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.

In his article Fire and Motion, Joel Spolsky talks about how all you need is to get a little more done every day. Time is on your side, if you just keep improving bit by bit. He’s talking about the game of inches in terms of slowly growing a software company, and I’m interested in it in terms of slowly growing into a writer.

It’s tough to keep writing. Now that I’ve been doing it a little more, I feel like the output is a little rushed and amateurish. That makes sense though, given that I’m an amateur. What matters is I’m writing at all. It’s not like I used to write better: it’s that I wouldn’t write, and would just spend a lot of time thinking about it. In my head everything would come together beautifully, but like the artist who struggles to translate what’s in his imagination onto the page, the raw act of writing is still unformed. And the only way to form it is to just keep practicing. Just keep writing at least a little, every day, all the time. Work on improving. But don’t stop just because it’s not awesome yet.

When I used to play the guitar, I loved the idea of being an awesome guitar player. But I was never that good when I practiced, so I didn’t practice. So I never played the guitar. When what I should have been doing was playing all the time, just a little. And keep getting better every day, just a little.

Well, writing means a lot more to me than playing the guitar. Enough so that I am willing to put up with not being as good as I want to be, and just embrace the struggle of getting there, story by story. Inch by inch.