Liz Argall

I spent the afternoon at a school talking to super smart 4th graders about comics and art and stories. They asked really good questions and had terrific imaginations.

It was a lot of fun.

If you came here looking for advice on how to look cool in primary school (for boys or girls)… well chances are you probably are already cool, even if your classmates or other people around you don’t see it… or maybe see it but aren’t very good at telling you they see it… or they might even tell you, but it’s hard to notice because negative stuff can hurt so much.

The classroom I visited was full of kids I think were cool. Quiet shy kids trying to figure out how to say stuff that meant a lot to them are cool, loud boisterous kids all over the place are cool, musical kids, athletic kids, writing kids, drawing kids, thinking kids, scared kids. Every kid in that classroom was cool and if I have one regret it’s that I didn’t get to spend more time with each of them. There wasn’t time to get to know each unique person.

It’s easy to worry about fitting in, or feeling not seen, or seen in the wrong way. There’s no magical formula to being cool. I wasn’t cool in primary school, but I did work hard at being the best possible me I could be and find my own way. People seem to think I’m cool now and it’s a little confusing.

1) Say nice things to yourself. Amy Poehler has some good advice, for girls or boys (she has lots of other good advice too).

2) Know lots of people worry about things, lose sleep, cry, feel alone, and it’s ok to talk about it.  This read pretty true for me, it might read pretty true for you.

3) If you get a website address and put http://cat. at the beginning and .meowbify.com/ all the images on that website will turn into animated giffs of kittens. That’s pretty cool.

Here’s an example, this is my web comic website: http://www.thingswithout.com/

This is my web comic website meowbified http://cat.www.thingswithout.com.meowbify.com/

4) Learning circus skills can be fun, look cool (even if people don’t appreciate it now, people will appreciate it later) and learning to juggle can be difficult and frustrating, but good for your brain. I haven’t learned how to juggle, but I can twirl sticks and play spoons. I remember a cool kid at my school who could balance things on his nose. Find the circus skills that work for you. There are classes or you can teach yourself.

5) Also, hexaflexagons are cool.

I’ve recently taken to drawing during readings. I find it helps me stay alert and remember the key moments of the story. The drawings don’t have to be good, I just have to do them.

Drawing on the iPad has been freeing, it creates less mess, the smooth texture of stylus on glass is less distracting pencil or pen and there’s a sense of infinite canvas within a constrained ratio. I don’t feel like I’m wasting paper if I do a bad drawing or get bored and want to move on. I just make the layer I was drawing on invisible and create a fresh new layer to draw on.

Sometimes I find pleasing juxtapositions between the layers and merge me after the reading, making a new work that is the synthesis of several authors and stories.

During dinner on Saturday night I spent about half an hour trying to write a poem about the Tick, in response to a spontaneous challenge (dinner was full of superhero poetry). The Tick is such a profound entity that I ended up creating a visual poem. It was fun to generate a series of icons that tried to express some of the Tick’s square chinned surrealism. It’s possible that drawing might turn up somewhere, but it might not.

My favorite doodle of the convention was drawn during Jo Walton’s guest of honor speech. 

I love Jo’s elliptical talks of synthesis. Caring about characters, tools and tricks and not tricks, because who wants to manipulate the reader, what an effective manipulation!

Her talks are a process and a conversation that illuminate complimentary and contradictory facets of this wonderful world of writing.