Self publish and do small zines before committing to an enormous graphic novel. For me, my schedule is different every day.Īre there any tips you could give aspiring writers who are looking to get published? You're often at your monitor or your drafting table and your task is to finish a page or work out a pose. Comics is a profession characterized by what I like to call joyful toil.

I might write for two months and then draw for six or seven. The drawing-the pencils and inking and coloring-demands the most work by far and that happens in entirely different parts of a year. This writing process is intermingled with thumbnailing, so I'm usually writing and drawing at the same time. I always print out my scripts because reading and revising on a monitor is very distracting. The process of writing and revising and editing happens in cafes or in my studio. Where do you write? How do you organize your time? Where do you look for inspiration? Also Hank the Cowdog might have been my first interaction with satire.ĭescribe your writing day. The Roald Dahl books with the lovely Quentin Blake covers offered the necessary whimsy and world-building that drew me in. An author either had to string me along with jokes or reveal a breath-taking world that I could get lost in. My classmates growing up had longer attention spans and larger appetites for prose than I did, so a book truly had to be glittery and silly to grab me. In middle school, I drew my first comics on wide-ruled notebook paper with mechanical and colored pencils.Ĭan you remember the first book that made an impact on you? Who were your childhood storytelling heroes?

Coming up with sentences and paragraphs is very difficult for me, so I had to use pictures to tell my first stories.

Check, Please! Book 1 by Ngozi Ukazu