Dan

I’m not going to say it’s a good thing I was surfing instead of writing tonight, but this post by comic-industry veteran Mark Waid helped me clear out some mental baggage. Says Mark:

Anyway, I had six pages. About 28, 30 panels. And it took me longer to write the first half of that script than it has anything else to this day, because by the time you set up the problem (“We need a new coach!”), show how desperate the staff gets once the first few candidates prove unsatisfactory, ramp up the tension, and introduce the woman in the wheelchair, you’re already on page three. Of six.

And while the resultant solution (and lesson) is no doubt obvious to the experienced among you, it was only when I sweated my way into it that I realized one of the most fundamental rules of comics storytelling: start the story as late as possible.

I like to write short, and one of the reasons is all that extra stuff bores me. If Julia has a big job interview tomorrow morning, and in my head I’m thinking “okay, I need to write her getting up, being anxious, trying to figure out what to wear… blah blah blah waiting room blah ten-year-old copy of MacLean’s magazine blah okay now she’s in Mr. Warthrop’s office.”, that’s when I get blocked.

Lately I’ve been revisiting an old habit: I’ll start a short story, it looks promising, and then… I stop writing it. Instead, I just outline one of the other ideas I have every ten minutes. I do that because outlining is easy and writing the bits in between the points on your outline is the hard part. It’s, you know, the part that takes work. But Mark states the solution.

Don’t write the boring parts.

Face it, if a passage is boring to you, the writer, you can’t imagine a cool way to have Julia pick the shoes and skirt and blouse and jacket she’s going to wear to her interview… well, it won’t be interesting to your readers, either. Why have it in there at all? Our brains are, if nothing else, machines for filling in the cracks. Allude to Julia’s feet, sore even after twenty minutes sitting down in the waiting room, and we can all figure out for ourselves that she put on the wrong pair of shoes that morning.

About the latest short story, I realized I’d had an idea of what the next thing that happened was, and I wasn’t interested in it, so I wasn’t writing it. Instead, why don’t I just start as late into the scene as possible - in this case, the next scene. Show Julia at the end of her first day on the job, snooping in her boss’s files. Unless something important happened during the job interview - and it’s always possible to fill those details in later, if necessary - just let the reader imagine the boring parts.

Thanks, Mark. If it weren’t two in the morning, I’d get to work at once…

Tomorrow, then.

Among the creators that I admire, drifting gallantly in that hallowed constellation, is Kris Straub, creator of the webcomics Starslip, chainsawsuit, and F Chords (on hiatus).

Those are all well and good, but what really had me excited was his horror microfiction community site, Ichor Falls. In fact, I took an idea I’d had involving ears and the crud therein and wrote it up in such a way that it would fit into the site’s universe… only to find that the “Submit a Story” link was hopelessly broken. And now the site’s gone entirely, replaced by an “Account Suspended” message.

Frustrating! Is this a result of the same issue that took down webcomics.com?

Anyway, in the meantime my story will have to languish on DeviantArt (where, as the work of a deviant, it surely belongs). I hope Kris will reinvest in Ichor Falls soon; meanwhile, I support the guy and his desire to bust out hilarious comics all the time instead of web design or some other, less-fulfilling job. So read his comics, and then buy them.

Update: Ichor Falls is back online, but I still can’t submit stories. Perhaps someday “Earwax” will have a proper home (other than lodged in your ear canal, I mean).