Hi there, I'm Jason Gautz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

On an earlier episode of this show, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk said something that I've never forgotten.

He said that writing programs shouldn't teach about plots or characters or how to structure a story. Instead, they should teach writers to manage their own psychology, like to be the captains of their own creative ship

across the bumpy waters of emotion and energy and hope and despair.

This kind of self-management, he suggested, is the main difference between people who keep making art and people who don't.

My guest today is Jessica Abel. She's an accomplished artist herself, a graphic novelist who

did a kind of graphic docu novel called Out on the Wire about how some of the greatest radio shows

and podcasts are made, including Snap Judgment, Radio Lab, and This American Life.

In the course of figuring out how to steer her own creativeship, she's also put a lot of thought into how to help others do the same.

Her most recent book, Growing Gills, offers creatives a step-by-step process for figuring out what they want to make and how to balance that with the rest of

their lives. Welcome to think again, Jessica. Thanks a lot. First of all, did you want to be a

cartoonist in high school? It took me a while to figure out that I wanted to be a cartoonist. I didn't

collect comics myself until I was in high school and had my own job and could buy them myself.

Right. Whenever somebody would give me one, I would be really excited about it and just rip through it, but it wasn't the kind of thing you could check out from the library at the time. And then I got a job as a cashier in a hardware store and got money. And around the corner from the hardware store was a big convenience store called The White Hen Pantry, and they had actually an enormous rack of comics, regular comics.

And this is in the mid-late 80s, which is also a really pivotal moment in the development of comics as in a dull medium, Frank Miller's run of Daredevil, you know, various kinds of things that are now

thought of as being benchmarks of quality and superhero comics.

Right.

I'm not currently that interested in superhero comics, but I did read them at the time,

and I definitely was lucky to find some really good ones.

There were no female artists that I was aware of in that first wave.

Who did I miss?

There were very few.

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