Writ­ing advice is an inter­est­ing­ly com­pli­cat­ed thing for me, because it’s…uh, inter­est­ing and com­pli­cat­ed, haha. *sigh* The act of writ­ing has a whole lot of lay­ers, you know? It’s a cre­ative art, and cre­at­ing art can be real­ly fun and absorb­ing. Cre­at­ing art is also work, though, and work­ing on a project can be tir­ing and frus­trat­ing. How­ev­er, the most com­pli­cat­ed and most inter­est­ing thing about writ­ing is how deeply per­son­al it can be, and how much of our own thoughts, feel­ings, and expe­ri­ences we invest in the work.

Per­haps you’re think­ing “no way dude, I just read a book about a fart­ing fer­ret who’s best friends with a talk­ing pota­to mash­er and it did NOT show me the mean­ing of life,” and okay, sure, not all books have the same type or depth of per­son­al mean­ing, but I kid you not when I say the embar­rass­ment that fer­ret felt when it fart­ed in front of its pota­to-mash­ing bestie is a true reflec­tion of life right here on this plan­et Earth.

Advice about writ­ing is com­pli­cat­ed because in the strange and gar­bled depths of my own mind, it’s not all that sep­a­rate from advice about life, and life is com­pli­cat­ed. It’s a worm­hole of com­pli­ca­tion, a com­pli­cat­ed snake eat­ing its com­pli­cat­ed self from its com­pli­cat­ed tail to its com­pli­cat­ed head! Ugh, that’s ter­ri­ble — sor­ry — but it kind of proves my point, am I right?

My life has been com­pli­cat­ed in recent years, but that’s noth­ing new; my life was also com­pli­cat­ed when I was an itty-bit­ty whip­per­snap­per of a human. Being a kid was hard in many ways; being a teenag­er was even hard­er. I was deeply, ter­ri­bly lone­ly, I always felt total­ly dif­fer­ent from every­one else in a bad way, and I was con­vinced I was hat­ed by the world and every­one in it. And now that I’m writ­ing this essay, I real­ize I’m writ­ing for a spe­cif­ic audience.

I hope that every bud­ding young writer who reads this can find some­thing mean­ing­ful in it, but the kids I’m think­ing about the most are the ones who are strug­gling like I did. The young peo­ple whose lives are com­pli­cat­ed because of exclu­sion and iso­la­tion. If that’s you, I’m so sor­ry. I know how hard that strug­gle is, and I can hon­est­ly say from per­son­al expe­ri­ence that it can get bet­ter — a lot bet­ter, even — but it’s not easy to believe it in the moment.

So now you might be think­ing “OMG, Mike, first you talk about gassy pole­cats and sen­tient kitchen tools but then you start talk­ing about crush­ing lone­li­ness and it’s super depress­ing, what is your DEAL,” and okay, yes, that’s a valid reac­tion, but bear with me, I’m actu­al­ly get­ting to the point, seriously.

When I was in that time of my life — alone, ter­ri­fied, with no idea how to make things bet­ter — I found com­fort in escapism. Yes, escap­ing real­i­ty can be tak­en too far, but it was absolute­ly essen­tial for me, and one of my impor­tant ways to escape was by read­ing com­ic books. My old­er broth­er col­lect­ed them, and I was reeeeaaal­ly not sup­posed to open up the very long card­board box­es he kept in the base­ment clos­et, take the comics out of their plas­tic sleeves and read the val­ue out of them, but of course I did, because being a lone­ly out­cast didn’t stop me from being a dis­re­spect­ful younger broth­er too.

All of my brother’s com­ic books were pub­lished by either DC or Mar­vel, long before either of them had cin­e­mat­ic uni­vers­es. I read them all, and I def­i­nite­ly had favorites — The Uncan­ny X‑Men with its Dark Phoenix Saga, the epic Cri­sis on Infi­nite Earths series, the leg­endary 18-issue first run of The Sil­ver Surfer — but one of my pre­ferred series was the rel­a­tive­ly over­looked Legion of Super-Heroes. This group of supes includ­ed char­ac­ters like Braini­ac 5, Trip­li­cate Girl, Bounc­ing Boy, and the young bro I’m here to dis­cuss, the one and only Mat­ter-Eater Lad.