Craft of Writing There are two kinds of shy person. One kind—the writer—stands at a distance, observing everyone else in the room. I’m the other kind of shy person, the kind who stands at a distance, examining a rock, and then jumps out of her skin when someone talks to her.
It’s not that I’m uninterested in people. It’s that to me, rocks people, as are all inanimate things, and drawings, which are my specialty. And people are not.
They’re too changeable, too erratic to ever see clearly enough. Besides, they can see you, too. Even though I shouldn’t be a writer, I am a writer.
It started when I was twelve. I was lonely. Rocks had suddenly stopped keeping me company.
I was ready to give people a chance—I just didn’t know how to talk to anyone. Instead, I found books. I carried ten or twelve of them with me wherever I went, and read bits of them constantly.
I wrote at night, in bed. I filled journals. Afterwards, I threw them out, to get rid of any trace of myself.
Because I knew I was a little weird. As inevitably happens, when I was fifteen, an odd boy I had an odd relationship with—the first of many odd boys I had odd relationships with—introduced me to Indie comics. At the time, comics didn’t feel like a different medium, just a different style of writing.
Note that this was 2004: most books seemed to be by ill-adjusted, horny men. Comics were no different. This was fine by me (this was, as I said, 2004, and the way things were was the way things w.