Art Journal 009: Writing Part 1: Characters

 Last week I wrote a bit about how I handled writing dialogue and how it relates to my artwork, so this week I’d like to follow up on that topic and share a bit about my process for writing stories. It’s an area where I have less technical training than I do in the drawing aspect of comics but it’s something I’ve been doing pretty consistently for the past seven and a half years so as someone who started out as Not A Writer I think it would be interesting to put my thoughts down into words.  I’m going to start out outlining the train of thought that led to the comic’s start and then after that I’ll talk about some writing tricks I’ve picked up over the years. Explaining how I developed the comic is probably the best way I know to describe how I write.

Dead Winter started as a place to experiment, and if nothing else the first hundred pages really show this.  I used to do a lot of illustration (my original career ambitions were to do spot illustration work for tabletop roleplaying books (I actually have my work in an old Babylon 5 splatbook (It’s called Ships of the Galaxy (but that’s going on a tangent)))) and I worked a night job as a bowling alley mechanic, and I got tired of just drawing figures in static poses on white backgrounds, so I said “maybe I should make a comic, that way I have a context to give me something to draw from frame to frame and I feel like I have meaning in my figures and my camerawork”.  I used to read a lot of webcomics and something post-apocalyptic was not a subject I saw a lot of, and zombies as a subset of that was even rarer, and that was basically how my comic was born.  Rule number one at this point was “never let the comic take itself too seriously”. No matter what make sure it’s fun and adventurous, the world didn’t have a zombie webcomic but it also did not need yet another way-too-serious apocalyptic gore-fest.  It was on an old Toshiba Satellite plugged into the mechanic’s office behind a long row of noisy bowling machines with a four or five inch Graphire 4 tablet plugged into the side.  It was this context and a desire to pull myself out of a dead-end and sort of dangerous job that spurred me to try something I’d never done before.  

My original plan for the comic was pretty simple.  There was a guy and a girl, one wrathful and one compassionate, who were opposites of one another and who rather disliked each other, and they were stuck with each other by necessity amidst an immediate threat.  From there I began to flesh out the two characters- one would be from humble means, someone with a crummy low-wage job, but that wouldn’t be the extent of her.  She’s smart, she’s educated and she’s artful- not picture-artful or music-artful, but wordly-artful.  A writer, specifically a poet.  Okay, so she’s from an artsy educated background and she’s stuck in a cataclysmic survival situation, how would that sort of person adapt?  She shouldn’t slip right into the gung-ho gunslinger motif, that’s been done to death.  It would be more interesting if she made a conscious effort -not- to kill anybody in a setting where death is literally all around you?  That was the train of thought that fleshed the basic concept of “compassionate girl” into Lizzie, the main narrator of the comic. She draws heavily from my personal experience as an aspiring artist and a college-educated late-twenty-something stuck in a dead-end job; her button-down workshirt and nametag were actually loosely based on the style of workshirts I wore at my old job!

Monday was originally planned as “wrathful guy” and he had an office attire aesthetic to his original concept sketch.  I like to draw action scenes and that was something I wanted to experiment with in the laboratory of the comic so the other half of the main character pair would carry a lot of the opportunities to draw shootouts and action shots that would make no sense for the other character to seriously engage in.  He would be less talkative than her, very cold and stand-offish, with a neutral-to-sour expression to contrast Lizzie’s expressiveness.  He’s got a shirt and tie, though- should he be a disgruntled office worker?  A betrayed stockbroker?  Why would a stockbroker be slinging pistols akimbo?  What if he’s a criminal instead, what if he’s a killer?  Someone whose job is ending lives in a world where the undead are running him out of business?   He’s not the world’s only assassin, though. What if there were more?  If they had a theme or aesthetic? Maybe keep the betrayal and the disgruntled concepts and weave them back into that.  This was the line of thinking that led to Black Monday Blues, whose name was partly inspired by Lightning Hopkins’ Monday Morning Blues, an old song I’d heard on the radio blues show on my tinny speaker in the mechanics’ back office.  The idea of Monday- as a name in the vein of Wednesday Addams and Joe Friday- being the one day of the week everyone dreads coming around as the name of an assassin high-profile targets would dread equally so cemented the choice.

So we have Lizzie and Monday, and they hate each other.  So why do they stick together?  I honestly didn’t establish this when I started the comic, as the two hadn’t even met yet, and it wasn’t until I started writing Lizzie and Alice’s house-siege escape where I had a single-page spread full of inner-monologue narrative when I established a relationship between Lizzie and her father.  The monologue on page 66- which was a page I hastily threw together because I had an update deadline looming and I needed to bridge the gap between the previous page and the next one which was already drawn- was originally written about Lizzie’s father.  It didn’t make any sense in the context so I rewrote it to be her comparing her situation to her work but it was in that discarded draft where Nigel Cooper entered the story.  The original monologue detailed a rough relationship with a father she didn’t see eye-to-eye with but I felt like her life was already hard enough at this point that I didn’t need to add parental conflict to it as well, so in fleshing it out in my head a more loving and supportive relationship made more sense than a Same Ol’, Same Ol’ sort of drama.  This also ended up creating the major hook of the comic’s story- Lizzie has a dad she cares about and wants to find, and Monday is a man who kills by contracts, so if Lizzie’s Dad was a man Monday had it out for then sticking with someone he hates would give him a reason not to just throw his hands up and leave, but it also gives him a reason to suppress his nature, hide his motives and lie through his teeth.  In the long run this expanded what would otherwise be a one-note character into a more dynamic one, requiring him to make compromises and consider his role within the group carefully if he doesn’t want to be found out.  And it was that one rushed night of fleshing out the sixty-somethingth page of the comic where I found my long-term narrative plot:  Lizzie is looking for her dad and Monday is also looking for her dad.  It all came together in pieces through the process of writing.

My early pages involved a lot of experimentation with flashbacks and weaving threads of time together, and that was partly done to flesh the two out enough that I could stick them together down the road.  I’d originally planned to stick them together, but the momentum of writing their stories had the unexpected side-effect of doubling the size of the central cast.  Lizzie’s car wreck was written as a way to abruptly sever her connection to the old world, as she was at that time oblivious to the state of decay going on around her.  It was a breaking-off point, something that both visually and narratively disrupted life as she knew it and an opportunity to segue into fleshing out Monday’s criminal character while leaving readers curious as to what would happen to her.  I actually planned out what would happen to Lizzie while I was writing and drawing the Monday-rescues-Sally arc and the subsequent dream sequence, and that’s where Alice entered the picture.

Alice’s original role in the story was to be the first actual nice thing to happen to Lizzie in the entire comic.  Her fiance abandoned and almost killed her, she’d been called into work, she dented her car once, she screamed at her boss and quit her job and then she wrecked her car completely and wound up a bloody unconscious mess; Alice was a contrast to the events leading up to her introduction.  Sunny and direct, Alice was a contrast to Lizzie’s weary workerness in a way different from Monday, more alternate-positive than opposite-negative.  In the original plan she was actually there as a setup character for Lizzie to get back on her feet and out on her own again- she wasn’t going to make it out of the house and Lizzie would have ended up with Officer Bradley’s shotgun.  The shotgun thing didn’t make sense with the idea of her being a pacifist and by this point her carrying a mop around had become much more iconic and less grim-and-serious so that plan was very quickly discarded.  Alice being a non-survivor of the house escape scene was also discarded when I began learning the value of good characters- I learned early on in a comic like mine that death shouldn’t be a wantonly-used tool or it’d lose its narrative punch, and I learned there’s a lot of wasted opportunity in killing off an important character.  This is probably one of my most thankful dodged-a-bullet writing decisions I ever made because the Lizzie/Alice dynamic has evolved to be the single strongest relationship in the entire comic to the point where people describe Alice as the other central character, not Monday.  Alice was originally a way to get Lizzie back on her feet, and in an organic narrative sense Lizzie went back into the fire to keep her out of the frying pan, and their relationship ended up being so strong that Alice in effect cut Trevor- Lizzie’s fiance- right out of the picture- he’s still in line to show up again but Lizzie isn’t exactly dying to find him anymore since she’s not all alone in the world, she has a buddy now!.  In a sense the characters decided they’d rather be together themselves, that happened while I was fleshing out a different plan.

Lou is honestly one of the characters most in need of his own fleshing-out.  He came into the comic as an Alice for Monday, so to speak.  He was comic relief who sort of attached himself to Monday off-camera and appeared as a yammering shadow when the story came back to Monday’s side but like Alice he sort of grew to fit a purpose in the process of writing him out.  He’s very handy- drawing from another aspect of myself (all four characters are really aspects of myself fleshed out into their own personalities, really)- and in a world in ruins having someone who is able to pick up two pieces and jury-rig them back together was a useful asset to the party above and beyond levity and sandwich jokes.  He’s sort of a paternal figure to the group, he wants them to be the family he doesn’t have anymore and he’s just genuinely wants to help them in whatever way they can, but in the pantheon of my writing Lou probably represents the greatest deficit in writing attention of anyone.  Fleshing out his history and his character is on my to-do list, I need a moment to slip it into the flow of the story.  It could be that Monday’s personality isn’t conducive to buddy-friends that led to Alice becoming more well-rounded than Lou but he doesn’t have the same direct relationship that Lizzie and Alice have together.  He still serves a functional, useful role in the story and he rounds out the party to a balanced and even four, he just needs a little tune-up work himself.

My working philosophy is “the best idea is the one you haven’t had yet”.  By fleshing out one imperfect idea I’ve always come up with new directions that completely invalidate whatever plan you had building to-date.  The best resource you can have for writing is a robust body of work to draw from- some of my best ideas came from re-reading my own comic, finding things I’d included hundreds of pages prior (Alice’s Police hat, for example), and finding ways to turn them into retroactive hooks for a new plot arc (the army seeing her Police hat and mistaking the van for undercover cops).  You don’t need to have a perfect story to start writing a story and you don’t need to be clairvoyant to plan a long-term hook, you just need to be adaptive and resourceful.  Let the story be organic, flesh out your characters and let them gravitate one way or another and follow where they go, don’t shoehorn them too hard into your original plan.  Build up bits and pieces and look for interesting ways for them to fit together and from there assemble your larger parts.  Cheat, repurpose, evolve, and if anything isn’t perfect, just remember:  you can fix it on the next page.  Just keep writing and you’ll have all the resources you need to keep writing forever after.