Don’t Make Me Write This!
You might know me as a comic. For the last 23 years, my career as an author/illustrator has been about writing funny books and making kids, and their adults, laugh. My mantra was “simple fun content for kids.” My images depicted comical, cute characters doing goofy things. An editor once called me “The Master of the Googly Eye.” Making humorous books was a joy (and still is) but I knew all along that my comedy was coming from a place of pain. Humor was my way of coping with serious emotions left over from my childhood—memories and scars that were sad, sometimes rage-filled and, of course, difficult to manage.
(Writing Memoir Scenes That Work.)
At the source of this energy was the painful moments of my childhood. Every time I made room in my schedule to work on journaling, or diving back into memories as I researched what would become this book, I came out of it with an enlightenment that transferred to all my other work and gave it life. I tried turning these memories and energy into a comic strip, then an adult novel, then an animated series, then a picture book.
Nothing fit.
I couldn’t find the format that would encapsulate the story I wanted to tell, and in reality I wasn’t even sure what story there WAS to tell. At that point in time, it was just a giant amalgamation of memories that was hard to curate.
In 2018, I was in NYC and had a one-on-one lunch with Christy Ottaviano, my amazing editor, who had edited and published a picture book series I created.
Normally, when I have a one-on-one, conversations get a little deeper than they do when there are more people around. Stories are shared about family, kids, friends, and loved ones. It can get intimate and emotional, and sometimes, hopes, dreams, and even fears get revealed. My goal was to grow out of my ruminations and put them into a story. Unfortunately, that same goal was also my biggest fear. Since college, I had been journaling and trying to get to the good stuff, way down deep. It was a scary place.
With Christy, we talked about my parents’ divorce and my dad’s drinking and smoking. I told her how we moved to a new home every few years.
Christy saw the reflection in my eyes as I talked and held back tears, and she struck while the iron was hot.
“You need to put that into a book.” she said, like it was obvious.
I shook my head and looked down at my lunch, “I’ve tried.”
“Well, you need to try again. There is something here.”
And of course, I immediately panicked inside.
Then my defenses went up and I cursed a bit and said that I did NOT want to go there. I pictured how hard and exhausting it would be to dip into that well again.
“Just think about it,” said Christy.
When my sons were born in 2002 and 2003, respectively, images and words about my childhood started appearing in my journal. As I struggled with what to do with it, I was pulled back in time, trying to relive the moments of pain (and joy too) that had been repressed for so many years.
Now that Christy had pushed me to put this story into a book, I could not say no. But I was resistant, too.
“Don’t make me write this!” came out of my mouth, and “I hate you, Christy.” (She knew I didn’t really hate her.)
“Just think about it,” she said again, with a warm smile on her face.
So I went home and thought about it, as I stomped on the floor and screamed into a pillow. Then, when I calmed down, I thought about it some more. Then after some more swearing, growling, and procrastinating (which extended over a period of weeks) I pushed away all of life’s distractions and started writing longhand into my red, spiral bound Walgreens notebook.
Anger came out at first, just a lot of venting and aggressive writing, the kind where your pen pokes through the paper. I would write for five minutes or less, then get up and pace around my studio, then sit back down again. After a few more minutes, I would stand up and roam around the room, trying to write and pace at the same time, but that didn’t work. I even tried dictating the story into a voice memo app on my phone. It kind of worked, but not really.
It was this madness that drove me to flop down in my office chair and draft an email to Christy, letting her know that I was dropping out. But like a gust of wind, my wife blew down the stairs and said “You’re writing this book.” Then blew back upstairs.
So…I wrote the book.
I started waking up an hour earlier than I normally do, to give the book some quality time.
As the days passed and my eyes and pen and paper merged together as one instrument, the words became more fluid. Tears became fluid, too and as I wiped them away every 30 seconds to regain my focus, I noticed that the story’s flow became smoother. Swimming around in this story was exhausting, so I continued with my goal of writing for no more than one hour a day. Word after word, hour after hour, morning after morning, the more I wrote, the less I wanted to cry. The more things became clear about what I wanted to say and how the plot would play out, my ruminations were no longer just a ball of anxiety and energy—they transformed into an organized story.
There was one hiccup in the process.
In June of 2021, my wife and I, as recent empty nesters, moved from Florida to Colorado with a whittled down collection of our belongings, which included my about-to-die laptop. That laptop had all of my writing in it and one day…it went kaput.
For a moment I sighed and let my spirits panic.
But because of the deadline, my commitment to Christy, and the brief scolding from my wife, I immediately started over…
writing by hand…
from memory…
word after word…
hour after hour…
morning after morning.
It’s funny, when you tap into a story that is so honest and raw, it just is what it is. The words flowed out just the same as the first time, only this time, it was better. It was more spontaneous, authentic, and pure.
Christy and I spent months working on the voice, refining Benny’s words, and doing line edits to give him more depth of character. We worked hard to make him troubled, yet likable, and we pushed to create a character and narrative that was both vulnerable and powerful.
And that’s what the story became—an honest, powerful story about my life as a kid, told from the perspective of a 10-year-old version of me. It contains childhood worries and stresses, the unknown future of my family after my parent’s divorce, memories of my father’s death from cancer, and my kiss to his forehead as he lay motionless in the funeral home. It also includes the more recent loss of my brother-in-law to brain cancer and watching him being removed from the house in a body bag.
The Death and Life of Benny Brooks became my vehicle to express all of these difficult experiences that had built up in my mind for all of those years. That’s why it’s called “Sort of a Memoir.” It’s sort of my life as it was lived, but not always in chronological order.
The book turned out 100 times better than I ever imagined and it made me believe that all the things that happen to us, good and bad, have value. I had to write this book, not because Christy or my wife made me do it. I had to do it for myself. My need to outgrow my childhood traumas was greater than my need to hang on to them, and writing this book forced me to let them go. The hole left in my heart from those experiences feels like it has been filled in with hope and love. I feel like I can now truly be myself.
Check out Ethan Long’s The Death and Life of Benny Brooks: Sort of a Memoir here:
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