National Graphic Novel Writing Month - part 3

Okay, enough chit chat. If you're taking on National Graphic Novel Writing Month then you'll have already rolled your sleeves up and got stuck in. So we'll be running some practical advice over the next week or so - starting off with how you make your lead character(s) compelling enough to keep the reader's attention through 48 pages or more.

There are several techniques you can use to make people care about your character:

• make them resourceful
• make them brave
• have them be smart and/or funny
• show them doing a good deed ("save the cat")
• show them being unfairly treated (“kill the cat”)
• show them standing up against unfairness or injustice
• show them doing something we can relate to

There's nothing wrong with a character having more than one of these qualities! Just don't get lazy and have the character merely be strong or lucky. A smart character like Odysseus has to convince us with his solutions to obstacles in the story, whereas if he just punched his way out of trouble like Ajax then we know that's at the arbitrary whim of the author.

My favorite example of the last bullet point on the list (simple everyday relatability) is the opening scene of the movie Harper, as described by William Goldman in Adventures in the Screen Trade.

It's more important to make a character interesting than to make them likable. Very often you don't want them to start out likable because their redemption may be the point of the story. (Or even their downfall - think of Macbeth or Richard III.) Leaving aside stories, think about the people you know in real life. Isn't it true that you spend more time talking about the person who behaves outrageously or amusingly or unexpectedly or brilliantly, than you do paying attention to that really, really nice friend who is just a little bit boring? Come on, you can admit it - we're professionals here!

How do you make a character interesting? Simple. Show us the side of them that we can see will inevitably lead to conflict. The anticipation of that, and the desire to see how the conflict will play out, will keep your reader riveted to the page.

The illustration above is from my graphic novel Billy Graves, of which you can read the opening half of the first act online with fantastic art by Dan Strange. More about creating compelling comics characters on the Mirabilis blog. And there are truckloads of good general writing tips on Nail Your Novel.

National Graphic Novel Writing Month - part 2

We’ve all seen Harlan Ellison’s brilliant rant. I know that doesn’t narrow it down much. I mean his rant about the miserable treatment of writers. I used to work with a producer who was fond of saying, “Nobody wants to pay the cockadoodie writer!” Only she didn’t use the word cockadoodie; it was a bit more heartfelt than that.

It was brought home to me this week when a comic book editor told me he expected to pay “name” writers no more than $800 to write a full 22 pages. How fast would you have to churn out the words to make that pay? It certainly puts the target of National Graphic Novel Writing Month into perspective. For NaGraNoWriMo you have to complete the script for a 48-page book by the end of October.

No grumbling, now – based on those rates, the pro writer would expect to do it in under a week. But that’s if you’re writing monthly comic books, the majority of which are intended to be read and chucked away. “Wonderful trash,” as David Fickling once said, “has its place in comics too.” A graphic novel, though, ought to be a work that people will keep, cherish and re-read many times. Here’s Neil Gaiman, quoted in Writers on Comics Scriptwriting by Mark Salisbury:

“I remember being told off by one writer who writes a comic in a day. We were talking and I was saying, ‘I've just finished this last Sandman, and it took me about three weeks to write,’ and this person looked at me and said, ‘I bash them out in a day. How can you afford to do it?’ Because at the time we were only making $1,500 to $2,000 a script. On the other hand, the ten volumes of Sandman are still in print, and they still sell more than anything else does. We've done roughly a million of them in the US alone and well over a quarter of a million in the UK, and over the years they've paid me back for the amount of effort I put into them. There was no guarantee that they would in the beginning, it was just how I felt they had to be done. Looking back, I'm not sure why I was doing it. I definitely wasn't doing it for the money. It was partly the fun, the joy of creating art, and a lot of it with Sandman was just the joy of doing something I didn't feel anyone had done before, which is not something that you get very often in any field of art or literature.”

Sandman was worth all the care and effort Gaiman poured into it. That book was never an example of Mr Fickling’s “wonderful trash” species of comics. It may have been released in monthly installments, but at heart Sandman was always a graphic novel. It’s a work that you keep discovering new layers to, that keeps on rewarding you each time you return to it- in the same way that the works of Dickens (originally serialized, of course) stay on the shelves while airport thrillers are intended to be read once and left in the bin when you check out of your hotel.

Perhaps the best comparison I can make is with television. I can enjoy a series like Monk or House, where the episodes don’t really build into much of a bigger whole. And on the other hand you’ve got the shows like The Shield or Deadwood, which genuinely are 13-hour movies. And it's the latter that are the equivalent of graphic novels.

Now, I know lots of people hate that term, but I think it has its place. ‘Graphic novel’ doesn’t have to betoken a badly-drawn semi-autobiographical work about an overeducated introvert losing love and gaining wisdom in a Third World warzone, or New Yorkers living in cockroach-infested apartments while ogling a girl they’ll never talk to. Swamp Thing was a graphic novel. Right from the start, even published as a monthly book, it was one big graphic novel. Watchmen too. Two of my current faves, B.P.R.D. and Hellboy, are so thoroughly conceived as graphic novels that I save up a complete run of issues before I’ll even start on a story.

The NaGraNoWriMo exercise isn’t about Mr Fickling’s “wonderful trash”, it’s about writing a graphic novel like that. To give you an idea of the difference, here is a script for a comic book I wrote in a weekend. That was for an issue of Frankenstein’s Legions (whence the pictures) and I wrote it over a weekend because I was doing it as a favor. The Frankenstein’s Legions script is for an 18 page book. It's rough, improperly formatted and a little underlength, but if somebody was only paying me $800 then I'm not going to spend much longer than a day or two on it.

Now contrast that with the opening episode of Mirabilis. Those 25 pages probably took me about five or six weeks to write – and that only after spending several months planning out the whole story. Mirabilis is intended to be for keeps, it has a good part of my heart and soul in it, and I hope the difference shows.

My point here is not to put you off attempting NaGraNoWriMo. (And boy do they need a better acronym. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s already taken, unfortunately.) I just want to make it clear to everyone – and in particular to the penny-pinching comic book company editors out there – that something of the quality of a great, or even halfway decent, graphic novel is not something you can knock out in a day or two.

Forty-eight pages in thirty-one days is an achievable target, but it’s not an easy one. Bring your best game and, as Ronald D Moore says, write with confidence.

National Graphic Novel Writing Month - part 1

Once a year, as the nights draw in, aspiring writers bolt the door, disconnect the phone, and buckle down to hammer out a 50,000 word novel in thirty days. That's NaNoWriMo and if it sounds like fun, (a) seek help and (b) don't worry, because that doesn't start for another three weeks. Ah, but in the meantime, what to do with October? Well, ComicMix has declared this to be National Graphic Novel Writing Month and they've got a lot of great tips for writing graphic novels to get you started.

NaGraNoWriMo may not trip off the tongue quite as readily as its prose writing equivalent, but the goal of completing the script for a 48-page OGN in thirty-one days sounds a lot less frantic. Almost leisurely, in fact - just so long as you already have the concept and the plot outline in mind.

I was going to sound off about the commonly held assumption that writing is a breeze and that comics writers in particular have an easy life. They just have to "add the words", after all - how long can that take? Well, I figure on writing one 25-page episode of Mirabilis in a month. I could speed that up, but I don't think it would do much for the quality. Graphic novels aren't quite the same as monthly or weekly comics. You buy a graphic novel, you expect to have it on your shelf for years. At least, I do. And if you collect something like Hellboy or Northlanders or Scalped, you're probably hanging on to those too. But I'll bet you Mignola, Brian Wood, Jason Aaron and co are pouring most of their time, energy and soul into those books. Contrast that with the majority of comics, which are written fast and intended to be disposable.

Thing is, you're not supposed to be spending October writing two throwaway comic books. NaGraNoWriMo is about writing one 48-page graphic novel. A keeper. Now that's a task. But you know what? You can do it. I'll be putting up some tips through the rest of the month, and to start off here's my process for writing an episode of Mirabilis.

I begin with very rough drawings like the ones above. I don't know if you could even call them thumbnails. They tend to get drawn on scraps of paper while I'm eating dinner, or out for a walk. No used envelope goes to waste in our house. There's nothing like a script at this stage. The story comes to me visually first, maybe with single lines of dialogue that I'll write alongside the thumbnails.

So then the next stage is to write all the dialogue, along with any scene descriptions I think Leo and Nikos are going to need. For the first panel on the page above, for instance, I had:

Estelle descending the stairs, smiling for Gertrude’s benefit as she whispers out of the corner of her mouth. Jack whispering urgently as he comes down just behind her.

The Venus fly-trap is also coming down (its little roots barely long enough to manage each step) but looking back the way McNab is going.

JACK (whisper)
We’re going to rely on “McFabulous”?

ESTELLE (whisper)
No choice. Play along with me, Jack.

I guess it's a little like the "Marvel Method" in that the process is story synopsis followed by layouts followed by script, the only difference being that it's me doing all those stages. The artists still haven't seen it at this stage; in fact Leo is typically pencilling twenty pages or so back from this episode, and Nikos will be coloring ten or fifteen pages back from that.

Then I refine the thumbnails into slightly less scrappy layout drawings for Leo to work from, as you can see here. At this stage I keep copies of Jennifer Van Sijll's Cinematic Storytelling and Steven D Katz's Film Directing Shot by Shot close at hand. I have in fact duplicate copies of these books as I tend to walk from room to room while planning out a sequence of panels and I need to be able to pounce on some expert advice at any moment!

I also make any changes at this stage to fit the story to page length. I like to work out a 25-page episode in 5- or 6-page acts, the aim being to hit a major plot point at the end of each act . In this case, you can see that I decided I was squeezing too many panels onto page three, so I shunted that final tier onto the next page. That made more sense in story terms too, because it was the start of a conversation between Dougy and the villain that marked where the scene started to go downhill for the heroes, and fast.

Next the script for the episode goes off to Leo - which is usually an excuse for me to go and spend a few days at his place waaaay out in the backwoods so we can talk through the scenes, think a little about what's coming up in the next episode, and watch a few movies that will help inspire us. For this episode it was The Fearless Vampire Killers, Murder on the Orient Express and Howl's Moving Castle. Beer is usually drunk also. For when we need to get very creative, Leo keeps a bottle of Siberian-temperature vodka in the freezer in one of his outbuildings.

After the pencils stage, I might still be polishing the dialogue but obviously nothing changes in the story itself. In very rare cases we might see the need to change a panel, but usually there are just minor changes before Leo inks the episode and sends it off to Mike Toris, who does the flatting, and Nikos. We keep an "Art & Color Notes" doc online between the four of us that we continually update as any potential problems are flagged and dealt with.

Over on the Mirabilis blog, you can see the whole process laid out in detail for an entire 5-page act - we used to call those "episodes" back when we were running every week in The DFC.

It's clobberin' time

Here’s a post that started out in one place and then veered off in a whole other direction. I was shooting the breeze the other week with Peter Richardson, one half of the awesomely talented Cloud 109 team, and we got onto the subject of early-stage concepting - that sweaty, lip-gnawing period when you’re taking cautious steps in a fog, feeling your way around a project that might be a Michaelangelo masterpiece but could as easily turn out to be an elephant.

I remembered a very early version of the scene from “The Door in the Water” (originally episode 3 in The DFC for 2 January 2009; now part of Mirabilis #1 on the forthcoming iPad app) where Jack is reminiscing about how he got into an argument with McNab at the New Year’s Eve ball. “I was going to clout him, then Gerard stepped in and explained it was a matter of honour.”

Well, at that stage we were ploughing through a bunch of pages, feeling our way as to dialogue and art style. Jack’s regiment was in World War One style uniforms. The Kind Gentleman had a powdered wig and boot buckles the size of dinner plates. Estelle’s hair was Princess Leia scary. We weren’t even sure as to the page size we should be working to, as the DFC’s original brief was for a hardly believable 12.4” x 18.5”. So we just figured to get a whole bunch of rough-cut pages done and then take stock.

That scene on the raft stuck in my mind because Martin and Leo got together – that must have been the summer of 2008, tempus fugit – and did some playing around with a camera, acting out the scenes and trying out different angles and focal lengths. And I was saying to Peter that I preferred the original picture of Jack because it seemed more in keeping with what he was supposed to be feeling. He was acting out the punch he would have liked to plant on McNab’s fat kisser. True, in the same panel he does go on to say, “Pistols at twenty paces. Is that it? Am I dead?” But it’s not really in Jack’s nature to be so melodramatic as to drop to his knees and do a “why me, O Lord?” pose. Also, he doesn’t quite look like Jack in that picture. (Though he does look a bit like Martin!)
So I set to work to dig out those pictures for comparison. And that’s where my preconceptions took a pounding and this post changed tack. Because look at the prototype pencils and then at the way the page ended up. Suddenly it’s clear that Leo and Martin weren’t just fooling around with a camera – they were bringing the strip to life. And the dynamism of the finished page crackles with incredible energy and drama – thanks not only to Martin and Leo, but of course to Nikos’s vibrant colouring work too.
Over the last few years, I’ve seen Mirabilis gathering such narrative momentum, and got so used to being wowed by panel after panel of cinematic brilliance, that I’d been taking it for granted. And then I look back at our first faltering steps as a team and I appreciate how much thought, care and effort Leo and the others have been putting into the art. We’re now poised to start work on the next 200-page season (Spring) and we’ve got undersea kingdoms, Russian witches, Norse gods, Babylonian sphinxes and Indian demons – and that’s just for starters. I can’t wait to see how Leo and the guys turn all those ideas into living, breathing images!

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead

To properly appreciate just how disturbing Jefferson Airplane’s "White Rabbit" is, you need to burn all your furniture, daub luminous graffiti on the walls of your house, and crank up the hi-fi to a volume that could liquefy human bone. That’s the scene Michael Douglas comes home to in David Fincher’s The Game. His life is being taken to pieces and it’s going to take more than the King’s men to put it back together again.

What makes Grace Slick’s original version of the song so much more unsettling than most of the "White Rabbit" covers is the way she delivers it so plainly. The tone is hectoring, not haunting; fanatical, not febrile. And that’s what makes it powerful. The stark, shouty simplicity of the presentation. The whole nightmare otherworldliness is right there in the lyrics, and Ms Slick delivers them in a relentless martial rhythm that has its own unstoppable momentum. You are dropping down a rabbit hole and there's no parachute. Dressing it all up in a self-consciously “weird” melody would only weaken it.

Are there other examples of that in other media? There’s a superbly creepy one in The Fearless Vampire Killers. When Alfie Bass sits up on his bier there’s no showing-off in the photography. Polanski films it the scene as plain and stark and shocking as a dream. It’s funny at the same time, of course, but that only makes it more unsettling.

Or how about the ghost stories of M R James? Unadorned prose and almost a humdrum narrative frame from which the supernatural pokes through like a mouse in the skirting board. I find that much more shuddery than Lovecraft’s florid prose, always so anxious to assure us this is all very, very frightening. Likewise, there are more scares in one minute of Let The Right One In than in all the last decade’s output of Hollywood horror movies, precisely because Tomas Alfredson plays it completely unplugged.

The best episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is “The Body” where any attempt to dress up the drama with eerie music and clever-clever direction would insulate us from the raw emotion. Instead, Joss Whedon strips that all away and we’re left with no cosy refuge such as the usual fictional wrapper would provide. Result: forty-four minutes of intense drama that leave you genuinely shaken.

Can you think of other examples from prose, movies, music or comics where simplicity delivers a punch that could not have been achieved through showmanship?

Mirabilis - the graphic novels!

Okay, we've got a month of big news coming up and this is just the start of it. In a matter of weeks you'll be able to feast your eyes on the whole Winter season of Mirabilis in the form of two glorious full-color volumes. Each book is 112 pages and will be available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble for around $19.99 each (or £12.99 in Britain). When we have the hard release date and RRP we'll be announcing it here, along with the first look ever at the stupendous cover painting of Volume Two - really, it should be in the Guggenheim. Oh, and then there's the apps... Stay tuned!

Forced landing among the gods

“Above the May Day celebrations in Worplesdon in Surrey, the clouds part and the halls of Olympus can be seen. Down flies an airplane to land on the village green. It’s the Wright brothers, believed lost several months earlier after disappearing into a thick fog off the coast of North Carolina.”

That’s how it began: a throwaway paragraph from a big brainstorming document that I did years ago, right after we first came up with the concept of Mirabilis. I put down hundreds of scraps of ideas as they came to me, figuring it was the best way to build up a picture of how fantasy flowed and ebbed through the year.

Each month had a little descriptive line. January: “Some rather queer things have been happening lately.” February: “Did I dream that, or did it really happen?” March: “It’s true; my cousin saw it with his own eyes.” April: “There are new things under the sun.” And so on to November ("Half sick of shadows") to the end.

Fast forward a while. It's 2008. Mirabilis is due to appear in The DFC and Random House have commissioned the Gazetteer for rather a tidy sum. So now Martin and I are working on ideas that would make the twelve full-color spreads that will form the épine dorsale of the Gazetteer – and later, we envisaged, comprise a rather nice Mirabilis calendar.

That first version we weren’t sure about for a couple of reasons. The flying machine was based on a real design by Clément Ader from the 1890s. In real life it didn’t fly, of course, but the green comet effect could change all that. Trouble is, it looks too science fictional, and people would think we were trying to do steampunk. The other problem is the placement of Zeus and Hera, who appear to be montaged in rather than directly interacting with the action. Martin and I mulled over it for days. He wrote:

“I showed it to Dave Carson, who knows about the Mirabilis concept, and he had no idea what we were trying to achieve in the picture, and found it confusing.”

So, on to the second version. Now Martin has brought the gods into the picture by moving them across and having the line of Zeus’s arm connect with the action below. I wasn’t happy with the flying machine, though. It looked like a real historical Wright Brothers contraption. Snag is, authentic and all, at first glimpse you’d think it was flying backwards. Martin pointed out that was how it would really have flown. But it forces a double-take about the wrong thing. You want your viewer to be going, “Ooh, that plane has flown down to the village green from Olympus!” not, “Have they got that plane the wrong way round or something?”

Martin wrote:

“I think the machine we need to use is the Model A Flyer from 1907. It was the fourth machine they designed, the first to feature two seated occupants – a requirement to secure a US Army contract. It was the first to be 'mass' produced, not sure how many but they were also built in Europe – so the truly pioneering vibe of the first three Flyers is slightly lost. But it's the first design where we can show two occupants – except the brothers never flew together, at the request of their father to avoid a double tragedy.”

And that brings us to the third version. The line of action is much clearer now, and Martin suggested accentuating that by having the suggestion of a “vapor trail” down from Zeus’s hand. It’s also much more dramatic in the way the airplane is buzzing the cricketers. We discovered that Zeus’s many epithets included Phyxius, god of flight, so it’s reasonable that he might take an interest in Orville and Wilbur’s experiments. (He was also sometimes known as Terminalis, protector of boundaries, which explains why he would be observing a village cricket match.)

We were still not completely satisfied with the picture, and I suspect by this time that Martin was coming to the conclusion that it would work better if he chose what to illustrate, rather than have me foist impossibly complicated compositions on him!

In the end, the concept changed anyway. I felt that Worplesdon was getting enough coverage in Mirabilis (the Sidney Sime connection, you see) and we needed to show more episodes from around the world – specifically, from other parts of the Empire, to show the global transformation of the Edwardian era that Comet Meadowvane was causing. Hence the report to the Royal Mythological Society moved the whole thing over to India:

Dear Professor Bromfield and Doctor Clattercut

An extraordinary event took place during a recent cricket match between the royal court and the local British regiment. The court was 150 for 4 when a great rock slid like a cloud across the sky, and down from it came a buzzing machine made of wire, wood and brown paper.

The contraption landed in the middle of the pitch, driving two deep ruts right across from mid-wicket to the stumps despite the hardness of the ground at the time of year. I barely threw myself out of the way in time, after first giving the propeller a sound clout with my bat, whereupon a young fellow wearing a leather hat and goggles leapt out crying, “For Pete’s sake, mister, why’d you have to go do a thing like that?”

When my temper cooled a little, I discovered the two occupants of this aerial machine were brothers by the name of Wright. Having taken off from a field in North Carolina back in January, they flew into a storm and were forced to land on what they thought was Bermuda, but which turned out in fact to be the flying island of Laputa. The island was carried around the world by the trade winds, and by chance the brothers Wright had completed repairs on their vehicle and were ready to take off again just as they passed over our pitch.

The question is, would you say this occurrence is ground for abandoning the whole game, or did the court (as the umpires ruled) forfeit the match? We cannot resume play now because the monsoon has arrived.

Very truly yours, Prince Duleep Singh,
Lahore

Dr Clattercut replies: Please do not treat the brothers Wright too harshly, your royal highness. Americans don’t understand cricket and so they probably think they've done nothing worse than if they had disrupted a game of baseball.

Prof Bromfield: Yes, and in any case the harm is done. The umpires have the last word, no doubt about it. You’ll get nowhere arguing with them, any more than with the Fates.

Dr Clattercut: It is the Graeae, of course - the three “grey sisters” of Greek myth - who share but a single eye between them.