One of the first things I remember is getting in trouble for taking a fistful of crayons and just drawing all over the walls and I think those crayon marks were there until I probably got back from college. So when did I first want to be a writer, I don’t know.
I loved comic books growing up and I think I really learned to draw by really copying comic books and I think… you know, I think that that’s the best training that there is, taking something that you like and copying it, whether it’s for art or for stories and then as you do that you can begin to add your own things to it and eventually it’ll become your own.
I think my encouragement to be able to write and to draw definitely came from my mom and my grandmother, I actually never knew my grandfather. But for them they knew that… they knew that this was… that writing and drawing could be a career and a very fulfilling career.
So they were really able to help me in that direction. I think I was lucky that throughout my school years, especially when I was young, I had teachers who really encouraged me, especially with the writing. That was really my favorite thing, creative writing.
And I think the best thing that you can do is to encourage and also not just to encourage things to be right or wrong, but just pure encouragement. I remember being… I remember writing a story in second or third grade or whatever, however old I was and I used the verb “to muck” in it.
I grew up actually on a horse farm and we used to muck out the stalls. And “muck” to me was as real a word as you could possibly have and the teacher said that, marked it wrong and said “muck” was not a word. And I remember taking that kind of hard and being a little bit, you know, I don’t know if it was mortified by it, but now thinking back on it, I don’t think there should be anything wrong with somebody inventing a word.
I think that that’s really a wonderful thing. So I think that the best kind of encouragement is really the purest form of encouragement to have somebody go their own way.
