Okay. Where to start.
Well, for one, I've started writing again. Quite a bit, too, if I'm to be honest with myself and you, dear reader. Compared to my glacial output over the last 10 years, the last week would make The Flash proud. I currently have three completed shorts for what is shaping up to be either an OGN or a series of web strips that I'm calling
Brief Encounter(s). I'm shooting for an indeterminate page count at the moment, so I don't know what exactly will be my end point, but for the time being I'm just generating as many vignettes as possible and turning them into script format as they come to me. On top of the three done, I have three on deck of varying lengths and a few more in a holding pattern, so I'm really optimistic about the endgame with this project.
My wife basically challenged me to come up with a story. We were talking about writing and I was getting into the whole thing where I've always had trouble with fiction because I've never been able to be honest with myself or my characters. There was always a fabricated feeling to all my plots because that's exactly what they were. Characters were a different story, but I was culling what I knew from various books and films to give the story it's meat. I would rarely mine my own life experiences or those of people I know out of fear. Fear that I may reveal something too private of myself or that I may anger someone else who may recognize something and follow-up with reprisals or hurt feelings.
On an intellectual level, I knew this was bullshit. All my favourite writers are my favourite writers because of their ability to be truthful. To go to those places that I would not. I've always beaten myself up about it. I've always disliked my prose as a result. I've generally stuck to non-fiction and found comfort there.
It wasn't until I read a 'biographical' comic called
The Hipless Boy that something clicked in my head. These were upfront and honest depictions of a fictional character's life and his two friends. Not all the situations were real, but enough of the story came from the authour's life or those of people he knows and it gave the stories a legitimacy. Again, this was all stuff that I knew on an intellectual level, but reading and reacting to these stories was a whole different experience. They were the kinds of stories I wanted to tell. Have always wanted to tell. Stories about life, relationships, friendships; the things and people we love. Not only that, but the style he chose, one of very short vignettes that didn't always end at the end, was just what I needed to shake any fears or reservations I had about my own work out.
So, I set to the task of planning out a story. It came to me surprisingly quickly, probably because it was an idea that I had in my head for a while but never did much with because it wasn't something that could be told in a long-form story and didn't have a pat ending. I wrote a poem a while ago with some shared elements, but until now, that was the only way I saw it. I was going more to catch the emotion of the moment rather than giving the reader a strong narrative.
That's also the reason that I chose to do it as a comic strip rather than a prose story. I tried the prose approach and hit a wall quickly. I had trouble figuring out why because I had all the dialogue and could picture everything up to the ending. Then it hit me. If I'm seeing this in still images with dialogue there's only one way to do it-as a comic book. I showed it to my wife who liked it, said put it away and write another one. I laughed and said it was hard enough to dig this one up, how does she expect me to come up with another one so quickly? Historically, it wasn't something that I did with any real facility. This was on a drive home after picking her up from work and about 15 minutes into the drive I told her that I knew what the next one would be.
Short stories. Comic book. 24 pages is a one-shot. That's three 8 page stories, or four 6 page stories or whatever combination I ended up with. Then the title came to me,
from the old David Lean film, it was all perfect.
Since then, I've come up with even more ideas and recognized the limitation of a one-shot in terms of creating, marketing and selling it in comic book stores. Nobody is going to order a 24 page one-shot comic from a nobody creative team, so the idea expanded to an OGN which might work better for me. Stranger things have happened. The only real tragedy with the idea is I'm not a confident enough artist to do these myself and finding an artist to illustrate these may be very difficult. So, my dream of becoming a published comic book writer may be short-lived. Even if I was to go web-comic with them, I still have to deal with the artist question. The rest I can handle, but if I don't have pictures with my words, well...
Still plugging away, though. I won't be deterred until I've exhausted all avenues with this one.
Then there's the other book I'm doing. More on that in another post.
Later!
m
Labels: writing
