I just got done writing a short story on my new typewriter, and the one thing I really appreciate about the experience is how … relaxing it has been.

I don’t know what it is about working on the typewriter, but I don’t feel the usual stress of constantly thinking “Is this good?” “Where should this bit go?” “Am I doing justice to this dialogue between these characters?” while I’m writing my first draft.

You know how people tell you that the first draft should just be about telling yourself the story, just getting it down on paper? It actually felt like that this time, without forcing anything.

I think it’s partly the fact that you can’t really edit anything you’ve already written, so you’re just moving forward. So the editing part of my brain is simply not working when I’m writing on the typewriter, even for the kind of tiny edits I usually make when I write on the computer (like just now when I went back to change “really not working” to “simply not working” to avoid using “really” too many times in this post).

Even when writing a story with pen on paper, I’m usually looking back and making changes or writing little notes to myself. None of that here – the most I’ve done is, when I read the whole thing back this afternoon before writing the final chunk, I made a margin note that I need to add a few sentences between two points early on when I do the second draft.

I think it also forces you to think ahead and hold more of the story in your head while you write, while still not working from a nailed-down outline which (for me at least) saps some of the spontaneity from the writing process.

In sum, I really enjoyed this, and plan to do a lot more of it. I’m not sure it’d work with a comic script, but it might be worth a try.

#writing

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.”

#writing

Since I wrote last night’s post about the webcomic format, I decided to try and come up with an idea for it. Maybe I wouldn’t do three 100-page books, but three 50-page ones (or one 150-page one), but I wanted to keep to the idea of a single story.

The original story I’d thought about for it was fairly episodic, because I’d had this idea that I could have guest artists come in once in a while. The problem with that ended up being that I had a lot of engine, but not a lot of heart behind why the story was happening that specific way.

So this time, I wanted to go for a single continuous story that I could tell with a single artist (though one that could be adapted to multiple artists if it came to that) but for which I knew the whys. I ransacked my notebook of old ideas, but nothing really fit. Then I went to bed, and I lay in the dark going through lots of ideas and combinations of genres and characters to see if anything sparked. I think I went through almost every genre I’ve read, let alone written.

And finally one coalesced into a nugget that I can start work from. It’s still quite rough, but I think it’s reasonably strong – I narrated the setup to a couple of people today just as a “Would you read this?” check, and it passed.

What led me to it was realising that in thinking of genre, I was sort of limiting myself to a framework that’s not helpful in generating ideas. So I started thinking about the visuals. After all, there had to be a strong reason I wanted to make a comic and not a novel here.

So I asked myself – if this has to be a comic, then what do I want it to look like? And I knew I wanted to do something that looked a bit like Moebius, something with that line and that colour, and from there, I started thinking about what I would want to do with visuals like that. I could work on something fantastical, or surreal, but also maybe do straightforward sci-fi.

Funny thing is, every time I read Moebius, the stories never give me the same thing I’m getting from the visual style. I want something solid, something grounded but strange, and the stories are mostly philosophical babble, abstracted from any kind of reality. Which is fine – those are the stories he wanted to tell.

But that’s one of the most fun exercises for a writer – you see something that has some interesting aspects, but you feel it doesn’t entirely work. And then you think – How would I fix it? You ask yourself enough questions, and you have a story completely distanced from your inspiration.

So that’s what I have for now – I’m obviously not going to tell you the story here. But I might use this log for more engine posts as I get going.

#comics #writing

Borrowing from Ganzeer’s (and Warren Ellis’s before him) concept of the Comics Engine – thinking about delivery formats for a comic.

This is one I’ve had in mind for a while – years in fact – and the fact that it still appeals to me implies that it’s a reasonably robust one. I kinda have a story for it too, but it’s been three years and I haven’t written that story, so it might be time to find a new story for the format.

Anyway, here it is:

You make the comic either at standard comics size or, if you’re feeling a bit expansive, at European size. I was going to make it at A4 size, which is only slightly off European size.

Anyway, take the size of the page, and cut it in half vertically. You have a half-page of the sort that used to be published in European comics magazines. In fact, that’s where I got it from, after observing that most of the early Asterix comics were quite neatly split halfway down each page.

Anyway, you do a comic that runs four half-pages a week. That’s two full pages a week. And because you’re composing to half-pages, each of those full pages will end up fairly dense. And you have beats to write to – there’s the half-page, then the full page, and then each set of the weekly two pages.

At the end of a year, building in two hiatus weeks, you have 100 full pages – that’s a graphic novel.

My idea was to do a webcomic for three years that’d end up a trilogy of graphic novels.

As I said, I still really like the format. Just needs a story.

#writing #comics

I haven’t been able to write since the lockdown began. Oddly enough, unlike some of my actual writer friends who are having trouble engaging emotionally with their writing while the pandemic goes on, for me it’s been a matter of logistics. There’s a lot I’m eager to write – I just can’t find the time.

I end up spending somewhere between an hour to two hours cooking, dishwashing and keeping the house (and shopping once a week), since I’ve given my cleaning lady a couple of months off. Other than that, I refuse to compromise on the things I need to keep me going at this time – movies, books and conversations. I haven’t met a single person I know in a month (I have met the people running the shops and the security in my building, but that doesn’t count, really) so I know that I need to stay in touch with the people I care about so I can stay on an even enough keel, emotionally.

And, weirdly enough, I seem to have more lettering work than before rather than less. Comics people seem to be taking the fact that they can work from home quite seriously, and I’ve been taking up a few genuinely interesting new projects. This added with the fact I’m working at around 80-90% of my usual efficiency because of the summer heat and the … waves at everything … means my hands are pretty full with work.

So I haven’t really had any time to write – at least any productive time to write. I’ve come up with a few new short stories that I’m hoping I’ll get to write soon, and my big projects – revising SAWBONES and finishing Draft 1 of STRANGER – are also waiting for the next batch of free time I might have.

I’ve decided for now to abandon my usual strategy of writing for an hour a day – I don’t really have that hour. Instead, I’ll be trying to figure out an extra free day a week, or maybe every couple of weeks, apart from the weekend, and try and write then.

#journal #writing

I’ve been rediscovering the pleasures of uncomfortable fiction. And uncomfortable fiction tends to be disreputable fiction, in some way or the other. I’ve been pairing my reading of Ulysses with transgressive horror short stories (queer and otherwise), and I watched Tromeo & Juliet today, which makes disreputability a veritable virtue.

It’s still comparably easy to enjoy a lot of these things at a distance – books like Ballard’s Crash or Ulysses have been rendered respectable with time (or, like Story of the Eye, come bearing academic analysis as defence). And on the other hand, with transgressive horror, or with bizarro fiction, the discomfort is built in – like a musical without songs, you’d be disappointed if you read these without any discomfort.

It’s also, as a writer, not something you can necessarily think your way into – these things have to come from within, by you confronting your ghosts or your demons. The things that bother you, and the things you’re a bit scared that they don’t.

Almost all of these examples have moments that strike the wrong note – parts that make me think, I wouldn’t have gone there if I were writing this. But the problem with writing such stories is – I don’t think you can get one without the other. You can’t transgress without going too far.

It struck me particularly today, because I just read a short story whose central concept I had come up with independently when I was a teenager. I never wrote my story, because I felt, at the time, that it went too far, that it was too strange and unpalatable. And I finished the story I was reading, and I figured that I liked my version better, because the one I read didn’t go nearly far enough.

#journal #writing

Thinking about this drive to diversify what one does. Whether it’s writing too many things at once – be those fiction or my attempts to maintain this log and a newsletter – or the desire to create in various media.

I know people who just write, or just draw, and that’s it. I don’t know if they have better or happier creative lives, but I do know that some of them have a more consistent output.

But then, is the idea to put out as many things as possible? I know writers who write too many books too fast, and too much of the comics medium works around this idea of compromising between quality and quantity.

I have no conclusion here – I struggle with the right number of books on my plate to letter, let alone the other things I do with my time.

I do know that I wouldn’t be happy simply lettering and then being an audience member the rest of the time. I’d need to create something or the other. The question is: is it better to think more deeply about what that something is before I do it, or is it better to do and figure out while doing whether it was worth it?

#journal #writing

I have a fascination with moments, and how moments carry meaning from other moments within them.

All those memories we carry with us – the truly intense ones – come along not simply because of those moments themselves, but because of what happened around them, or what they meant later. And I’m not talking about the obvious stuff. It took me ages to start enjoying Sudoku again, quite recently, because I associated it with an old, long-lived trauma.

But it could be something less direct, like my most enduring memory of my late uncle being watching him shave in front of the mirror when I was a kid, because that was when he offered to buy me a bicycle that my mother couldn’t afford by herself – a bike that, sadly, was stolen a few months after I got it. But that image of my uncle shaving – that’s a moment that speaks to me of love.

I keep coming back in my writing to such moments. I think I’ve finished or started at least five stories entirely about moments like these, of illumination or elision.

Here’s one such story that I posted to my blog. A few readers assumed it was autobiographical, because of the kind of detail chosen. It’s not, but I like to think of that as a compliment in this case.

#writing #fiction