***
My tweener grandsons and I arrived at
Saturday’s North Texas Teen
Book Festival nine minutes after the starting time for the keynote
speech by Dav Pilkey, author of the
world famous (at least in the world of middle grade readers) Captain
Underpants series and more. Nine minutes. No problem, I told the boys, who
had only been persuaded to attend on the promise of breathing the same air as
their hero’s author. Pilkey was due to repeat his speech the next hour. I
informed the cheery greeter that we were here to see Dav Pilkey.
And she said, oh, all the tickets are
gone.
Gone? Fifty-one minutes before Pilkey’s second speech of the day, and
there were no more tickets? If guys serious about getting a head start on their
teenage attitude could cry, the boys would have.
 |
| Dav Pilkey at NTTBF |
Let’s wait and see if there’s room, I said. Even if all the seats are
filled, there’s plenty of standing room. Isn’t that breaking the rules? the
boys said. Won’t we be thrown out? In front of everybody?
Five minutes before H-hour, we arrived back in the auditorium. There
were. . . seats available. Not many. And some people were standing in the back.
But without yet knowing it, we had exercised one of Dav Pilkey’s three required
“P’s” of successful writing—persistence.
It was a trait developed during a school career marked by diagnoses of ADHD
and dyslexia, which made a future as a successful writer seem, to say the
least, unlikely.
“Because I was such a failure at school,
I concentrated on something I was good at—drawing,” he told his audience at the
book festival.
Drawing comic strips of
superheroes (an early character, Dogman, acquired super powers after being
struck by lightning), he stapled the sheets of drawings and (often) misspelled
captions into books that gave him popularity with fellow students.
Teachers were less
enthralled. “You can’t spend the rest of your life making silly books,” one
told him—a statement that evoked hoots of laughter from his middle grade
listeners.
However, he credits that
teacher with an important contribution to his writing life, although perhaps
one she wouldn’t appreciate. “One day in second grade, she said the word underwear,
and every kid in class laughed.”
Insisting that underwear was
not a funny topic, young Pilkey's teacher put him in timeout, which he spent
devising the first version of his iconic Captain Underpants character. And kept
drawing silly characters because, “If you want to be really good at something
you have to practice.”
He even developed an
appreciation for reading, “it gives us new ideas.” (A school reading of A
Tale of Two Cities was later reimagined as A Tale of Two Kitties.)
“Who likes to write and
draw?” he asked. (Hands shot up.)
“Do you ever get blocked?”
(Hands up again.)
When that happens to him,
Pilkey said, he likes to play, another of his “P” words. (Yes, Captain
Underpants’ creator loves “P” words as much as his characters do.)
“And there’s another
important ‘P’—persistence.”
(“Wow,” I told my guys, “we
didn’t break the rules. We persisted!”)
Persistence, Pilkey said, is
what kept him going after more than 20 publishers rejected his first “grownup”
manuscript. “I was just devasted and I didn’t know what to do. Except send it
out again. If I had given up, I wouldn’t be here today.”
Practice, play, persist.
Lessons for writing. And maybe, for life.
Oh, yeah, in case you’re
wondering, Pilkey keeps persisting, with a new book out this summer starring
that original childhood hero, Dogman in (wait for it) Lord of the Fleas!
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