I wanted to finish writing a graphic novel today. It appeared to me in a blaze one night, and I wrote the outline in around two hours. It was incandescent – apart from a couple of small details (and one thing about the ending), I knew exactly what went where, and why things were happening.
I’m not naturally an outliner – as I’ve written in my newsletter, I generally need to write the story to figure out what the story is. But I think it was partly because it’s a crime book, and partly because it’s largely silent, told through images, that I knew what choices were being made as I outlined it.
So that was last Thursday, and I figured I’d write it in around ten days, retaining the white heat aspect of it. It’s a short graphic novel – around 80 pages start to end – but, sadly, there was just no time to be found.
I did write a quarter of it, though. Finished page 20 today. And I’m very happy with what I have so far – I’ll need to edit the dialogue a bunch, but the images fell into place as I needed them to.
And I’ve narrated the whole thing to a few people, and they all seem to like it.
I’ll admit I’m a little disappointed I didn’t finish the whole thing – “I wrote it in a week” is an attractive proposition, especially when you’re thinking of a short pulp story whose roughness will be part of what makes it interesting.
But I’ll keep plugging at it a few pages at a time, and maybe I’ll be able to say, “I wrote it in two weeks.”