Art Journal 030: Writing On The Fly

When planning the overarching story arcs of my comics I know where I want them to end up, but the details in between I tend to iron out organically as I come to them.  I never thumbnail too far ahead, usually only a few pages at a time, and by the time I burn through those thumbnails I’ll knock out some more, and in the time between thumbnail sessions I’ll think about how I want the next batch of pages to pan out.  This week I’m drawing the next comic and it’s the last comic I presently have thumbnailed, so I’m going to verbalize my thought processes in how I plan for what I want to do next.  There might be some very minor spoilers in this one, so take note if you’re the sort, but nothing should be tremendously plot-revealing or anything we haven’t already learned about thus far.

One of the things I always try to think about when I’m plotting out pages is the momentum of the story as it unfolds.  When I block in an arc in the story, I’ll think about how it flows out from what I’ve already written, and I’ll roughly look at how it flows into what I plan on writing beyond it.  The past couple pages of the comic were thumbnailed and planned as a rhythmic next-point to hit after running the job placement microarc, flowing into a scene about working your job within the town.  That arc also weaved into a confrontation between the Mayor and the Sheriff, introducing political strife within the town and a conflict vaguely evoking the red-sash Cowboys of Tombstone.  This current page rounds off the scene, with the Sheriff and his deputies excusing themselves, and the Mayor leaves a tip for Liz to forget anything happened, which turns the previous pages of her job being fruitless into one which happened to land something interesting.  In inventory terms, Liz comes away from her job encounter with a pocket full of money, more than even Monday was flashing a few scenes back, which is set to give her options and leverage in future engagements within the town.  

That’s my comic as it currently stands, but from here I have to start thumbnailing the new scenes, and that means finalizing what I want to touch on next, how much focus I want to give everything and in what order I approach them.  For me, momentum is always important.  When a scene ends and another starts they have to feel like solid endings, like we’re not cutting something off mid-way, the scene has panned out and produced a tangible forward step in the plot.  In the case of the pages I just wrapped up, establishing roles in the town for the main characters and introducing conflict were my progress goals and they wrapped up with the main-main character coming across a wealth of information and a wad of cash.  It feels like closure, and a good place to step off from.

Starting a scene is always the most stressful brain-racking part of writing stories for me.  When the new scene starts you need to establish the new location, the new setting, the new tone, the new time and the new context, laying the foundation for the next couple pages- this is where blocks of thumbnails come in handy, since knowing what your next few pages are actually going to be and how they’re going to flow lets you make an informed and meaningful start to that scene, like tilling the soil so your seeds can grow.  The current arc involves Liz as a waitress again, which is a callback to the very start of the comic, so my plan for the next arc is to continue the callback and shift the clock to after-hours in the restaurant- a scene opening with Liz mopping the floor like she did on Page 3, only instead of meeting her shitty overbearing boss we’ll be introduced to her new coworkers, the Leung family, who are nothing at all like Frank and introduce as another set of friendly faces in the town and provides Liz some levity in not having such a bad job after all.  After this scene plays out and I establish the Leungs, there’s a bit where everyone goes home and goes to bed and closes out the day.  That’s a natural rhythm and a flow from one scene to the next which makes sense and draws to a logical concluding point, which would also make a good place to end the chapter and explore some intermission content, and then I can start the next scenes fresh and new.

These next few scenes are pretty straightforward leading up to the end of the chapter, but the real serious issues come in the next one, and those are where planning on-the-go becomes really vital.  When I’m cementing ideas into the storyline I remind myself that whatever I write is there for good, and that becomes the canon I have to work with, so making sure I lay the foundation nice and even is incredibly important.  If I forget a detail I can find another appropriate beat to introduce it in, or I’ll have to live without it, and there’s been times in the comic where I forgot to include something and there’s no time to go back and wrench it in, so we just move onward with what we have.  There’s other cases where I wish I’d done something different, so I’d try to fix what I’d already written by establishing new context in future updates- for example, on page 104 Frank puts a knife to Liz’s throat, giving her the cut on her neck she’s had ever since, but once I wrote this scene I realized that Frank had been hacking up zombies with that knife for days and it’s filthy, and I was afraid someone was going to call me out as to why this gesture should mean Liz would be infected, so I suddenly had to write myself a reason why this would not be the outcome so early in the comic and I came up with a whole system for how zombie viruses actually worked in this setting.  It turns out that never actually came up, but it’s been planned since that scene and it’s actually one of the elements I have to juggle in the next coming scenes.

I have a lot of things I want to happen in Tombstone, there’s no shortage of events, but the crucial part is placing them in the order that has the best rhythm and carries itself forward with the most meaning.  Alice, Monday and Lou all have jobs in the town too and I’d like to hit on those three, but of the lot of them Monday’s is the most important to the plot so that will be the one I focus on first.  Also important is an encounter between the Sheriff and the Gravekeepers to follow up on the conflict established in the diner the day before.  I figure if I start with Monday’s story I can weave it around the Sheriff encounter, bring him into work in the town’s de facto town hall and from there I can branch away to Alice for a little bit, since her job as a nurse will put her at the heart of the town’s medical situation and finally give me an opportunity to write out how the virus actually works, a detail I racked my brain over four hunderd fifty pages ago.  From there I can hook back to Monday’s thread, make a cut over to Lou, who is meeting with Lizzie at her place of work and tie that back to Monday through Deputy Mayor Martinez, and after that I pull the trigger on Chekhov’s gun and boom!  Time for the fun part!  

That last paragraph is a verbalization of how I think through my story rhythm when I have multiple threads. I try to find a central thread like the trunk of a tree, and as you go up the tree you find places where you can branch off the story, but this isn’t a normal tree, all the branches loop back around to tie together up near the top.  So I figure out what my core focus is for that moment, what scenes intersect, where can I hand the camera off to for a bit and how can I bring the camera back after that moment; what do I need to establish first before moving to the next moment to keep a bit of mystery but also inform future content with important background and subtle context.  Typing that all out up there actually helped me a great deal in hammering out the foreseeable future of the comic, so that one was a documentation of the act of writing as it happened.  That works out perfect for me!

Writing off the cuff is not a recommended route but it can produce some interesting results, especially when you’re looking into your written pages for hooks for your future pages while also laying hooks for future pages to look back to.  You -can- survive without an immediate plan, and winging it for a little bit won’t kill you, but you just need to keep focus on what’s actually important to your plot to keep you from getting sidetracked into stuff that doesn’t actually matter.  Find your root, find your anchor story thread and tie things back to that.  Keep the rhythm going, keep it organic, and the story will practically write itself for you.