Avi’s 2024 Summer Blog Series
Pedro Martín
From Avi: As I did in the summer of 2023 and the summer of 2022, I’ve invited 13 admired middle grade authors to write for my blog for the next three months. I hope you’ll tune in each Tuesday to see who has answered these two questions we’re frequently asked by readers. You should have a list of terrific books to read and share by the end of the summer … along with new authors to follow!
Where did you get your idea for a specific book of yours?
I’m glad you asked! I usually don’t get this question organically.
Mostly kids like to ask things like: “How much do you make?” And “How old are you?”
“Not as much as you think!” And “Way older than you’d think?!”
After their disappointment and confusion dies down, I usually pivot into talking about where Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir came from.
I come from a huge family. Eleven, plus my grandfather. So whenever we would get together to trade stories, there were usually twelve sides to every story. Over the years I would take mental notes of my favorite retellings of each of those stories and store them in a corner of my mind palace.
When I got older, I went to work at Hallmark Greetings as an artist. The job was fun, but I got bored easily. And often. I decided to use all that excellent boredom-time to write and draw cartoon versions of all those family stories on 3X5 cards and toss them into an old Batman lunchbox (the storage shed of my mind palace). When I retired, some twenty-seven years later, I found that lunchbox while I was unpacking my office and decided to revisit those childhood memories.
After about two years of rewriting and redrawing my stories for my web series “Mexikid Stories,” I decided I wanted to tell a bigger story! One that I couldn’t tell in a simple web series. One about a trip to Mexico that featured my entire family. So I decided to try to write and illustrate a graphic memoir. It only took a few years, but it flew by.
I’m kidding, it took forever.
If you had one piece of advice to give to a young would-be writer, what would it be?
Don’t write a graphic memoir! That’s my thing. Stay in your lane, kid!
No, I’m kidding. I just think that. I don’t say it out loud … anymore.
There are a couple of things I like to tell kids. One: Don’t be surprised when a story you’re in the middle of writing decides to change course. That’s a good thing. That means you’re learning more about your characters and by extension yourself. Writing takes a surprising amount of introspection (which I usually don’t condone, cuz yuck “feelings.”) If you follow the flow of the story, it will reveal a lot of interesting themes and subject matter that you didn’t think about when you started your journey.
It’s totally worth it. Enjoy the ride!
Two: Be authentic. Your experiences and feelings are what make your story unique. Leaning into that authenticity makes your characters even more interesting. Their dialogue will sound real, and their faults will feel relatable. And even if your experience is way different than your readers’, there are universal truths to be had if you come from a place of honesty.
Particulars
Pedro Martín
Former Hallmark artist for 27 years and the creator of Asteroid Andy, Pedro is the author and illustrator of Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir from Dial Penguin.
Pedro also chronicles his life growing up Mexican American online in a series called Mexikid Stories (@Mexikidstories, Instagram, Facebook and Gocomics.com)