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Up in the Air:
The Story of the Wright Brothers
Interview with Brian Floca
Brian Floca, the illustrator of Breakfast Serials´ novel The Secret School and author and illustrator of UP IN THEAIR: The Story of the Wright Brothers, smartly identified an interesting aspect of newspaper serialization. He said, “A well-designed, well-printed and well-bound book is one of the most beautiful and lasting objects one can own. On the other hand, a newspaper, with its dense, space-conscious columns and its thin paper, looks and feels inexpensive from the minute you pick it up. But because there´s so much to learn and enjoy in a good paper, affordability elevates rather than lowers its worth.”Brian Floca is also the author and illustrator of three picture books: DINOSAURS AT THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, FIVE TRUCKS, and THE FRIGHTFUL STORY OF HARRY WALFISH. Among the other books he has illustrated are Avi´s four “Tales From Dimwood Forest” novels, which include POPPY, a winner of the Boston Glove/Horn Book Award. A native of Texas, Brian Floca currently lives in New York City.
1. What aspects of the Wright Brothers´ lives fascinate you the most?
The first is their nerve. Not just the nerve to climb into potentially dangerous, experimental machines, but the nerve to think that they could do what no one else had ever done, that they could do what so many people had declared impossible. The second is their genius. They found their way through problems that had stumped everyone who had ever tried to tackle them. The third thing that fascinates me is how resolute the brothers were. There were moments in Wilbur´s and Orville´s work that fit our idea of a light bulb going off over someone´s head, and there were moments when they doubted that they would solve a problem. But mostly this story is about steady, diligent work. The brothers were extraordinarily methodical, rational, and persistent. They worked steadfastly on all the small parts of this gigantic problem, and then stitched all their small solutions together.
2. Was there anything that surprised you as you researched the Wright Brothers?
The brothers did their own work, to be sure, and yet there was a way in which, once they got interested in flight, they became part of an international effort. I hadn´t expected that, but if you look at the brothers´ papers, you see them following very closely experiments that were going on elsewhere in the United States, in Germany, in France, and elsewhere. And the European experimenters kept as close an eye on the Wrights´ work as they could.
By writing hundreds of letters, by passing articles back and forth, and by visiting each other, all these men interested in flying machines built a sort of fraternity that crossed continents and oceans. They built their own chat room, ninety years before the Internet.
3. As writer and illustrator of Up in the Air: The Story of the Wright Brothers, it would seem you may use a different approach than someone who is just writing or just illustrating a story. As you go along, do you leave text out that you can illustrate? Do you write things you can´t illustrate? How does that work?
The text and images do slightly different amounts of work in this story, depending on the chapter. There are things that the Wright brothers did that are easier to visualize than to put down in words, so there are chapters where the images go a long way in clarifying the text. And pictures are more immediate than text, so there are some moments, like the experience of riding a glider, that take a while to convey with words but that you can get across immediately with a picture.
4. When you write, do you visualize what is happening? When you draw, do you hear the words?
I do visualize the events that I write about, and then try to capture that with words. I don´t hear text when I draw, though. Drawing comes much more intuitively to me than writing; for me, drawing isn´t related to the part of the brain that orders things into words and sentences.
I´m much more likely to get a sketch right on the first try than a paragraph. But then again, I think there are very few people who get their paragraphs right on the first try. The key to most good writing is a lot of rewriting.
5. Perhaps you have flown in an airplane since you embarked on this project. Do you feel any different about the experience now?
The mechanics of a modern plane are of course incredibly different from those of the Wright´s gliders and Flyers. But the underlying ideas about how to control the machines are the same. So when you´re in a plane, you´re in some ways in the Wrights´ ideas. It´s a peculiarly direct connection to make with a person. And now that I´ve spent so much time thinking about Wilbur and Orville, I have to say that I find making that connection to be a strangely moving experience. No pun intended.
6. What aspects of writing historical fiction interests you the most?
Historical fiction can remind us of something that Wilbur Wright wrote to his friend Octave Chanute, after Wilbur and Orville had invented the airplane: “If the wheels of time could be turned back... it is not at all probable that we would do again what we have done... The fact that lightning strikes once in some particular spot is no evidence that it will strike there again soon.”
In other words, historical fiction reminds us that people we read about in text books weren´t just going through the motions on their way to endings that were already worked out. They, like us, didn´t know what was coming. Like us, sometimes they didn´t know when they were getting things right and when they were making mistakes. It reminds us that nothing had to happen the way that it did.
7. You have illustrated the works of other writers. How different is it to illustrate your own text?
Mainly, I don´t have to worry about what the author will think.
Serial Story: UP IN THE AIR -- The 18-part serial story ran in the Daytona Beach News-Journal each Monday from January 13 through May 19 (except for April 14). Text and illustrations for the serial copyright © 2003 by Brian Floca. Sponsored in part by Inventing Flight, Dayton, Ohio. Reprinted by permission of Breakfast Serials, Inc. www.breakfastserials.com.
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