Interview Hope Larson

Hope Larson is one of the most talented people making comics today. She is also a former resident of North Carolina. Hope has mostly worked in the graphic novel format with a few short stories here and there. Hope is part of a growing trend of cartoonists who are making work for a primarily young adult audience. She recently announced that she would be adapting Madeleine L'Engle's classic children's novel A Wrinkle in Time. I interviewed her on subjects related to writing.

Her website is www.hopelarson.com

Comics Connections: Would you mind talking a little bit about yourself and the comics work that you've done?

HOPE LARSON: I've been drawing comics more or less full time since mid-2004. I have two books with smaller comics publishers, Salamander Dream (AdHouse Books; out of print) and Gray Horses (Oni Press), and two books with Simon & Schuster's Atheneum Books for Young Readers, Chiggers and Mercury. I'm working on a comic adaptation of Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, for Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and another original comic for Atheneum. The original book will be my first comic drawn by someone else, artist Tintin Pantoja, and hopefully my first series!

Comics Connections: What kind of process do you go through when you write a story for comics? Do you use a full script, thumbnails, etc?

LARSON: My process varies with each book, but I always start with a complete script. My scripts look a lot like screenplays. Once the story's locked in, I draw the book out in thumbnail form, either on index cards or on regular printer paper.

CC: What writing has influenced your own writing, both in and outside of comics?

LARSON: Manga, television, film and young adult novels are my biggest influences. Everything I come into contact with influences me in some way.

CC: Your stories feature young women in stories geared toward a young adult audience. What motivated you to write for this audience and how does this influence you writing? How much of these stories comes out of your own life and your own experiences?

LARSON: Writing for and about young adults is just comfortable for me. I remember very clearly what it was like to be that age, and rather than drawing upon my own experiences, when I write I draw upon how it felt to be a teenager.

CC: How important is it for a cartoonist, or any writer in general, to use life experiences as the basis for the writing in their stories regardless of genre?

LARSON: Unimportant. That's what research is for!

CC: You mention research which I think brings up an interesting point. How easy is it to become a slave to your research (ie "If the story isn't fitting the research, I have to rewrite everything") and how hard is it to use your research to go in your own direction? What sort of things do you take to make sure your research is serving your story rather your story being entirely guided by your research?

LARSON: I tend to research until I can write the story, then stop. Or until I feel I've exhausted all the avenues I can realistically explore in search of material. You can never know the whole truth of anything, and I'm a fiction writer; ultimately anything I write is going to be a big sack of lies. I don't envy investigative reporters or people who write historical non-fiction!

CC: I've read about writers having conversations with their characters in their heads so I have two questions to ask about that. First, do you have conversations with your characters and two, how important is this in the process of both creating the character and writing the story?

LARSON: I don't have conversations with my characters. It had never occurred to me to try that. Typically, my characters come to life gradually, as I build the events of the story and figure out how they'd react to the situations I put them in. My characters often start out a bit flat, and I flesh them out more as I revise.

CC: You're currently writing a story for another artist and you've written a story for your husband, artist Bryan Lee O'Malley. What's the process of writing for someone like and what things do you try to consider for the other artist when you're writing for someone else?

LARSON: It's a lot easier to write for another artist! I have to be more specific in my writing than I would if I was drawing the book or story myself. And I have to know exactly what I want before the artist starts drawing, so I can correct them if they do something wrong or answer any questions they have about the characters or the story.

I'm definitely a collaborator, so seeing someone else's take on one of my stories and building on that can be a stimulating experience.

CC: You've worked mostly in Graphic Novels but I also know that you've done some shorter comics pieces for anthologies. What considerations do you make when composing shorter stories versus the kinds that you would when you're making longer ones? What things do you do that you would apply to doing both?

LARSON: I don't particularly enjoy writing short stories, and I don't think I've ever done a piece for an anthology that I don't end up hating. I've written a few shorter pieces that I like, but they come about naturally. I despise writing on someone else's theme.

Short stories are a lot more work per page than longer ones, and they don't afford me the room to do the sort of play I enjoy as a cartoonist.

CC: Your current project is adapting Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. What kind of process has it been creating an adaptation of a book from a writing perspective? Are there things that you've picked up as a writer that maybe you hadn't considered or things you realized that you're not doing in your own writing?

LARSON: A Wrinkle in Time is an old-fashioned book—it came out in the 1960s—and one of the things I've become most aware of while doing the adaptation is how much middle grade/young adult literature has changed over the years. I've approached the story as a period piece. It was a simpler time, etc.

The other thing I think about is how many people are going to be angry about this book when it comes out. The way I imagined it, the way I've chosen to draw the characters, the environments—those things can never match up to the pictures in the heads of people who love the original book. It's quite freeing, actually. I can't please everyone, so why try?