy to depict what it feels like through words alone, but I had the value of, you know, art, and color, and words, and sound effects to try and convey how it feels to be so scared. And one of the things you feel is extremely isolated. You feel so alone. You feel like nobody else could possibly understand this feeling. So yeah, I was...I was trying really hard just to convey that through my work.
And part of what happened when I was younger was that I started to get really scared of eating food. So I was afraid that if I ate the wrong food, it would make me very ill. So I used to love going to salad bars and buffets, but suddenly, I was like, ooh, this thing might have bacteria in it. Ooh, I don't know if I want to touch that spoon, because what if the wrong person touched that spoon before me? And it's like, it magnifies. It gets bigger. It spirals into something huge, and then I just wouldn't eat. And so my parents were worried about me. And that was about the time when my parents took me to therapy. So, I was in fifth grade when I started going to see a therapist. And her name was Lauren. And she is a character in Guts. And this is one of the relationships that I had to, you know, come to terms with. I was not into the idea of going to see a therapist, because it seemed scary. It seemed like something I should be ashamed of. But was it? I don't think it was. This was also like the late 80s, and so I think the stigmas have changed just a little bit between then and now. And now something, I think more people do talk about anxiety, and sometimes being in treatment for anxiety as well. So I'm glad to see that things have changed a little bit, but Lauren helped me a lot. We talked about all sorts of stuff. Just, you know, about-- like, the fact that I had a big family and had to share bedrooms with multiple people, and we only had one bathroom and that was not good.
[laughs]
And we talked about the fear itself, and how, like, I just had this sense that I was like falling through space and could not feel my feet underneath my body, and so one of the things we learned about kind of grounding yourself? And thinking about your feet on the floor, and then different breathing exercises, and it was really, really helpful.
So if my clicker would work, there we go. So eventually, I did admit to my friends what was going on, and it was usually in smaller groups, not like getting up in front of the whole class or 4,000 people in the, you know, big, main room of the National Book Festival, and saying "I have anxiety! I'm afraid of throwing up!" I see a therapist. I can do it now. Thirty years does a lot for one's confidence. But yeah, once I actually started talking to my friends about it, it turned out that we were not all so different. Some of them were seeing therapists too. Some of them had things that they were anxious about, too. So just being able to talk broke down those walls, and it was so helpful and powerful. So please, talk to people. Be brave. It will probably help you.
Finally, my third piece of advice is to share your story. And this is what I've sort of made a career of; sharing my different stories with people, and by virtue of talking about these things, I've managed to feel less alone.
So, when I was a kid.
[laughs]
I liked to draw. These are some of my masterpieces from when I was small, and the one on the left is from just before my second birthday. I was a kid who liked to scribble. My parents gave me paper, and crayons, and markers, and I just made marks on paper because I enjoyed it. And I think a lot of kids enjoy it. And I am a kid who never stopped. I still like making marks on paper. The one on the right is from closer to my fourth birthday. And you can tell that I was really looking, and paying attention, and trying to capture figures, and humanoid characters with pizzas for faces, I guess. I don't know what is about, but it is cool that my mom kept all of these drawings, because it's very fun to look back over the whole course of my life and see my progression.
These are some of the first comics that I ever made. So I started reading comics when I was about 9, and by the time I was 10, I couldn't stop drawing my own. And I would just look at what I had read. I would try and capture that same sense of energy. The types of-- it's like a setup, and then a punch line, you're creating characters, you're creating dialogue, and there was a lot to learn. For example, I don't know where the word balloons are, and where the boxes are and stuff. I would just start drawing, and then I'd try to like-- fit the box around the
[laughing]
drawing. It's easier to start with the box, then draw the pictures in the box. It's easier to write the words, then draw the word balloon around the word, so that you make sure everything fits. And sometimes that helps you go, wait, this is way too many words. I need to cut a few words. So it's a process. But I think it's a process that you learn best by simply doing.
So over the years, my comics have improved, and this is a comic that I drew when I was in college. It was a very short story called Beginnings. And it's actually one of the many comics that Warren was talking about earlier. I wrote this story for a class. It was three pages long. It was called Beginnings. And it was actually about my experience of reading Barefoot Gen when I was 9 years old, and how deeply that comic impacted me. And I feel like it has continued to impact me throughout my life. But I'm having a conversation here with my mom, where my mom-- I say to my mom, "I think that book ruined my life." And she says, "I think it actually made your life better. You just haven't realized it yet." And I think she was totally right. A book that you read at any point in your life can change the course of your entire life for the better.
This short comic has sort of taken me in a lot of places. It's part of why I met my editors at Scholastic. They read that mini comic. And they're like, "We really like this short story. We'd like to work with you," and that was what led to beginning The Babysitter's Club, which is like a strange jump. Like, I made a comic about World War II, and they're like, "Okay, let's"
[laughs]
"do Ann M. Martin's The Babysitter's Club." But you know, there was a spirit there, and they saw it, and they liked it. But it was re-published in Japanese by somebody who translated it just for fun, because the book Barefoot Gen had been banned by a library in Japan, and this person just wanted to use my short comic as an example of why that book was important, and why he thought that his kids, and all kids, should have a chance to read it. And I agree with him. And then it got re-published in a couple of newspapers, and I can't read Japanese, but like seeing that is really cool. So you really never know. You really never know when sharing your story is going to connect you with others.
Oh, and here's a picture of me when I was 11 years old, and I had this experience, that I don't think any of you have heard about. I had an accident, where I knocked out my two front permanent teeth. And then had to spend the next four and a half years of my life getting my face reconstructed. I should tell you this story sometime. Actually, wait, I already did that. I took that experience and weaved it into a graphic novel called Smile. And that was my first original graphic novel. It was published in 2010, and much like my short comics, I feel like this book has changed my entire life for the better. It has taken me all over the world, and before it was published, I had a couple of people say to me, "No one is going to be interested in reading a comic about braces," and you know, "No one is going to understand this comic that takes place in 1989. That's so weird." But what happens when people read this story, they see themselves. They can see their own pain. They can see their own insecurities and anxieties. A lot of them had braces, it turns out. I've heard kids have braces, like it's crazy, but yeah! It's awesome! And it has been translated into like, 25 languages at this point, so
[laughs]
sharing your story, you never know.
And then I kept doing it. So my second memoir is called Sisters, and it's the elevator pitch, it's about being on a road trip with your siblings. That's the whole story. But you know, a lot of us have been there before. A lot of us have siblings, or we have families, and we've been on road trips, and we've got relationships with people that are so interesting that you can't help but want to tell their story. So that's what I have continued to do, and it has been really lovely to like, talk to people. And they're like, "Oh my gosh, I have a sister too!" And then that's it, and I'm like, "Yeah!"
[laughs]
"We're the same!" It's really-- and sometimes people are like, "I've never had a sister, but now I know!" So
[laughs]
that's cool too. So I wrote a fiction book called Ghosts, and it was published three years ago. So I write both memoir and fiction, but a lot of times my fictional work has elements of my own life in it, and aspects of my personality. So I am still reaching pretty deep inside in order to create my characters. And when I went on tour for this book, I talked a lot about how Cat, who is the older sister in this family, was anxious, and she was always worried about her little sister, and she was worried about life, and about death, and so I would stand on stages like this one, and I would say, "Cat and I have anxiety in common," and then I would move onto the next subject, and people were like, "Wait, wait, wait, slow down!"
[laughs]
"What? This is interesting. Tell us what you mean." And so sometimes those are the signals that lead me to a project where I go, you know, that is something that is maybe worth investigating, and maybe that I may want to tell. So, thank you readers for being curious about me and my life, and about what I have in common with my characters. So yeah, that is really about managing that, and about examining it, and trying to put it onto the page. And because I've been a cartoonist pretty much my whole life, over 30 years, I have had the benefit of being able to share my stories in a way that other people can read them, and appreciate them, and connect with them. And I feel extremely lucky to be able to do that. And that is not to say that if you're not a cartoonist, you don't have other ways of sharing your stories. You can write poetry. You can sing songs. You can make YouTube videos. You can do so many different things to express your point of view, and your stories. But I encourage you to do that because sharing your story means that other people feel less alone, and then the circle is complete.
Oh, and I have another project that I'd like to tell you about, it turns out. It's called Share Your Smile, and that's an extension of the last slide, and it's hard when you don't have the slides in front of you, so you're not like, "Oh, and the next thing I want to say is this." Hello.
[laughs]
So Sharing Your Smile is actually sort of like a how-to, and sort of an idea prompt builder. It asks a lot of questions. And I think that's one of the most helpful things that you can do if you're writing stories, is to ask yourself questions. You know, who are these characters? What are their families like? Where are they from? Where do they live? What do they like about the place that they live? What do they hate about the place they live? What do they like about their school? What do they like about their-- you know, car. There's so many questions that you can ask yourself. So this book asks a lot of questions, and then it's your job to fill in some of the answers, and then use those answers as jumping-off points to tell your own story. And it has been so much fun to see kids filling the book in, or writing their own comics, and then showing them to me. I love seeing other people be creative.
And now, we get to talk about graphic novels, which is my favorite subject of all.
[laughs]
So, graphic novels are real reading. I feel like
[applause begins]
this is-- thank you! This is a funny conversation that we've been having over the last few years, where somebody sometimes will say, "Graphic novels are not real books." Just because you read them in an hour, just because they have pictures, just because they make you laugh. Just because they make you, you know, want to read the next book immediately in a series, it doesn't mean that's not a real book. That's totally what a real book is. And it's-- you know, they've got characters. They've got plots. They get people so excited, and it is-- it is so legitimate, and it's really lovely to be here, especially at a celebration of books and reading, and to be able to talk about graphic novels in the same space, and on the same stage as some luminaries in the business. And graphic novels are a medium, not a genre. This is the mistake that people sometimes make. They'll say, "I love the genre of graphic novels," and I'm like, "Wait, that's like saying I like the genre of movies. Movies are a format. Movies are a medium for storytelling, and graphic novels are the same." So graphic novels come in many flavors. You can have westerns, slice of life, mystery, history.
[laughs]
Science fiction, and sometimes people like to blend all of those things together. But a graphic novel is basically anything you want it to be, as long as they are both words and pictures. Graphic novels still face a lot of stigma. This is from a comic strip called Heart of the City, by Mark Tatulli, who has a book out right now, called Short and Skinny. It was a week of strips where the mom kept pushing back and saying, "A graphic novel is not a real book. I want you to check out a real book from the library." And what her daughter had to do was to make her read the graphic novel. And Mark, thanks Mark! He used Smile as the graphic novel that they were talking about, and at the end of the week of strips, mom had been convinced, and she's like, "Oh, this is actually a really good book!" And her kid goes, "Graphic novel."
[Laughs]
So it's just important to like, spread this knowledge amongst the gatekeepers in your lives, be they librarians, teachers, parents, educators, we all need to sort of be together on this one, that graphic novels are amazing. All right. I think this slide got cut off, but it says, "You probably know that graphic novels are awesome."
[laughs]
And I think everybody in this room can probably agree on that one, which makes me super happy. So one thing that is a burden is that graphic novels take a long time to make. And I think part of the problem is they can be read in like an hour, and people are like, "Okay, when is the next one coming out?" It took me three years to make that, and so please read it a second time.
[laughing]
And maybe a third time. Some of you probably noticed today that I was not signing books today, and that is because my wrist is in the process of blowing out, and when I sign books, it actually takes a little bit away from the future of me being able to make more books, so I have to be extremely selective of when, where, and how many books I sign. And I am about to embark on a two and a half month book tour for Guts, so
[laughs]
I just kind of have to pace myself. So I apologize for that. But I'm glad I got to take pictures with those of you that came. So that's me, doing a stock signing of 4,500 books in Texas. And I had to tape up my arm like an Olympian. But comics can be long or short as you want them to be. So if you're somebody who wants to make comics, and you're intimidated by the fact that graphic novels take a long time to make, make a one-page comic. Make a two-page comic. Make a ten-page comic. It will give you a chance to build your chops, and to give yourself the experience of practicing, and then, at some point, if you want to write a long-form graphic novel, you can. This is a single-page story that I did, around the same time as I did the story Beginnings for my mini comics. This one is about my first cup of tea. That's it.
[laughs]
That's the whole comic. Nothing wrong with that. Graphic novels inspire budding creators, so one thing I've seen a lot of, and this was true for me as a kid too, when I read my first comics, I immediately wanted to make my own comics. So if you've got an inspired reader in your life, the next thing you know, they might be a writer, an illustrator. But all of us start out reading, and then some of us continue to want to be a part of words and pictures, and it's wonderful. Graphic novelist is an actual career. Believe it or not, this is for you guys, mom and dad. It can happen. It takes a lot of work. And you spend a lot of time. I have actual assistants now, who help me out in the studio. I still do all of my own artwork, but I have somebody who scans my pages, somebody who answers my email. They're super cool people, and most of them are also younger creators, and so it's nice to kind of mentor people and show them, you know, and pay them for the work they do, honestly, because they deserve that.
Okay, so now I'm going to talk a little bit about the actual career. This is my process talk, just because one of the things people have asked me is like, "Well, how do you make a graphic novel?" And it's so much easier to show than to tell. Again, that's a cartoonist thing, because we're like, "Let me just show you." Because the pictures are part of the story. So, when I write, it's in a format called thumbnails. And that means that my ideas exist in my head, and when I put them on paper, they look just like this. They are already comics. They already have words, and pictures, and panels and word balloons. And I'm not spending that much time. I'm just kind of doodling little stick figure characters, and then putting words in their mouths, and then I do this for the entire book. So I will do 250 pages of thumbnails. Then I basically have a blueprint for the whole thing, and I send those to my editor, and she is comic-savvy. So she is able to look at this, and see what I'm trying to go for. And then we edit my project from this stage. So I'm often redrawing my thumbnails, but you know, each page only takes maybe five minutes. And what we're looking for at this stage is like, is the character relationship. Are they all working? And how is the narrative arc feeling? And is there a part that can be expanded, or shortened, or clarified? So I'm doing all of the things that an editor-creator relationship would do at this stage, which is just making the book as good as it can be. But when that stage is finally done, like I said, the thumbnails do act as a blueprint, so then, I'm able to move on to final artwork. And I'm using a lot of the same tools, but I switch my paper up to something called Bristol Board, which is just thicker, smoother, heavier, takes pencils and erasers a little bit better. So I'm actually going to go back one slide, just to show you the difference between the thumbnails and the pencils. So it's the same information. It's pretty much the same thing, it's just that I'm spending more time when I'm doing the pencils, as when I did my thumbnails. So, you know, it was comics all along. And so after the pencils are done, I move on to inking, and I'm using all analog tools here. I use a watercolor brush dipped into a bottle of waterproof India ink, going right over the same page. So I'm just tracing my pencil lines, and this is where I can add like darks, and lights, and do some cross-hatching, and make it look as pretty as I want it to. And then, I scan my work into a computer. And then it goes from being a piece of physical art to being digital art. And I open up my files in Photoshop, and then I'm able to make tiny corrections to my work. So, instead of using like white-out to cover up lines I'm not happy with, I'll just use Photoshop, and use like, my stylus or my mouse to do that. I just realized, is Lauren here? Okay, I just realized that-- you, hi! Can you get me my bag, which is backstage? It has my iPencil in it, and I'm going to need that in a minute. Thank you! So in Photoshop, I am able to do my digital clean-up. Like I said, this is what prompted me to realize I have digital stuff up on stage that I'm going to show you guys in a bit. So this is where the coloring is done, and I actually don't do my own colors. I work with a colorist named Braden Lamb. He is awesome. Thank you so much, Megan.
[laughs]
Yay for assistance! And Braden has been coloring my work since... Sisters? I think. He colored Sisters, Ghosts, all four of my Babysitter's Club books, and Guts. And he's super talented and awesome. And he is also coloring Gail Galligan's Babysitter's Club books right now, too. So I feel like the color really adds a lot to it, and a lot of times, I'll tell him what I'm looking for, but then he goes crazy. Like, with Ghosts, I told him I kind of want it to look like foggy, and beachy, and windy, and he just knocked it out of the park, like those cool greens, and blues, and everything that he used, I loved it. So this is also a digital part of the process. So that happens in Photoshop, and now we have a program called Clip Studio that a lot of people color in. And then the rest of the process is just something that the book designer at Scholastic works on. They do the design, the layout, they put all the pieces together on the page, assemble the files, and then those files get sent off to the printer. And then cover sketches, I mean, this is pretty important, because this is the first impression of your work that people are going to have. What's going to be on the cover? And I think Scholastic also has really strong design sense, and they know what's going to sell, and what's going to pop off the shelf, and stuff like that, and I'm illustrating those pictures. So I do a bunch of sketches. Sometimes up to 60 sketches of a cover before we pick one that really works, and then I do the illustration, and then Phil, the designer, puts all of the pieces together, the typesetting, and the words, and all of that stuff, and then again, those files get shipped off to Asia, printed there, put onto a boat, and then they put them on the shelf at Politics and Prose, and people get to read them, which is really nice. So holding the finished book in your hands for the first time never gets old. I don't have any kids. I can't say that this is exactly like holding your baby in your arms for the first time, but it's a pretty good feeling.
[laughs]
I can confirm. So I keep doing it. Thank you. That is my slideshow.
[Applause]
Okay, and now is the part where I'm going to open up my other program, and I'm going to draw. So somebody just has to switch the cables up here, and once they do I will draw for you. But I can start out-- there we go, I need a couple of prompts from the audience. So I need an idea for a place and two objects, and ideally, they should not have anything to do with each other. So you with the blonde hair, I saw your hand go up first. So what-- do you have an idea for a place? Yeah? Hmm! The woods, I like that. Okay, now I need two objects that you would never find in the woods. It's very, very important. How about you with the white T-shirt there. Yeah. A pig. Okay, I like pigs, extremely a lot, so we're going to go with a pig in the woods. And then how about you with the pink and black pants in the very front?
[Inaudible]
A unicorn. I mean, pigs and unicorns, you see them together all the time, right? In the woods? Okay, why not. So I'm using a program called Procreate, and I just have to make sure that my settings are visible on the screen, so let's try this. Can you see that? Excellent. Okay. So this is going to sort of imitate what it would be like to have a pencil and paper, and that means I'm just going to do some super quick sketching on my screen, and you know, when I'm doing my comics, it's not unlike what I'm doing right here. I'm just like, sketching in a bunch of cool stuff. Okay. So we've got a pig and a unicorn in the woods. Those are two trees. That represents the woods pretty great, right? So let's see, I've just said I love pigs, but of course, now I'm like, how on earth do you draw a pig? I bet there is somebody in this audience who would draw like, the best pig ever. But I am going to draw my version of a pig, which is a very cartoony pig. Somehow I never learned to draw animals very well. That was always my sister's wheelhouse. She's an animal drawer, and I tried to be, but it just
[laughs]
I'm always much more comfortable drawing people for some reason. Maybe if I knew that animals had this awesome of real facial expressions as people I would draw more animals, but anyway, you know, a unicorn, that's a little trickier, because I don't remember seeing a unicorn before.
[laughs]
It's just like a horse, right? I know, I don't draw horses that often either. Okay, well, it's going to be a pretty dopey looking unicorn. All right, horn, yes, that's how you know it's a unicorn. All right. So those have the same kinds of feet as pigs, right?
[laughs]
In my world, unicorns totally have the same kinds of feet as pigs, too.
[laughs]
Oh no! So bad. Okay. So not much is happening here. So I'm actually going to like, shrink the screen a little bit, and then do some erasing, because I want to add to this scene here. I'm going to-- I usually like, figure out a way to work my character into it, which sounds awfully a lot like centering myself into the conversation, but that's what you do when you're an autobio-cartoonist, so, you get to be the star of the story. So I'm going to put myself here, like reacting to the scene, and got to do that eraser again.
[laughs]
You never know what you're going to get when you do this exercise, like what do you think she should be saying now that she has discovered a pig and a unicorn in the woods? No one is sure. I have an idea. I think they should be throwing her a surprise birthday party.
[laughter]
Oh wait, no, no, no, I'm going to go back, I'm going to have the pig say... oops, surprise! Do, do do-- comics! Happy birthday! I covered up the horn. That's okay. All right, let's put some more trees in there, as Bob Ross would say, happy little trees, just to set the stage, okay, so now I have like, now I have a sketch, and so now, this program is cool, because I can make an extra layer, and I'll call this layer Inks. How do you spell inks? I-N-K-S, okay, cool. And then I'm going to use a different tool for this. I'm going to use a pen tool, and I'm going to make the color black, so that it shows up differently. So change my color to black. And again, this program is called Procreate. And that's a really weird name, but it's
[laughter]
it's a really cool program for sketching. So I want my brush to be more opaque. And this is what I would normally do with like a brush, or a pen, I would start to go over my other drawing and make it look a little bit more refined. So I hope, yeah, you guys can see this okay. And this is a chance to kind of move things around, and if things don't really fit, I can make them bigger or smaller. For the sake of just like, doing a quick sketch on stage. I'm not going as crazy with it, but like, this hand is not the way I would normally draw a hand. I just wanted to get the space down for that hand as quickly as I could before-- oops, I made the opacity really, really low. There we go. Computers are cool, because you can go back and change things. So I'm going to fix this hand to look more like a hand, and less like a weird mitten. People often ask me like, "How did you learn to draw things like hands?" And I'm like, "I practiced." I took a lot of figure drawing classes when I was in high school and some people take figure drawing, which is where you're literally just
Looking at a human being and drawing that. Sometimes they're naked. That part is interesting.
But oops, so here's my cat [laughs]. Sometimes people like, shy away from drawing things like hands and feet, and I always saw it as a challenge. I was like, let me draw the model's hands, or the model's feet, because I think it's one of the more interesting things about drawing people.
So yeah, with this program, you can make things bigger. I'm going to make my lettering look nicer. I might not finish this whole drawing right now, because I think you guys kind of get the idea. I will draw that pig, though. Because I love pigs. Okay, I'll make my word balloon look a little nicer. Do-do-do.
And the nice thing about not working with traditional tools is that you don't spill your ink all over the place. That is something I have done more than once in my life. And I do have cats now. The cats are pretty new. And the cats like to do things like come up onto my desk while I'm working and like, sit on my pages, which is really cute, but I'm like, dude [laughs], I'm trying to work here. And they often put their noses into my inking water [laughs], which is also really adorable, but not good. Like, they don't want to drink their regular water, but if it's inking water that I'm paying attention to, they're all over it.
That totally looks like a pig. Yeah. Okay [laughs]. I'm from the cartooning school where you like, just kind of approximate and like, oh yeah, that's a pig. It's another reason I love comics. I studied a lot of real drawing and, you know, figure drawing to learn how to do things the right way. But once you learn how to do them the right way, then you can start breaking all of your rules, and making it look your own way, so pigs' feet are awesome!
Okay, now I'm just going to kind of sketch those trees back in there. So yeah, so what I can do now is I can go back into my layers and I can turn off that bottom layer, so then it just leaves the ink in the back. So I'm going to draw that in there, because it looks a little weird without it. I'll turn the layer back on, so you can see my sketch underneath. Right? And then you can turn the layer off, when you're ready for the print version, which is just the inks. So that's a little drawing demo for you guys. I hope you enjoyed it. [Applause]
>> And now, my favorite part, which is Q&A! So if you have questions, I'm going to ask that you guys use the two microphones on either side of the stage here. We have two, so you can use two, and I will go back and forth between them. So yes, we are going to start on this side. So you are the first question, hello!
>> Did you ask permission from your siblings to put them in your book?
>> [Laughs] We're getting right to the hard-hitting questions. In fact, I did. My sister was the first person to read the script of Sisters, and I said, do you want me to change anything? Are you comfortable with this? And her response was, "Our little brother is so much more annoying than you made him, so make him way more annoying!" And so that's what I did [laughs]. Now I'll go to this side. Hi!
>> Uh, uh when you-- when you made the book Sisters, was all that true? Like, the whole road trip and the-- you know, those like, childhood flashbacks, with you and your sister?
>> Yeah, they were. The thing that I do with my memoirs sometimes is I will take events that happened over the course of like five years, and I will squish them down into a shorter period of time. I call it compressing the timeline. And that is just because like, it's kind of boring, sometimes.
>> Were you also as crazy for a sister as you were in the book?
>> Absolutely. Yeah, all of the emotions, and feelings in the books are 100% true. Hi!
>> Hi, I do have a relevant question, but I want to give a background. I work with kids in D.C. public schools. Actually, we bring mentors and literacy to kids, and Library of Congress, Hill Staffers and community members come and read with our kids once a week for an hour out of their week. And my question is to you, well, first of all, to thank you for making books relevant for kids that are important topics in their lives, that can really resonate, even with my own daughter and with the kids that we work with. But our challenge is how to get kids to love reading, and how to get them motivated to pick up a book and find it enjoyable, and find that love. So my question is to you, how do you suggest getting kids interested in reading?
>> I mean, I think a lot of kids are intimidated by words on a page. Maybe there's just too many words, and so for those kids, graphic novels really are kind of a perfect gateway, just to getting to love stories. You can also read out loud to kids. You know, like, just share prose, works and poetry and like I said, sometimes reading inspires writing, so getting kids just to share their stories with one another and with the class, you know, is an exercise. I know that sounds like homework, but if you ask the right questions, writing comes naturally to a lot of people. So there are so many ways, and I wish you luck.
>> Thank you, graphic novels are an amazing gift for kids. Thank you.
>> Hi!
>> How did you get your inspiration for your books?
>> Most of my books are inspired by my life, so I've had all these things that have happened to me over the course of my life, and as a writer, I've been able to look back and say, what was the weirdest thing that I experienced in middle school, or how did I feel when this thing happened to me? And I can usually sort of channel those feelings and those memories into stories. Not every memory is good for a story, but I like to draw, and I like to write, and so eventually I just usually settle on something where I'm like, that's worth spending some time on, and yeah, it just kind of comes naturally. Thank you. Hi!
>> Do you have any ideas planned for your next book with original characters, and do you plan to add any more LGBT characters for your future books?
>> The second answer to your question is 100% yes. The first question, I'm working on it. I am in the process of thinking about what my next book is going to be, and it will be a couple of years before I'm ready to announce it, but I'm excited. I love making books.
>> Please take your time--
>> Oh, thanks [laughs]--
>> I can see how much your hand hurts.
>> Oh, thank you.
>> That happens to me all the time.
>> Hand stretches. I've got a little foam roller for my hand, so I'm going to go back to my room and do that. Thank you.
>> I hope to see you again in the future.
>> Likewise, thank you. Hi!
>> When did Guts come out?
>> It hasn't come out yet, so when people say, what's your next book, I still have an answer [laughs], this is like the best part. It comes out on September 17th, so yes, I will be at the Small Press Expo, right before the book comes out, so I won't be back in D.C. this year after the book is published, but it will be at every bookstore when it is.
>> Thank you.
>> You're welcome. Hi!
>> Did you always have the computer program, and if not, what did you use before it?
>> So I'm super old [laughter], and my family didn't have a computer until I was 9 years old, and my sister was 5, and there's actually this anecdote in Sisters, that as soon as my family got a computer, she was like, "Mine!" and just kind of hogged it most of the time, and she figured out how to use the art programs on it right away, and I was like, okay, okay, okay. And I kept drawing on paper, and so I didn't even really start using a computer until I was in college, which again, tells you just how old I am [laughter], yeah. So and before, I mean, I still use the same tools, pen, paper, ink [laughs], markers.
>> Hi!
>> What do you love most about being a cartoonist?
>> Oh my gosh, there's so many things to love about it, and for me, it's sort of satisfies two parts of my personality. I really like working by myself and coming up with ideas, and for me, sitting at my desk and drawing feels like meditation. It feels like breathing deeply, and at the end of the day, even though it's a very long day, I'm usually like, that was so much fun. I listen to podcasts, you know, I get to kind of be in my own world, but then as soon as I've created a book, I get to go out and kind of share the joy of books with other people. So I really like this part, too.
>> Thank you.
>> Hi!
>> Hi, I was wondering when you were writing Smile, did you think it was just going to be one story about your life that you were going to put out, or where you thinking of it as like the first step in many stories about or inspired by your life?
>> I never thought that this was going to be what it is, and as soon as I finished Smile, I was like, "I am never doing that again." But then people kept asking, like, well, what else happened to you in your life? And when are you going to write a sequel, and what, you know, we wanted to know the continuing adventures of Raina. And I'm like, nothing else has ever happened to me. But then on like one of the pages of Smile, there's a single panel that talks about a road trip that my family went on when I was 14, and that whole panel is an entire-- or that one panel is an entire book. So sometimes I just have to look. And it's like looking at your own photo album and going, oh right, that thing that happened. Well, you know, that person was there, and this thing happened, so my brain just works that way. I don't know what my future plans are, as far as memoirs. I feel like 3 is a really good number. I probably have like one or two more stories from my childhood that I really want to tell, so maybe I will.
>> Thank you.
>> You're welcome. Hi!
>> When did Amira start loving snakes so much [laughter]?
>> Her name is pronounced Amara, just in case that's okay to tell you, but she has been obsessed with snakes probably since she was like a toddler, and she always loved animals, but she really loved like the creepy-crawly gross ones, and I was much more interested in like, cats [laughs], hamsters, dogs, and she was like snakes, and spiders, and lizards and stuff. And yeah, she still really likes snakes. And I do not [laughs].
>> Hi!
>> Hi, so we have a shared question.
>> Okay.
>> What's your favorite part about writing books?
>> Hm! I really like when I'm done writing a book and I can-- I can be like, yay! Here's my new book [laughs], but then like five minutes later, people are like, "I finished reading it!" Like I said, I really like the sitting at my desk part. So that means like, coming up with the ideas, and then writing it, and then the drawing, I love the drawing part so much. But that's the part that makes my hand so tired. So, the thing I like to do the most is one of the hardest parts, but I don't know. That's a pretty good life [laughs]. Thanks!
>> Hi!
>> So, when did you decide to write books about, like your life, or yeah--
>> Yeah, I don't feel like I ever really decided. What happened was that when I was a kid, my favorite books were realistic fiction, so they were books about kids who were my age, and had, you know, experiences with their classmates, and their friends. I loved reading realistic fiction, and then when I was like 10, 11 years old, I was drawing comics, I was writing in a diary, and then I started doing those two things together. So I started writing my diary in comics format, and I never showed these to anybody, because it was very personal, and very embarrassing, but I did it from age 11 all the way up until age 25, so that was a lot of years of experience of writing about my life. I never thought that would become my career, but I had a lot of practice at it, so it kind of worked out.
>> Thank you.
>> Hi. Sure!
>> What's your favorite book that you wrote?
>> That's so hard to answer, because I like them all, but... I love them all for different reasons. I think Smile is my most personal book, because I wrote it before I had an editor. And Ghosts is a favorite of mine just because I put so much creativity and feeling into it. But I also really like Guts, because it is, again, so personal. And I feel like people are really getting to know me, the person, when they read Guts. So I hope you guys will read it when it comes out [chuckles]. Hi.
>> Hi, when you stepped on a snake, why were you so scared? Because it was dead.
>> It was so gross! That's why. I was wearing sandals. I had the same shoes on that you're wearing right now, so it was like-- it wiggled. It was like, on a rock. It just like, shuddered under my foot. And I was also in the middle of a blackberry patch, so like, I stepped on the snake, and I was like, "Ah!" I ran away, I had to run through the blackberry patch, so I got all scraped up. It was just not a good day. My heart was racing really fast, and everybody laughed at me afterwards. Also, I went blackberry picking like a couple of weeks ago, and I was wearing sandals that day too and I never learn. And I got a giant scrape on the back of my foot, so yeah, I don't know.
>> When you recently went blackberry picking, if you already stepped on a dead snake in sandals, why did you choose to wear sandals again?
>> You are so much wiser than me, and if you'd been there to warn me of this, I would have known better. And as it was happening, I was like, "Seriously, Raina?" It was like, this is really-- [laughs], yeah, I don't like snakes, but I love blackberries, so [laughs] that's how I'll answer that one. Hi!
>> How did you get the inspiration to write, like, figure out the titles?
>> So Smile came to me because it was the actual opposite of how I felt in that story. The last thing I wanted to do was smile when I had braces, and when my teeth had been knocked out, but it's also something that happens in our culture, that we're often told, like, "Smile. You don't look happy." And like, "You should smile more." And sometimes you just don't feel like smiling. So after that, my editors were, "One-word titles. That's your thing." And so now they kind of helped me come up with them sometimes. Sometimes my editors help out. They really wanted the title of Drama to be Drama. I wanted it to be called like, Callie's Stage Group Chronicles, or something like that, and they were like, "No. Drama." Really? Okay. And then ever since then, I've just accepted it. Guts was also extremely obvious to me, when I was working on that story. It just, it's like, it just existed. That's when you know you're onto something, when it just feels so, so right. So it's really tough though, like, coming up with that many one-word titles [laughs]. We can do a couple more. We have a few more minutes. So, hi!
>> What was your main inspiration for Drama?
>> It was inspired by my high school theater days. So I spent a lot of time backstage, playing like [chuckles] secondary roles in my school plays. Like, I would get the program and it would be like, "Aristocrat #7, Raina Telgemeier" [laughs], "hobo number three, Raina Telgemeier." Child, that was like often what I was cast as, because I was very short [laughs]. Yeah, so I spent a lot of time backstage just observing my friends, and seeing the dynamics between what was happening on stage, backstage, off stage, and it was fascinating to me. And years later, I was like, I really miss those days, and my friends, and so I kind of wrote the book as an ode to all of that.
>> Thank you.
>> Hi.
>> Are you ever going to do a book about other people in the stories?
>> Like the secondary characters?
>> Yeah.
>> I don't want to say no. Is there a character you'd like to see a graphic novel about?
>> No, it's like-- not really, I just want to--
>> [Laughs] Okay--
>> No [laughter].
>> I don't have plans for one at the moment, but if I get enough fan letters that want me to write a graphic novel all about Jesse, maybe I will. Yeah, maybe [laughs]. Hi!
>> Hello. My sister Justice and I are big fans, but we really were wondering which book of yours took the longest to make?
>> Smile took five years to make, from start to finish. Part of that is because it used to be a web comic, which means that I was publishing one page per week, and I was just putting it up on a website, and so people could read the story as I was working on it, and then eventually, four years in, I got a contract from Scholastic, and I finished the second half of the book in nine months. But start to finish, five years. The second longest was Guts. Which took me almost three. Drama took two and a half. Ghosts took two and a half. Yeah, they take-- they take a little over two years a piece. But the Babysitter's Club books I did in a year a piece, because I wasn't doing the writing, I was just doing the art. So it's-- yeah [laughs].
>> Okay, thank you.
>> You're welcome. Can we do two more questions? One from this side, and one from that side? Hi--
>> What advice do you have for like drawing?
>> For drawing? Like how to get better at drawing?
>> Yeah.
>> I mean, just keep doing it. And also look. Like, look at photographs, look at real people. Look at landscapes. Look at other art. Look at things that you like, and then try and capture what you see. Practice, I don't know if it makes perfect, but it makes art. So you've made a lot of art by the time you've been practicing.
>> Thank you.
>> And then we're going to do the last one on this side.
>> Hello.
>> Hi!
>> So I enjoy writing and stuff, but once I get deeper into the book, or like, I don't really write a whole book, but like, it sort of gets boring after a while. Like, so how do you sort of fight off that boredom?
>> That's a tough question, because I think we all suffer from some degree of like writer's block, or artist's block. I don't usually start a story until I know it's a story that I want to tell. So I will often do like a complete outline of a story, and say, this is the beginning, the middle, and the ending. So I know where I'm going with that story. So when I'm in the middle, and I'm kind of slumping, and going, oh, gosh, the actual work, to make this story is a lot. And it's tough. And I need some inspiration. But if I can see where I'm going, it's easier, and that's-- it's part of the reason why I say like, start small. Start writing a short story. Write just one moment. One interaction between two characters, and then say that it's done. And then write a second story. So there is all sorts of ways to watch out for burnout, and one of them is just to walk away sometimes, and say, you know what? I'm going to take a break. I'm going to go like, take a walk outside, or go swimming, or like, play with my dog, or whatever, then just come back to the drawing board, or the writing board, or whatever you'd like to call it, feeling a little fresher and ready to tackle the next page.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you! I think that's it. Thank you all so, so much! [Applause]