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Audio Journal: Want to Learn Something? Reverse Engineer It. · The Daily Writer

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: My son Ben is 16 years old and he's a junior in high school this year.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, just a few years ago, he was in middle school, and if you remember what your middle school years were like, they probably were not super pleasant.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Most people in middle school experience a time of it's a high level of stress.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you're dealing with bullies.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's a time of change in many ways, physically, emotionally, mentally, um, socially.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that was certainly true for my son Ben.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I would say middle school was generally not that great of an experience for him.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: He was dealing with a bully who was a major pain in the neck.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um he was a pain in other places too, but this is a clean podcast, so I'm just gonna say this this kid was a pain in the neck, and he was just dealing with a lot of other stuff as well.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: So one day I just was trying to rack my brain thinking, what can I do to make middle school at least a little more pleasant?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: What's something I could do every day that would encourage him or that would be fun or at least make him laugh?
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the very least I could do was give him something that would make him laugh at lunchtime.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so I came up with this crazy harebrained idea of drawing a comic strip for him.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: So starting in middle school, I decided to draw a comic strip that's called Lunchbox Comics, and that of course comics is spelled with an X, Lunchbox Comics, because this was a comic strip that went into his lunchbox three times a week.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was difficult to do five days a week because they're kind of time consuming, but I decided to do three days a week, and for the most part, I've kept that up ever since he was in seventh grade.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: So over the last few years I've drawn hundreds of these comic strips uh for my son Ben.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now here's the thing with drawing a comic strip, I had no idea what I was doing.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: I legitimately didn't, and I'm a terrible artist.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like I can barely even draw a square, much less draw a comic strip that made any sense at all.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: But because I was really motivated to do this and to brighten my son's day, what I did was I thought, well, other people have learned to do this, so why can't I learn to do it on at least a very rudimentary level?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I got some some of my Peanuts comic strip books.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um I've got part of that collection that uh the publisher Fantagraphics released a number of years ago.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: We've got a bunch of those.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I just got my Peanuts comic strips uh down from my shelf, and I started to also look up Garfield comic strips and a couple others, and I started to study how to actually write a comic strip.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now I wasn't worried about the drawing because these drawings are literally stick figures.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Stick figures are the only thing I can draw.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I was set, these are going to be very, very simple, you know, characters.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I began to study how to actually draw or how to actually write a comic strip.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I tried to reverse engineer the process and I studied how does how does a comic strip, like Garfield or Peanuts, how do they set up the story?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: How do they pay it off with a punchline at the end?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: What happens in the middle?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now the interesting thing is that Garfield is a three-panel strip, Peanuts is a four-panel strip, except for the Sundays, which you know, those are longer.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so I decided to do a three-panel comic strip just for the sake of simplicity and also because I thought it would be a little bit more challenging.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm happy to say that I've made a lot of progress over the last few years.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, once my son graduates from high school, I may publish these in a book.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the drawing is absolutely horrendous, but that's not the point.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: The point is doing something that is fun and doing something where you can learn and something that brightens up at least one person's day.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the whole point of the story that I'm telling you is this is that there's a lot of value in learning to write in a format and a medium that you haven't done before.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you've written nonfiction books, maybe try a fiction book or a short story.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe try writing a screenplay.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe try um you know, writing nonfiction.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: If you've only written fiction, maybe try a comic strip.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's an endless number of things that you can write.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: But I would just challenge you to figure out something that you want to write and study it what it is that you want to write and then dissect it, disassemble it, reverse engineer it.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Look at the component parts and see how something is built, see how a story is built, see how a nonfiction book is built, see how a chapter is built in a book, see how a novel is built.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's all kinds of resources for learning how to do all those kinds of things.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: But the point of it is figure out what you want to do and just know that you can disassemble something and you can reverse engineer it.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: You can learn how it's put together.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's how I learned to write a comic strip for my kid, and if there's something you want to learn, you can absolutely do it too.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it doesn't mean I'm ever going to get paid for writing comic strips.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's highly unlikely.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: But it does mean that I've learned to do it at a level where at least it doesn't totally stink.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Occasionally, they're actually pretty funny.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And even when they're not funny, they're funny because they're not funny, if you know what I mean.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: They're funny because they're so bad.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: But hey, I've accomplished my goal of making my kid laugh at lunch at school, and that is all the praise that I need.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's all the reward that I need.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, what is it that you want to learn?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And how can you deconstruct it?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: How can you reverse engineer it so you can do it at a basic level?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're lucky and if you work hard enough at it, maybe you can even make something of it uh down the road.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: All right, that is this episode.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry it was a little bit of a long one, and I will see you in the next one.