Kaisa Leino is the diligent and skillful editor-in-chief of Better Than Sliced Bread, the English students’ webzine, and a comic artist majoring in English philology. She shared with us her advice on being a writer and shed some light on her creative process.
What got you interested in being a writer?
I guess a lot of the favorite books from my childhood had several cool characters who wrote, whom I admired, such as Emily of New Moon, Jo from Little Women and Moominpappa from Moomin series and they inspired me to write. Also, my parents read to me all the time, so it was a logical step for me to start writing.How have your years in Better Than Sliced Bread developed your writing?
It’s easier to tackle new genres these days. I guess since writing for BTSB has become a routine, I have gotten more courage to try my wings with stuff I might not be that familiar with, such as women’s ice hockey.Can you tell a bit about what goes into being the editor-in-chief for an online magazine?
For me, the job has two sides. The first is all the practical stuff from planning and organizing the staff meetings to keeping the DLs in mind, helping editors with articles and delegating with web-wizards and social media representatives. But then there’s the other side, which I think all editors-in-chief hope that they would have more time to do: Inspiring people, brainstorming with them and keeping the big picture in mind. Sometimes it’s good to stop and think about our purpose, what we aim to be and if we’re going towards that. I’m incredibly lucky in a sense that our current editors are a creative and active bunch who have a yearning to write. They’re a very easy group to boss around (don’t print that, they’re going to kill me)!What are the biggest challenges in guiding and being in charge of other writers?
Often people have this desire to write and create, but they sometimes don’t have a concrete idea of what they want to write about. Sometimes that can be a hard situation, other people can just give you ideas but in that situation you have to be ready to write about almost anything. That doesn’t work for all writers. Even though I don’t feel like our editors need that much guidance, it would still be awesome to sit down with them more and just talk about their creative process, but since I’m doing this while studying and working, I often don’t have the time.You also do comics: as a creative process, how does drawing comics differ from writing?
That’s a very good question. In many ways they are similar and with both of them, I try to follow one simple rule I have heard somewhere: Being creative isn’t anything, creating is everything. This means to me that, of course, some people are born with abilities to create music, draw or write poems, but none of the artists or authors I admire got where they are without the hard work of actually CREATING something, sitting down and putting their ideas on paper. Then again, they’re also different: writing is something I can easily see myself doing professionally, but I’ve always tried to keep drawing as a creative outlet, something that I don’t need to “perform.” I love comic blogging: the form can be quite relaxed, but still you feel awfully proud when you get an update up there!During the summer you worked in Alaska and got to teach a comic drawing course there. How did you feel about that experience?How many times can you use the term “awesome” here? My course participants were a wonderful group of people. Most of them thought they were total noobies about comics when they came to the workshop, but soon they started realizing that they know more about comics than they thought they did. Most people do read comics, like Calvin and Hobbes, so it was easy to start building their knowledge from examples like that. I held lectures about comics as an art form, informational comics (such as autobiofictionalographical comics [google it] and comic journalism) and Finnish comics. We also had homework and in-class drawing activities and at the end of the course, we held an exhibition of our works. You can still see our participants’ art in our blog: http://workshop2014.tumblr.com But yeah. Teaching comics is something I definitely want to do again at some point.Do you have any advice for the budding writers out there?
Well, I’m repeating myself here, but: Forget about being creative, just create/write. And remember that there are a lot of places that you can offer your articles to, but don’t sell yourself short: If you think your article is cool, try offering it to magazines that actually pay you. Now I’m giving you conflicting advices, but I think it’s also important to remember that writing can be a wonderful outlet for your thoughts and it’s ok too to just keep them to yourself. And without being overly critical, don’t be completely satisfied with what you create: in a lot of things, you get better with time and if you can accept that, you’re on a good road.
You can check out Kaisa’s comic blog here: http://seekittygo.tumblr.com and BTSB here: http://betterthanslicedbread.info