Trung Lê Nguyễn: Hello, my name is Trung Lê Nguyễn, and I am the author and illustrator of The Magic Fish. This is my debut graphic novel. I originally did not know that this was going to be a graphic novel. I had envisioned all of the different interweaving stories as separate projects, and I started working on them shortly after college. I started drawing different iterations of Cinderella, and I was really fascinated with the Vietnamese version that my parents had told me when I was younger. So, I did as much research as I could, and I started doing a little bit of visual development here and there while I was working at my day job. When I pitched the story to Random House Graphic, it felt more cohesive to be able to pull all of these narratives together. I discovered that there were common themes that I was fascinated by, and I wanted to pull everything together into one unified narrative.

I am someone who considers myself to be a very visual storyteller, and so my writing process was very undeveloped at the beginning. Much of my challenge was just very basic writer things. I needed to figure out what to include and what to edit out as far as the narrative strokes of things. And then, there was the additional challenge of what are the things that I like to draw that I can convey visually so that I don't have to bog things down too much with walls and walls of text because it's a graphic novel after all. So, a lot of it was just trying to figure out, first of all, how to write and find my writer's voice, and then also learn how to integrate that with my natural visual storytelling inclinations.

I did not actually look at other graphic novels as sources, but I love looking at children's books, especially very old ones, and I just kept collecting children's books all the way through the decades: Books from the 1910s, all the way up until about the '70s and '80s. And so, much of the visual sources for my book are beloved children's books that are really lushly illustrated.

I can do my best to describe some of my favorite drawings. I think one of the wonderful and challenging things about doing a graphic novel is that sometimes there are things that you can do on the page that you just can't do in film and you can't do in prose writing. One of the Cinderella stories has a transformation sequence, where the character opens up a jar, and outside of it comes these large reams of billowing fabric that wrap around her and magically transform into a really elaborate gown that she can wear to the ball. I had so much fun drawing that particular page because it cues to my visual sensibilities really nicely.

I'm not a comic book artist who likes to use a lot of action lines. I don't tend to draw your traditional comic book iconography or orthography, so I had to find different ways to convey movement and to convey rhythm. I like to do that with texture and with hair and with fabrics, and so it was a really great opportunity for me to visually play with all of the things that I really love to do in an image.

I think the broadest thing that I want people to take away, especially kids, is that there's no wrong way to read a story. Everybody has a lot of different experiences that they take with them, and that informs their relationship with whatever it is that they're reading. And so, there are probably a ton of interpretations of my story that other people might have when they read it that I may never have thought of, and it could be this really wonderful new dimension. And I think that's a really wonderful thing.