Art Journal 031: The Cutting Room Floor

Whenever we start telling a story we have thousands of ideas in our heads we want to fit into the narrative.  We often think up tons of details and little side-stories we want to include in our comics, and we only think up more as we push forward in our work.  It’s a natural part of the creative process, but if left unchecked it can derail a good narrative with needless meandering. This week I’d like to write about editing, or specifically on the process of cutting ideas to keep your story lean and focused, and what to do with the scraps you’ve snipped.

Before we know what is and isn’t a good idea to include in our stories, let’s first look at what makes a good story in the first place.  A good story is an efficient story.  In terms of people-stories, it focuses on a central subject or group of characters moving towards some ultimate end, and all of the things that happen on-camera ultimately feed towards that end.  The things people read have meaning to the narrative, even if they’re not directly related to the central subject of the story.  As far as a webcomic goes, I like to measure progress in terms of pages- there can be incidental background details, character or world-building elements within a page, but by the time the reader hits the end of the page the story should have taken a step forward towards relevant ends, otherwise that page was unnecessary.  In this way every page turn meaningfully pushes the story forward, and gives everything that happens in that page an overarching purpose.  That’s the core of what makes a good inclusion to a story.

With this in mind, it goes without saying that things which don’t push the story forward are best left on the floor, and to illustrate the point I will share an embarrassing confession.  In my early days of making this comic, like early to mid 2007, I had an idea for a comic-relief zombie.  Just this incidental zombie who had a mishap- where the other zombies’ mentality has reduced to the very base compulsion to eat, this one had the base compulsion to bang its bad parts into stationary objects or whatever else. I was going to give him a seedy track suit to help him stand out from the crowd, and he’d be a recurring thing.  The me of 2007 thought this would be funny, but I also learned there was no way to put this into a comic without it being some idiotic tangent, and I learned a whole bunch of incredibly important lessons that day.  I’m mentioning this old idea because it’s a pretty bold example of something that belongs on the floor- it didn’t have anything to do with the story, it didn’t build towards anything and it was just stupid, so it was discarded.

While I quickly abandoned the idea of some functionally-different zombie showing up throughout the comic I didn’t entirely abandon the idea of a notable recurring zombie showing up here and there.  A bad idea or an idea that doesn’t work doesn’t have to stay on the floor, you can scrape the gunk off it and salvage it, and this is how I did it:  I took the idea of a marked, notable zombie and reworked the theme of it to fit into the actual story, and then I weaved it into the narrative as a replacement for an otherwise generic zombie.  Specifically, this became the zombie on page 127 who became the permanent recipient of Lou’s plunger.  A plunger-face zombie was more iconic and less stupid than the previous idea, it became a natural consequence of the story-valuable moment of “recover the van” and set Lou up to have a free loop on his belt for a power drill later on.  The plunger zombie becomes a recurring thing again on page 249, as a medium for a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey joke in an intermission page, and he comes back again on page 471, alongside the Muppet-nosed zombie stuck in the ladder from when Lizzie broke into the Omnimart on page 282.  So in the long run I got the stupid recurring dudes I wanted, but I was smart enough to make them distinct in a way that was a product of the story and included them in a way that did not disrupt the narrative.  An idea that doesn’t work isn’t lost, you can still adapt!

Sometimes a comic idea isn’t necessarily a bad one, but it makes an awkward fit with the narrative momentum of your story.  Sometimes you want to include a scene or a moment that would be relevant to the story, but to get there you’d have to break the rhythm of the flow of events you’d already set in motion, so its not a good idea to ramrod this other seemingly-usable idea into the middle of your story.  Momentum is very important to consider, and if something doesn’t feel like a natural next-step then it would be wise to snip that idea and figure out another place to put it into the story, and if you don’t find a place for it? It might not have been that important an idea to begin with.  An example from my own work involves the introduction of Tombstone: I wanted to establish a whole lot of stuff in this town and I needed to pick the right order, and one of those things was a medical center.  The original idea was when Pat rode Liz and Alice into town and the old lady greeting committee coddled them up and took them inside we’d be introduced to the medical staff of Tombstone for a checkup- it’d make sense, making sure a newcomer to town isn’t bringing disease in with them. But it was more important to establish the political arm of Tombstone with the Deputy Mayor and, importantly, I wanted page 500 to be in Liz and Alice’s new apartment so I could drop the Cuddle Reunion Scene on an animation page, so the med visit simply wouldn’t fit.  It’s not a lost idea, though, since Alice is very obviously going to be working in that very center, I can ride the momentum of the story and introduce it when I bring Alice into her job.  In this case I’m cutting a scene out of a script to work it in a little further down the line, when momentum calls for it.

Another sort of idea which could do with special editorial attention are any ideas which would make lasting, permanent changes to the storyline.  A very important thing to remember, particularly in the page-at-a-time medium of webcomics, is that once something is done, it’s incredibly hard to retcon out of, so it’s good to approach major changes in the same way you would approach getting a tattoo- know that what goes in is never coming out.  In terms of my own work, this issue came up fairly often with character deaths.  Every time a character dies, I make triple-sure that it is the appropriate time in the story for that to happen, and I don’t lose any future potential with the death of that character.  Frank didn’t die with the pipe to his face because he’s cooking on the backburner to make one more appearance when he was all but forgotten about.  Arlen died because his usefulness was over, and he punctuated the end of that era of the comic (and the bulletholes he cut in Lizzie and Alice’s ears are another lasting mark of the end of that chapter as well).  Assistant Manager Ron died to cement the relationships between the remaining Omnimart employees, and his girlfriend Chloe did not die because she might still be useful in the future.  These deaths were considered and weighed based on the usefulness those characters might potentially have to the story in the future, and when their death can act as an emotional underscore- and not an arbitrary occurrence-  then they die.

Both Alice and Lou, on the other hand, have been under consideration for a death scene at different points in the comic. Alice’s original introduction, as I may have mentioned in another article, was originally not meant to extend beyond the safehouse, but when I was writing her she became such a good friend to Lizzie that her tremendous value as a companion outweighed the emotional sting of her departure, so Lizzie went back and pulled her out of the fire- this opened the way for Alice to pull Lizzie out of the fire as well in the future!  Lou, on the other hand, represents a different set of considerations.  He admittedly hasn’t had as much character development as his friends, but he’s beloved by readers and he has real in-story utility as someone who knows how to repair and jury-rig things.  There was an idea that he would be a casualty of the Omnimart arc, being bit by the surprise zombie Melody ends up shooting and making the return of the remaining three to the apartment all the more somber.  That story element- the loss that came with being kicked out of the apartment- was weighty enough on its own that a main-character losing his life would not have contributed meaningfully to it.  I’m glad I didn’t drop the axe on either of these characters because they ended up making a really good group dynamic once the story got rolling (I’m also very glad I didn’t commit to a Lou or Alice death scene because four main characters makes a great four-player videogame).  This policy of massive consideration also goes to other permanent matters, like the aforementioned ear notches as a minor example or major scarring, psychological or physical incapacitation which would permanently (or at least long-term) alter the way in which a character could function within the story. The first example of this was Lizzie’s cracked rib from her car accident; at the time I wasn’t sure how bad it should be, and if it would impair her ability to be an agile character, but it ended up working as a sort of physical limitation for her that didn’t hinder her movements, but gave gravity or consequence to certain large physical commitments.  I actually did a lot of research on rib-related injuries, their heal time and how incapacitating they are to make sure I wasn’t painting myself into a medically-unhealthy corner.  So it’s always policy to make absolutely sure I want a big change to happen, and if I don’t, it goes on the cutting room floor.

It can be hard to take the scissors to your comic, especially when you become very invested in it, but it’s important for a narrative to stay trim if it’s to get where you want it to go.  You don’t want to bog the reader down with unnecessary noise drowning out your signals, you don’t want to interrupt the rhythm of your comic with an out-of-place scene and you certainly don’t want to pull the trigger on a permanent change unless you’re absolutely positively certain that change is meaningful and you don’t have a need for those elements in the future.  Most ideas seem great at the time, but it’s very important to develop a sense of self-scrutinization and recognize when something won’t work, and then you have to be brave and make the cut to your script.  It’s not fun, but your work will only be better for it in the long run.