New Year’s countdown of 2018 reader favs: day 5

What lessons does a writer of goofy middle-grade level graphic novels have to teach us about life? Dav Pilkey, author of that grade-school classic, Captain Underpants, tells all in this post originally published April 24, 2018.

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 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!

Dav Pilkey and the three ‘P’s for successful writing

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.

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.

Pilkey (l) at North Texas Teen Book Fest

“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!

Adventure classics -- An ape and a gentleman

Is there a more perfect modern myth than Tarzan of the Apes?  Modern, at least, as in ninety-nine years old this year – Edgar Rice Burroughs’s masterwork was first published in magazine format in 1912.  The writer was born in 1875 and after enduring health problems and a series of low-paying jobs, tried his hand at fiction without having any illusions about his skill as an author.  He recalled later that “although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read. . . .”

My sister and I devoured Tarzan books during what would now be termed our years as middle grade readers.  All I remembered was the adventure, so that when I started to read one to my then middle grade daughter, I was shocked by how awful the writing was.  Not only were the books filled with the overwhelming bigotry and racism of their era, but Burroughs also seemed to have fallen under the spell of the deliberately archaic language that “good bad writer” Rudyard Kipling used in writing about children, indigenous people and animals.  Fortunately, excellence in writing isn’t needed for the art of myth making.

“The critical problem with which we are confronted is whether this art – the art of myth-making, is a species of the literary art,” C.S. Lewis wrote as editor of nineteenth-century fantasy writer George MacDonald’s works.  “. . . myth does not essentially exist in words at all (and) can coexist with great inferiority in the art of words.”

Perhaps it was because he only aimed to tell an entertaining tale, without worrying about literary excellence or burdening himself with excessive knowledge of his equatorial African setting that Burroughs attained such purity as a transmitter of myth.  The myth of the lost child who grew up to be Lord Greystoke but, still more wonderfully, king of the apes.  In that mythic realm, Burroughs has few rivals.

(The copyright of Tarzan of the Apes has expired in the United States, so I hope not to go to jail for reproducing its dust-jacket illustration here.  Does anybody dare share memories of books they once loved that they have to bowlderize now for family reading?)