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Creative Common / The Writers' Block
« on: 21 November, 2014, 09:26:25 AM »
Writing (much like illustrating and lettering, I suppose) is a lonely job. It is also a frustrating and often confusing job. When artwork or lettering aren't working it's fairly obvious to see why - the foreshortening on that arm isn't right or that lettering needs more kerning - but when your script isn't working the reasons are not always quite so obvious. That's why I thought I'd start this thread so that we can discuss the mechanics of our craft, look under the hood of our stories and know what needs fixing and how to fix it.
.
It's not my intention to start a "here's my idea for a story/character/setting, what do you think?" kind of thread but a "I can't figure out how to get my protagonist to situation X without violating condition Y, any ideas?" kind of thread, although I suppose there's room for both if that's what you want.
.
Anyway, to kick off I'm going to describe a couple of useful ideas from John Truby's screenwriting course (which I highly recommend) that have helped me in my endeavours.
.
Like most writers, at first I fell into the trap of thinking that writing was easy. I retained myriad unnecessarily oblique words in my memory and was capable of constructing unnecessarily lengthy, grammatically reckless yet still ultimately readable, if somewhat convoluted, sentences with relative ease and occasionally, flair and so I set to writing. I got an idea than just started writing - after all, I'd read plenty of comics an I've learned the format, so I'm all set, right? Wrong. I'd get a third of the way in then hit a wall. The story was going nowhere, the characters were going nowhere and the idea was going nowhere. Yet another beautifully written but abandoned script.
.
What I hadn't figured out then but know now is that writing may be easy, which it is because virtually everyone can do it, but *storytelling* is hard - possibly the hardest job in the world; as difficult as quantum theory or five dimensional geometry. The storyteller has to take an idea, or a collection of ideas, and present them in one of the recognised story forms and/or genres. Audiences instinctively, and subconsciously, know that stories have different shapes and different beats and if any of those shapes or beats are missing the audience senses it. Your story doesn't work for them but they can't tell you exactly why.
.
Story shapes and genres are an important tool for writers to know about because it can give you a useful shorthand, a framework of things you don't have to explain that sets the scene or mood for the audience immediately, allowing you to concentrate more on the story You want to tell within your chosen vehicle. For example, your audience will expect different things from the comedy and tragedy story types and different things again from the gangster genre or the western genre. Part of our job as storytellers is to give the audience what it expects, but in a unique way, and *more*. What's the *more*? I have no idea - if you ever figure out a formula for producing it, please let me know!
.
The point is that I didn't plan my stories. As soon as I started doing that I had my first success ("The War of the Worlds" in FutureQuake # 15), although my plans at first amounted to little more than a page breakdown with each page containing vague story beats. Nevertheless, planning meant that I finished every script I started because, if something wasn't working, I caught it in the planning stage instead of hitting it head-on in another soon-to-be-abandoned script.
.
My next major success (and I hope you don't mind using my own work as illustrations - it's really the only work I feel entitled to criticise) was "Flesh: Extinction" a 3 book, 4 episodes per book monster of a story which ran in Zarjaz (issues 10, 14 and 17). Some of the initial planning in this story worked quite well - for example the "traitor" exposed in the last episode of Book II is clearly visible doing the deal on page one of episode one of part one. I was proud of this little detail until I realised that I'd just used it as a trick to tie the story together and that it was nothing more than a happy side-effect of planning and nothing to do with my genius as a storyteller at all.
.
The rest of that "epic" holds together fairly well, though, but still relied heavily upon instinct at the script writing stage and had a plan that was too shallow. The image in the final panel on the penultimate page of the very last episode was supposed to make a powerful statement about humanity, and I thought it was a very clever panel, but because I put it in on instinct and at the last moment there was no foreshadowing or "ground work" for the image and so it failed - and that's not the artist's fault, it's mine.
.
So, to me at least, planning is the most important part of the mechanics of writing - you can't build a suspension bridge without a blueprint and you can't write a story without a plan. But where do you start with a plan?
.
In the next post, I'll waffle on a bit about some of the factors that go into my planning - moral need, desire and the ghost.
.
It's not my intention to start a "here's my idea for a story/character/setting, what do you think?" kind of thread but a "I can't figure out how to get my protagonist to situation X without violating condition Y, any ideas?" kind of thread, although I suppose there's room for both if that's what you want.
.
Anyway, to kick off I'm going to describe a couple of useful ideas from John Truby's screenwriting course (which I highly recommend) that have helped me in my endeavours.
.
Like most writers, at first I fell into the trap of thinking that writing was easy. I retained myriad unnecessarily oblique words in my memory and was capable of constructing unnecessarily lengthy, grammatically reckless yet still ultimately readable, if somewhat convoluted, sentences with relative ease and occasionally, flair and so I set to writing. I got an idea than just started writing - after all, I'd read plenty of comics an I've learned the format, so I'm all set, right? Wrong. I'd get a third of the way in then hit a wall. The story was going nowhere, the characters were going nowhere and the idea was going nowhere. Yet another beautifully written but abandoned script.
.
What I hadn't figured out then but know now is that writing may be easy, which it is because virtually everyone can do it, but *storytelling* is hard - possibly the hardest job in the world; as difficult as quantum theory or five dimensional geometry. The storyteller has to take an idea, or a collection of ideas, and present them in one of the recognised story forms and/or genres. Audiences instinctively, and subconsciously, know that stories have different shapes and different beats and if any of those shapes or beats are missing the audience senses it. Your story doesn't work for them but they can't tell you exactly why.
.
Story shapes and genres are an important tool for writers to know about because it can give you a useful shorthand, a framework of things you don't have to explain that sets the scene or mood for the audience immediately, allowing you to concentrate more on the story You want to tell within your chosen vehicle. For example, your audience will expect different things from the comedy and tragedy story types and different things again from the gangster genre or the western genre. Part of our job as storytellers is to give the audience what it expects, but in a unique way, and *more*. What's the *more*? I have no idea - if you ever figure out a formula for producing it, please let me know!
.
The point is that I didn't plan my stories. As soon as I started doing that I had my first success ("The War of the Worlds" in FutureQuake # 15), although my plans at first amounted to little more than a page breakdown with each page containing vague story beats. Nevertheless, planning meant that I finished every script I started because, if something wasn't working, I caught it in the planning stage instead of hitting it head-on in another soon-to-be-abandoned script.
.
My next major success (and I hope you don't mind using my own work as illustrations - it's really the only work I feel entitled to criticise) was "Flesh: Extinction" a 3 book, 4 episodes per book monster of a story which ran in Zarjaz (issues 10, 14 and 17). Some of the initial planning in this story worked quite well - for example the "traitor" exposed in the last episode of Book II is clearly visible doing the deal on page one of episode one of part one. I was proud of this little detail until I realised that I'd just used it as a trick to tie the story together and that it was nothing more than a happy side-effect of planning and nothing to do with my genius as a storyteller at all.
.
The rest of that "epic" holds together fairly well, though, but still relied heavily upon instinct at the script writing stage and had a plan that was too shallow. The image in the final panel on the penultimate page of the very last episode was supposed to make a powerful statement about humanity, and I thought it was a very clever panel, but because I put it in on instinct and at the last moment there was no foreshadowing or "ground work" for the image and so it failed - and that's not the artist's fault, it's mine.
.
So, to me at least, planning is the most important part of the mechanics of writing - you can't build a suspension bridge without a blueprint and you can't write a story without a plan. But where do you start with a plan?
.
In the next post, I'll waffle on a bit about some of the factors that go into my planning - moral need, desire and the ghost.
