My process (writing)

Creating a story is a monumental undertaking under any circumstances. Creating a story that will take thousands of hours to complete and one that will feature two dozen speaking characters is even more daunting. I’m going to spend years bringing this tale to life. If I don’t like it or if I’m unprepared for what will come down the road, the project will in all likelihood be a miserable failure.

For my last project, Variables, I did a fair amount of preparation. It turned out that wasn’t enough… Not nearly enough. Couple that lack of preparation with a story that was going to span dozens, if not hundreds, of speaking characters and you have a recipe for disaster. Thankfully, I saw the difficulty in continuing down that path and just pulled the plug on the project. It was simply too massive for one person to undertake (well, if that person planned to ever do anything else during their working career, it was too massive) and I had to bail off that ship before it burned me out completely.

The experience wasn’t a bad one, though… It taught me a lot of things not to do while drafting future projects, both in artistic style and story craftsmanship. And I put that experience to good use in my new project, Aurorae. This story, while still large, is going to be one-quarter the size of Variables. Instead of spanning multiple decades, it would take place over the course of a year or two. Instead of featuring more characters than the kudzu-entwined writing of Lost, it would have a dozen “characters of significance”, with only 5 or 6 of them qualifying as “main characters”. And I’d start small. Real small. As in “two people” small. That way, I wouldn’t overwhelm both myself and the reader with characters, divergent storylines, and confusing backstory. I’d ease into the story like a hot bath, or maybe a heroin addiction.

While working on Variables, I had several story ideas that I liked. Some, I tried to incorporate into that comic. Others were too large and/or different to work so I jotted down some notes and moved on. When I decided to start this story, I had the core of an idea: what if magic came back to earth? Well, okay, so that’s been done but what if I added a twist to that formula? Without giving too much away, I drudged up several of those notes I had accumulated over the past few years and I started mixing and matching the ideas. What if some “normal” people were gods? What is a god? Where’d they go for all this time? Why’d they leave? After a few weeks of bouncing ideas around and doing a fair amount of research on ancient mythology (and using some of Joseph Campbell’s teachings I’d read/watched in the past), I started writing. It was a mess, it was contradictory, it was jumbled. But that’s okay… You gotta start somewhere.

Whenever I begin putting an idea to paper, I start free writing. I type whatever comes to mind. It could be characters, it could be settings. It could be a scene with dialogue, it could be a generalization such as “they fight, person wins”. That gives me a baseline from which to start expanding upon the original idea. Often, the formation of a character starts with a few lines of dialogue. Why’d that person say that? What would cause a person to reach the point in their life where they’d say such a thing? That spurs the creation of another character. It could be a complementary character, it could be the antithesis to the first character. It could even be something as simple as a setting or a minor event. Rinse, repeat. After a few pages of this, you start to see the basest form of an outline emerge from the paper (screen). Once I have several characters blocked out, I begin writing brief descriptions of each person in the story. Where they came from, what they did, how they reached this point in the story. It looked something like this (you’ll notice that much of this is blurred out… I can’t go revealing important plot points to the audience quite yet):

As the story grows and characters are added (some names have been changed to protect the innocent), I go back and color-code the characters. This allows me to more easily keep track of the ever-growing complexity of the story and quickly reference each loosely-outlined character. I continue with this method for several pages; in this case, I ended the outline somewhere around ten pages of type. Now that I have an outline of the story, where did these people come from and how did they get here? In the current outline, I touch on a lot of that but given Aurorae and its quite significant backstory, that means I need to write another story, one the readers will never see: the backstory.

By the way, this was my first draft. What you see here isn’t entirely representative of the final iteration (if it is at all). Now I’m over 15 pages of outline and everything is a giant mess. Characters and their actions are contradictory, story arcs begin but don’t end (and vice versa), and there isn’t much in the way of flow to the piece as a whole. That means I need to scrap everything I’ve written to this point and reel it all back in to a manageable outline. In the case of Aurorae, that means a spreadsheet with dates listed horizontally, characters vertically to help me visually track each character’s progression. This is an incredibly time-consuming process because it’s the first time I’m required to sit down and write an actual story instead of a mish-mash of characterization and really nifty, but not cohesive, events. I start from “the beginning of time” and continue through to the end of the story, breaking down each event, listing basic character actions, and adding/tweaking events to streamline the story. At the end of the list, you’ll notice a greyed-out column. That means “dead guy” or “arc ended”. Usually, the two are synonymous.

After this (quite monumental) task is completed (and to be honest, the completion of the story is not yet completely finished), I have a good idea of where I’m going with the story, how characters interact, and where the “big picture” is headed. This piece was edited continually for a few weeks before I was satisfied enough to move to the next step.

Using this timeline as a reference and sourcing some of the dialogue/scenes I wrote into the original outline, I start to meld the two documents into a much larger, more comprehensive outline. Thanks to the timeline/spreadsheet, I now have a list of events that shows me every character arc at a glance and when combined with the scenes and brief dialogue written in the original outline, I can cut and paste things together into a coherent story. I doubled the size of my previous outline and including the backstory, I now have an outline that is over 25 pages in length and should end up well over 30 pages by the time I’m done (sorry, not going to show an image of that… basically everything in it is stuff that cannot be shown to the reader).

What do I have now? A really big outline, mostly consisting of “this happens, that happens, it changes Character X, forcing him/her to alienate Character Y”. Good to have, but still lacking real characterization and dialogue… the stuff that makes people love (or hate) characters. As I’ve mentioned many times to one of my friends, stories of events are great but without real characterization, it’s just a Powerpoint presentation. Pulp Fiction is the “story” of a guy who cheats at boxing, changes his mind, and then leaves town because the mob is after him. Throw in some weird shit about a briefcase and there you go, that’s Pulp Fiction. What makes the movie memorable are all the silly little side events and conversations between the characters that endear them to the audience.

And that is why I am starting Aurorae small. I want to get into the heads of each character and make them special and unique before getting too entangled with the greater plot points of the over-arching story. I’m taking two characters and making them the entire focal point of the first chapter (which will be somewhere between 50-60 pages). This allows me to explore what makes them tick while revealing story elements to the audience in a trickle instead of a flood; limiting the perspective from one viewpoint (or, in this case, two viewpoints that are shared) lets me Keep Things Simple, Stupid instead of getting caught up in a massive story and throwing up my hands in disgust (which signaled the death knell of Variables). So, instead of being forced to write out every character in minutia, I’m allowed to focus on two characters right now and tell their story. That means instead of writing multiple chapters at once to keep everything in check and to get the best idea possible of what makes every character act as they do, I can start writing one small chapter that focuses on two teenagers. Like the outline, I start free writing dialogue. It doesn’t have to make sense, it doesn’t have to be polished, it just has to exist.

What you see here is actually the 4th or 5th revision of my free writing but it doesn’t look much different from the first draft… There’s simply more of it. When characters aren’t speaking, I add a note of what is happening around them but mostly, this script is about the dialogue. Conversation is what drives any piece of writing (one that involves multiple characters and doesn’t rely on soliloquizing… then again, soliloquies are little more than one-sided conversations between character and audience so I guess that counts, too) so I focus on that and ignore most of the events happening around them. I probably take this strategy in part because writing dialogue is so bloody hard, takes the most time, and requires the most refinement (aka. starting over again and again because you botched it so badly the first three times). After a time, I realize that I’m coming close to a finished product and it’s time to start blocking out environments, panels, and pages.

This is the first “real” draft of chapter one. After all that work, I have something that closely resembles the words and images that will actually go on paper. This version will be read, re-read, edited, screamed at, and much gnashing of teeth will happen in the coming weeks as I tighten the story and prepare to draw actual content. After I have a “finished” version (is there such a thing?), I will begin plotting layouts and drawing the book. Somewhere around halfway through drawing chapter one, I begin anew with chapter two and start with the outline, revising and editing, and then free writing dialogue for the next chapter (and characters).

This process certainly isn’t for everyone but I’ve found it works for me and all that front-loaded work helps to avoid the dreaded feeling of “oh shit, I just wrote myself into a corner and I’m screwed” as you realize you’ve written a character so completely differently than you expected that later events (only loosely held together in your head) no longer make sense. That causes you to either re-write huge portions of the story or bail on the project completely and nobody wants that (I can tell you firsthand, it sucks).

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