Art Journal 011: Writing Part 3: Connecting the Dots

Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking less about the mechanical process of drawing comics and more about the methods of writing them (mostly because it’s interesting but partly because I’ve been focusing on game development and non-comic freelance work lately).  I talked about creating characters and personalities, as well as building spaces for them to live in, so this week I’m going to wrap up this brief segment on writing and talk about how all the pieces fit together into a rolling narrative story with a deliberate beginning and end.

A good story has clear purpose and direction, it doesn’t meander or focus on things that are not relevant to its goals. The little pieces might not seem like it individually but over the course of a narrative everything feeds back into the main storyline; whether its character development, contextual flavor or short side-stories, everything is linked to the central story you’re writing.  If something is wholly unnecessary it goes on the cutting room floor, unless you want to confuse or mislead people by presenting details they might think are relevant which are not (when these are called “red herrings”, or misleading details, even they are specifically linked to the heart of your story).  A good story is trim and purposeful but not shy about exploring and expanding the scope of its context, but knows enough to stay on course without getting lost with wanderlust.  At least, that’s how I’ve come to think about it.

So if it’s important to keep a story on a linear path, but you’re not entirely sure how you want to end it, or you anticipate having better ideas than the ones you started with (see: Art Journal 009), how can you possibly keep everything tied to the narrative without letting anything be unnecessary or distracting? The trick is all in how you structure your story!  Think of it less as a man-made architectural structure and more as an organic process, like a vine creeping under the sun.  You start with a seed and nurture it until your story sprouts, and what’s already been written helps inform and narrow the infinite potential for what is yet to come, turning and weaving with every new good idea and realization of badness of prior ideas.  It’s agile, it’s nimble, it’s adaptive and clever, but it’s by no means planned out completely from beginning to end and executed strictly by the blueprints.

The way I like to describe my story-writing process is by assigning waypoints and letting the story find its way from point to point on its own.  The waypoints are key events on the line that I want to hit and the story is the curving line that goes from point to point, so no matter where it goes it’s leading in the direction I want it to.  It is in essence breaking a story up into short segments so you have more control over your immediate future- and so you have more immediate goals to reach in the narrative.  Focusing on your waypoints also lets you open up the space beyond to either change future waypoints, add new ones in-between or rework how they all fit together.  Another way I tend to visualize it is a thousand strands of thread leading through the eye of a needle- which is your current point of the story- and coming out the other side woven into a single clean line.

I’ll use the opening as an example of how this all worked.  The first page of my comic I wanted to establish a setting and a tone.  It’s all large panning shots of a crummy hole-in-the-wall diner, the narration filling in our other four senses.  Greasy food, impatient customers, a pushy boss.; it sets the tone for the main character’s whole world, and it’s one of the only fleeting glimpses into the old world that we’ll ever see.  This was my seed, establishing the story, the setting and character so a fresh reader can enter the world and build a sense of where they are in their head- the narrator doesn’t even introduce herself until the second page.  From this seed my next narrative waypoint was “establish characters”, which takes a few more pages, introducing Monday and intertwining their contrasting narratives (p.19) and building a sense of who these people are and what they’re doing.  

The next waypoint was “time-skip cutoff”- once the characters were established and the foundation of the story laid out Lizzie meets the blind side of a car and goes unconscious for a few days, where in the meantime we get a sense of the people Monday works with and a look into the rapid decay of the old world.  As mentioned in the last article (Art Journal 009: Writing Characters) I didn’t start out with a clear framework of what I wanted to do with Monday so adding this little arc after the Lizzie Car Wreck Timeskip let me explore the criminal element of his past before the early-post-collapse commences.  After this arc Lizzie’s second dream sequence introduced her conflicted inner narrative, and then we meet Alice- Lizzie’s future BFF For Life and arguably the future new second-most important character of the group- and the next waypoint in the story was “Liz and Alice get out of the house safely.”  The original waypoint was going to be “Liz gets out of the house safely at the expense of Alice and Officer Bradley” but I changed it at the last minute because I didn’t want to build characters up and then get rid of them, that would be wasteful.  This change also helped me build a policy of “don’t kill characters for no reason”; character deaths are big events and they should never be overused or else the occurrence will lose all impact and it becomes “oh, this again.”  

Zipping through the next waypoints on my list were “introduce Lou”, “unite the two narratives”, “battle Frank” and then “arrive at Chantelle’s safehouse”.  And after the rest period there’s “chase scene”, “Omnimart infiltration”, “Omnimart meetup” and then “Safe house betrayal”.  As the comic grew the waypoints covered more and more pages each, the reason being that in the beginning nothing is actually established yet so there’s more points that need hitting but as the story consolidates there’s more established plot and reference to draw from, so there’s more foundation to build on and you can wiggle and explore more without the story getting lost.  You’ve gone from 0 to 60, now you can start cruising, but you need time to accelerate to that speed.  I do have a finish line in mind- it actually evolved once or twice in the writing process- but the waypoints are plotted out to a definite end, and the comic at the time of writing (7/25/2014) is in the second of three acts.  I’m not going to spoil the end, but that’s my waypoint writing system carried all the way to the story’s conclusion.

Before I started writing comics I was big into games.  Not just videogames, though, I had a bunch of friends I used to play lots and lots of tabletop RPGs with.  We used to travel down to Dragon*Con every year and fill up our schedule with one-off sessions with premade characters in systems we’ve never heard of before.  This was honestly the foundation of my understanding of narrative, and playing tons of dicegames has had a big influence on my learning how to write comics (confession time: anything in the first 100 pages that seems out of place was actually an in-joke reference among my friends).  One of the ways this background influenced my writing was in establishing characters with different traits.  In my head everyone has stats and a character sheet and they’re good at certain things- Monday has low empathy and social scores but he’s great at stealth and combat, whereas Lizzie has high athletics and empathy skills but her ability to fight is limited to her mop and her boots- she never actually punches anyone in the comic but she does great with what she has.  Alice being a crack shot with a rifle hadn’t entered my mind until I started fleshing out the Omnimart arc- she just never had access to a gun and her being handy with a trigger takes a lot of weight off of Monday as The Guy Who Shoots Things.  Overall the party has a diverse range of skills and everybody can fend for themselves, but they work best together or at least in pairs.  Everyone they meet has Items and Skills of their own as well- this all loosely stemmed from my enjoyment of tabletop games.  I initially saw the comic as a gaming session I ran myself, and that sort of colors the arcs the characters jumped through.

I made a very conscious decision when I started writing comics, I didn’t want the tone to be too serious.  “Never let the comic take itself too seriously” has been the words in my head since day one seven and a half years ago. I want my stories to be a little hard and a little gritty but I want them to be bouncy and fun; I don’t want to drag the reader down into an abyss of misery, I want to write an adventurous action story that stays on the upbeat, even when it has its emotional moments.  I wanted my writing to be fun, playful and a little goofy but still have a driving purpose, a kinetic force to it and a bit of world-weary bitterness to the flavor.  I want to tell human stories and this is roughly the frame of my perception of being human, drawn from my own life and the lives of people I’ve met along the way.  I wanted to write the stories I never had growing up, and that’s the driving force behind the story I’m writing and the way it plays itself out.  It’s a story about people doing what people do as seen from the lens of my own existence.  And that, in summary, is how I write my comics.

Thanks for reading!