Interview with Alex Norris, winner of the ALCS Educational Writers’ Award

On Winning the Educational Writers’ Award

“Yeah, it felt amazing. I really wasn’t expecting to win, so I was just thrilled. I feel like the book really connected with the people I made it for. Usually my work resonates with other artists or creatives, which is great, but with How to Love I was trying to reach outside that bubble. I wanted to write something that could affect people’s lives in a meaningful way. So knowing that young people got something important from it really mattered to me.”

On Getting Started in Comics and Illustration

“I grew up in Swansea, Wales, and I didn’t know any artists or writers growing up. No one in my family or community did anything like that. I was really into The Beano, that was my entry into comics. For a long time, that was pretty much all I read. It wasn’t until much later that I got into books outside of that. I studied English Literature at University but stayed connected to comics, partly because they’re not very literary or pretentious. There’s a pop culture aspect I’ve always liked.

I started making comics for the student newspaper, which was great because no one else was doing anything like that, so I didn’t have anyone to compare myself to. Eventually, I put them online, and the internet helped me find an audience. I didn’t feel part of the ‘art world,’ but online I could connect with people.”

On Creating How to Love

“How to Love started on Webtoon, the Korean comics app. I was one of the first English-language creators there. I’d only been making comics online for about a year, and they invited me to do a series, which was just amazing. I wanted to do something new that really used the format well. The app has a great comment section, and a lot of the audience was young people reading about love and romance. However, I think many of these stories don’t prepare people emotionally for real relationships at all. Real life is often messier, uglier, more painful and more weird.

Originally, How to Love was going to be a parody of love advice. That’s kind of my default, starting with parody. I think it was partly a defence mechanism, because I didn’t feel like I had anything real to say. But also I just love parody. It’s often how I start, and then I make it more sincere later. The comment section played a big role in that. People would say things like, ‘Can you do a chapter on this?’ and I’d realise that what I thought was a throwaway joke actually resonated with their real experiences. These people were crying out for real advice.

I wanted the book to be accessible. Funny, yes, but also something people could really take away and use. A lot of love advice is hyper-specific and salacious, like reading Reddit threads of extreme situations. I wanted to offer something more foundational, things that help build a strong foundation that the reader is able to apply to whatever specific situation they find themselves in.

The comics are quite symbolic and metaphorical, which makes them abstract enough to apply to lots of people’s lives. Rather than say, ‘Here’s what you should do in this exact situation,’ I wanted to create something that the reader could interpret and apply to their own life. It’s a bit like a parable. That also helped with the pressure. I wasn’t dictating answers, I was offering a perspective.”

On Feeling the Pressure to Get It Right

“Yeah, I definitely felt pressure. This is advice for teenagers, and bad advice can actually be harmful. But I felt ready for it. I’d been doing this a while and felt confident in my voice and ideas. I didn’t set out to put forward ideas that are completely new. I wasn’t so much in giving “hot takes”. If that’s your priority, it’s harder to put your audience first. Most of the ideas in the book are quite foundational, because I think a lot of young people, and frankly adults too, need to hear these basic ideas. I was more interested in telling these universal ideas in a new or unusual way. For example, “Love yourself before you love someone else”, we’ve all heard that, but what does it actually mean? I wanted to say it in a way that actually goes into your brain, and doesn’t just being a lot of noise.

On Researching for the Book

“In a way, I’ve been researching this book my whole adult life. I just love talking about relationships and feelings. When I started the Webtoon series, it gave me an excuse to talk to my friends about their relationships, even the ones who normally wouldn’t open up unless it was for ‘research.’

When I sat down to write the actual book, I deliberately didn’t read much other love advice. I had a few key influences going in, one big one was Life Isn’t Binary by Meg-John Barker, which really helped me question binaries and think differently about relationships. But once I started writing, I knew what I wanted to say, and I stayed away from other books because I didn’t want it get muddied by other people’s ideas.”

On Giving Advice to Different Audiences

“I think with a book like this, the reason I was able to write it was because I was being emotionally honest, rather than just writing what I thought was right. These are things I live by. Everything in the book is stuff I actually do, and advice I give to people. Sometimes in real life I give advice I wouldn’t personally follow, because people have different priorities and principles. But in this book, it’s my view. Anyone who knows me, especially if they’ve dated me, would recognise that.

There were a few things I wanted to include that I hadn’t thought much about before. One was loneliness. Early on, I knew I needed to write a chapter on it, but I had no idea what to say. That’s one I really had to read up on. Another one I struggle with is how to advise someone who’s really shy—because I’m not. A lot of advice is like, ‘Just put yourself out there,’ but that can feel awful if you’re shy. So I tried to offer alternatives, like meeting people through hobbies or friendships, stuff that’s more doable, especially in a teenage context.

There are definitely things I haven’t experienced that I still wanted to give advice on. When I was writing, I’d often read the comics in my head as different people, a teenager, a divorcee, a shy person, a queer person, a straight person. I’d also try to read it as my teenage self, which is really hard because I’ve changed so much.

I would have loved to do dedicated chapters for different kinds of people – teenagers, older people, people my age. But publishing-wise, that gets tricky. They want to know where to shelve the book. Personally, I love making books where that question is unanswerable.”

On Copyright and Intellectual Property

“My experience with the intellectual property lawsuit… it sucked. One of the big things that sucked was just how confusing it all was. I’d made this thing, I was just happily making my work and thinking, ‘I own this because I made it.’ Nobody else can make it because I make it. That’s how I saw it.

But other people were looking at it in a totally different way, as this thing that could be bought, sold, transferred, owned by someone else. And that was really jarring. Business people, lawyers, they see art completely differently to how I see it. That was so confusing to me to me as an artist. And I’ve had to spend so much time fighting for something that, to me, is really simple: I made this.

Before this happened, I never gave any of that a second thought. I’m now a big advocate for the rights of authors and creators, especially people like me, who are vulnerable to others looking at their work and thinking, ‘I could own that,’ just because they know how to navigate the legal system.

Unfortunately, all the classic advice is true: get someone to read your contracts. I’d heard that before, and I didn’t do it, because I thought, ‘Well, I made it, so it’s fine.’ But I’ve since learned it’s a lot more complicated than that.”