Back to Writing

With SS2 now trickling along with access to computers setting my pace, and more specifically Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, to use my now precious free time (which is relatively abundant compared to say... yours) I am returning to writing for my second comic outing. Curiously I've actually finished a draft of a project I plan to do third or fourth in comics, but it just took me and wrote itself more or less. I need to do a hefty revision with one aspect of the story but that's detail, not thought.

Anyway, this next comic steps up the ambition by several magnitudes like an electron jumping from 1st shell to 4th shell. It will be set in a city, meaning I will probably have to spend several months on perspective drawings. It also involves central to the storyline - light, as in the central character's special ability is actually using light based powers, which means I'll have to draw/ink for light effects in some plausible way. (plausable in a visual sense, not in a scientific sense).

Then the subject matter is infinitely more complicated than FOWP being that I want to create a romantic feminist narrative. And by that I don't mean romanticized feminism. I mean I want to look at the womens movement in conjuction with romantic relationships. I don't know if I can write romance, so I'm just writing what I like, because I know what I like, and at the very least I will have a romance I can read.

The key thing is though, the structure. You have an idea, that's actually the easy part I wanted to do something in the spirit of Shojo along the same lines as Manga pioneer Tezuka the Ted Roosevelt if I may of Manga. Except of course by 'line' I don't mean 'linework' I just mean that the target market this time is I guess is the feminist values I would want to impart to any girl, women or fembot that I cared about.
Princess Knight / リボンの騎士 credited as the first manga targeted at a female audience

Plus, I white guy dressed in art deco styling killing African children has I admit, limited appeal to a female audience. SS2... well lets just say I don't want to meet the girl that's a fan of that.

Anyway, what was I saying, yeah the idea was simple, I was like 'I want to do something in the spirit of Shojo manga, but I want to subvert it with a feminist bent' and I think I have in my central character a good embodiment of the modern girls predicament in the women's movement. That is confused and skeptical about the whole fucking thing.

I've even done my research, having read Female Chauvinist Pigs and The Female Eunuch which admittedly takes a while to get going but I ended up dog-earring 2/3 pages for notes and references and quotable quotes and then alas, the roof leaked directly onto my collection of books where my parents had stashed them in their endless attempts to conceal the fact of my existence.

But anyway, the theory, the idea, the concept, the characters, easy. Now structure, that's a whole 'nother cheesecake. For example, FOWP was another of those 'it writes itself' plots, I just wrote down on a bunch of cards the events eg. 'oil drilling' and 'hall massacre' and 'disease outbreak' and then I just slid the cards around into a linear plot that made sense. The thing was it all took place in 24 hours (story timeline). Furthermore if I could reduce the role of the monster to 'Sherlock' or 'The Doctor' in literary device terms, it provided all the action. The role of Professor Salif was the 'Watson' or 'Companion' role even though they were in opposition. The professor shouted out and essentially explained what was going on for the benefit of the reader, whereas the monster just rampages.

The plot is simple, the monster escalates in a linear fashion as everything else attempts to resist until finally critical mass is reached and the monster is stopped. There isn't even really a twist, at least not one that 'turned the whole thing on its head'.

But this next project when it comes to structure, I don't have such a simple B-grade movie plot to riff off. I have three characters operating on three intersecting timelines I have to work together to I feel cover all angles appropriately, and even though writers like Takehiko Inoue make it look easy in masterpieces like 'Real' I find it extremely difficult to combine... well I need to elaborate more on some details to tak about the pieces fitting together.

So firstly imagine the Tri-force:
link via sonic-penguins

In the Zelda series you had Zelda herself embodying 'Wisdom'(yet she was always the one getting captured by Gannon) Gannon the villain of the piece embodying 'Power' and finally the hero Link embodying 'Courage' (even though he was often the one who actually turned up prepared).

So this central threesome is only slightly different, I have the main character who is in this bizarre love-triangle, where she has to reconcile with tri-force numero two 'healthy relationship' which essentially is the romantic story, (and before anyone asks, no I won't be incorporating the rather extreme militant-lesbian-feminist dogma into the 'healthy relationship' part). Then there's her conflict with the villain of the piece 'unhealthy fixation'.

And here's the problem I end up with 3 timelines, the 1 timeline has to thread its way subtley betwixt the two other threads. In other words, I have to reconcile a storyline of a romance with a story line of a conflict/vendetta. All the while making sure I get my take on feminism across.

Thusly thuserson, I now have written the synopses of each storyline tri-force, now I have to unite the tri-force, and just because I want to do it, doesn't mean necessarily it can be done.

But this is the beauty of writing. You come across intractable plotting problems that force you to be (da Da DAH!) creative, thus a story you set about writing can suddenly evolve into something you didn't expect it to be.

I think bad writers in my view choose plot over idea, which I endeavor to shy away from, if the story doesn't serve the message, that's what I have to ditch, it means potentially if the characters I've created ultimately serve as a distraction from what I'm trying to achieve I may have to abandon the story all together and come up with another medium/narrative.

The second most exciting thing about the creative process in writing is actually born of narrative fallacy, I experienced it in FOWP when while I was reading it, a bunch of narratives I hadn't actually planned on had simply written themselves into the script. Infact so many scenarios were workable into that particularly handy parable that I had to cut a bunch of content because I would still be drawing today if I had left them in. I probably would have just ended up drawing history.

But perhaps an example in narrative fallacy is best represented by 'No Country For Old Men' as a commentary on the war on terror. Think about it, man stumbles across an unexpected treasure in a dessert, getting himself implicated in a drug warfare.

Then we see Mos go through a cat and mouse game using every ounce of ingenuity to hold onto his prize against an enemy that didn't play by the rules. The enemy ended up being something every character had engaged without understanding, and seemed to fight based on incomprehensible 'principles' and didn't respond to money and all that shit until eventually the best course of action was simply to pull out, withdraw, retire.

Fits kind of neat doesn't it? Except I just made that all up, it can still be extracted from it, but as far as I know Cormac McCarthy has never suggested it was analogous to anything. It's just a story. It isn't like George Orwell's Animal Farm or 1984 both clearly diadactic.

Mine will be diadactic, but I expect unexpected narratives because that's simply what happens when you are tuned into feminist issues. They simply crop up all over the place, any double standard or insidious subtle repression or reinforcement suddenly jars in your brain. So I'm sure my characters will interact in ways that are straight forward, like 'whose driving tonight?' for example, and being able to extract some deeper meaning (if I want) out of it.

Anyway, back to sewing the Tri-Force together.