The Never Ending Writing Project

Yes, we are back to the comic book.

I have not posted it yet. I am looking for a good place, and I have asked for advice from some of my Twitter contacts, but I really don’t know much about this end of things. I know 400-page long fan fiction that is not “slash” has limited appeal, but that’s just how it came out. I still think it’s really good. On the plus side, writing in Final Draft I can save it as a PDF, so it should be pretty easy to upload and download, regardless of where it ends up.

Also, it is not done. I did accomplish my editing goals over the weekend, but there were still some additional scenes that I needed to write, and I was stuck on them but I see how they are going now. I should be able to finish tonight. Of course, I still keep finding little tweaks to make, which is why I want to post it. Well, I wanted to post it to be done with it, and that is not going to happen, but it is in a different way than I expected.

Remember when I got curious about the ration between screenplay pages and comic book pages, and I thought about trying to draw a page or two, but then decided not to because of how frustrating that would be? Yeah, I need to draw this.

A big part of what made writing this as a comic book different from just writing a screenplay is the imagery. I mean, when I am writing a screenplay, I think about imagery and focus and things like that, but here I was thinking about drawings. I would see the best way to convey scenes, and some of the ways to make them more visually interesting, and at some point I realized that I need to do it, even though I am not good at this.

It’s not just that I am not a good artist, nor is it that I want to be a professional writer, and so I need to be writing other things. In terms of sheer scope, I figured out that the ratio was about two drawn pages per one written page, meaning that I am looking at about 860 pages of drawing.

I think I need to do this for three reasons. The first one, and the reason I can’t resist, is just that creative drive. I have ideas in my head, and I am attached to them, and I want to make them reality. That they are coming out as images instead of words is new, but also, they already came out as words, and there are always images anyway; it’s just that normally the images lead to the words and now it’s going back. That should be interesting.

Also, there’s a special kind of energy that comes with drawing, and maybe I need that in my life. I remember once reading a blurb in a magazine about what type of doodles to do based on whether you needed to be focused or creative or other things. I think it was spirals for creativity, but I don’t remember. Usually I only draw during phone meetings, and then I tend to go back and forth between geometric shapes and fruits, sometimes flowers, maybe birds if the meeting is really long.

(Or I draw when a conversations gives me strange thoughts, like catfish in a rocket, a giraffe riding a Segway, or junkie whales.)

Finally, one of the saddest things I have read recently was a story about Berlioz in Musicophilia. He woke up from a dream with a new piece of music in his head. He was tempted to work on it, but at the time his wife was very ill and he needed to earn money by some odd jobs he was doing. To work on the piece would involve neglecting all that, because it would consume him, and then he would need to pay for a copyist, and a staging, and he could not commit to that, so he pushed the music out of his mind. It fought, but he fought harder. It came back once more, and then he succeeded in forgetting that completely.

I don’t want to do that. I do have responsibilities, and I can’t go crazy with my dreams, but I need to hold on to them too. So this is going to be my practice for that. I need to start working on a new screenplay. I need to keep blogging. Okay, maybe those are wants and not needs, but they are important to me, and legitimate, and at the same time there is the job that actually earns me money, and the rest of my life.

This project is going to be my practice for slow, steady pacing. It will not go fast. It will start out very frustrating as my abilities fall below my ambitions, but my abilities will improve. That means that after 400 pages I may want to redo the first 200, because I think I can make them look better. That’s okay. It will be a journey. So, we are looking at something like a 2022 completion date. Don’t get excited.

I have bought some regular pencils, colored pencils, and two 50-page drawing pads. One will be for sketching, and practicing, and the other I will start drawing in. If I get something perfect in the practice pad, I may just cut it out and paste it into the other pad. As I get further along, I will buy more pads, and I will probably need another 16, depending on how much I redo.

It is intimidating, but it is also exciting. For one thing, the text is somewhat unstructured. With a screenplay, you are generally trying to get the premise out in the first ten minutes, and then you expect two plot twists spaced forty minutes apart, and that may sound formulaic but it works. The comic book is longer than three movies, so it does not quite work out like that. However, as I start working it into 50 page increments, maybe its structure will change. There have been snatches of poetry that relate, and putting them into the script did not feel quite right, but putting them as an end not on a page might. So it is really exciting.

And hey, if nothing else I should get better at storyboarding. I’m not even sure how many filmmakers still draw those out, but I saw some for Yimou Zhang’s Hero, and they were appropriately gorgeous for that movie.