So Share Your Smile is my newest book that’s just come out. It came out in April, and it’s a collection of story starters and idea builders. And so there’s a lot of little prompts to have kids ask themselves questions, and then jot down their answers. And that’s what I always encouraged in the workshops that I did with kids was don’t over think it. Like, tell me a story about the time you — whatever. And then like, you get like, one minute to write it down. So no thought, just action and writing, and then what you get out of that is then like, “Okay, I have like two sentences that I wrote.”
Let’s think about those sentences. Let’s think about what’s really crunchy about them, and what’s sticky, and what we can pull from them. And so key words, or evocative images that you have in your mind. And I can’t give this workshop or this talk to every kid, but I do get a lot of email from kids asking me like, “Where do I begin, and how do I start making comics, and how can I become a graphic novelist?” And this is my own process, you know.
This is how I start telling stories is I look at old photographs, or I think about my seventh grade math teacher, Mr. Theodis, you know, he was a character. And so let’s you come up with just little bits of business from your life. I think it’s a good place to start spinning. So there is room for kids to write. There’s room for kids to draw. There’s room for kids to paste in photos. And they’re different sections of the book based on the books that I’ve done. So Smile talks about, you know, your experiences, your feelings.
Sisters talks about your family. Drama talks about school. So we’ve kind of seen this pattern that kids are really curious about certain things, and so Share Your Smile is supposed to kind of channel them all into one kind of guidebook. And it is kind of a one kid, one book experience. It’s not like a graphic novel where you can pass it around to everybody because it’s supposed to be where you personally write down what you wanna do.