Jaxon’s great cover over great underground comix including Richard Corben. Had to have it. Image attribution.
When I sit down to write I really only consider one audience: me.
I know that’s probably audacious considering I’m in a field where everyone is concerned with What Sells and What Doesn’t Sell. I don’t really care.
See, the thing is if I worry about or research What Sells I’m going to be behind the curve. I can’t afford to be behind the curve because I’m not anywhere near the road that curves one way or the other. I pay more attention to What Doesn’t Sell than anything else but only to know if I’m going to have trouble selling a story if I get brave enough again to send it out.
Like Modern Day SF. I like to write stories that aren’t necessarily set in today’s world, but maybe they’re only a few years ahead of us. I grew up a couple of favorite stories that were obviously set on Earth, just a few years ahead of the time I was reading them. They still hold up as being a few years ahead of Now though they were written in the 50s and 60s. So that’s the model I sometimes go for. Trouble is, I’ve run into a couple of publishers who don’t even want to look at that stuff and those had been places I’d wanted to send stuff. I suppose I should have sent it anyway, but I’m digressing from my topic. (more…)
Colin was surprised at how heavy the shotgun was. No one was going to understand until it was all over, but he couldn’t just do nothing. He dragged his sister’s wagon into the house and left mud tracks on the dining room’s white carpet. He’d get it for that, but he had to do something.
Mom would have to understand.
*****
“Where are you going?” His mother stopped cleaning the potatoes in the sink and wiped her forehead with the back of her purple gloves.
What you see is not necessarily what you get. The well-dressed man’s brain is filled with realistic though bizarre characters who will get under your skin. Image borrowed from here.
I recently finished a book by the crime writer Jim Thompson. If his name is unfamiliar to you, you may have seen one of the films of one of his books: The Getaway, The Grifters or The Killer Inside Me. Or maybe you saw his scripts filmed by Stanley Kubrick: The Killing or Paths of Glory. Or maybe this is the first time you’re hearing about him.
His stories are peopled with characters who are so twisted, so damaged that one cannot turn away from the story. It’s like each person he’s writing is such a train wreck that to not look is impossible. Pop. 1280 is the most twisted thing I’ve read since The Killer Inside Me. In Killer, you’re as involved as the main character in every depraved act that’s committed, complicit in the crimes. The same is true in 1280, but he adds a layer of racism that’s beyond uncomfortable and it’s even uncomfortable in the mind of the narrator.
Each book, written in first person, puts the reader deep inside a main character’s insidious brain squirming with creeping tendrils of evil and malice disguised as rational thought. It’s unnerving, to say the least. I couldn’t stop reading. I had to know what was going to happen next.
Dropping compelling characters into bizarre circumstances is certainly one way to keep me engaged in a story and Pop. 1280 is a master class in how to do it. Each chapter ends not just on a cliffhanger, but with the expectation that while that may be a nice place to stop you’d better not. If you do — well, let’s just say that no matter what you think might happen next it won’t hold a candle to what does happen. It’s not the shock value that kept me reading, it was that the darker the places his characters went the more it made sense. He drew me deeply into those parts of my psyche that I don’t often go. (more…)
I’ve mentioned a time or two that I spent some time writing and drawing my own comic books. Nothing big time. They were photocopied minicomics that I distributed by hand and through mail order ads in The Comics Buyer’s Guide.
This was still early days of the internet circa 1999 to 2001 and I didn’t have access to a scanner so I didn’t do a lot online. Believe it or not, a lot of things that younger people take for granted now were simply beyond my financial scope at the time.
The second to last comic I drew told a story about the birth of the main character’s child. It was pretty similar to what I experienced in the birth of my own child.
One of the last comics I drew had a much deeper effect on me though it was about an experience I shared with the entire country and many, many people around the world.
This isn’t the exact car (this photo is borrowed from Wikimedia Commons) but this is what I remember it looked like.
When I was growing up, my dad had a great sportscar, a Triumph TR-4. It was white and a convertible and sat two, though my brother and I would shoehorn ourselves into the space behind the seats. This was a cool car, and it was only later that I discovered it was British and that made it even cooler.
The car had a manual transmission and Dad would flip a switch and it would go into overdrive. (Don’t ask me to explain overdrive unless we’re talking about guitar sounds. I never understood it beyond “it’s extra gears”.) When I was old enough to learn how to drive, the family car was a Datsun B210 (a car I later killed by dozing off behind the wheel but that’s another story) which also had a manual transmission. It was the car I learned to drive on. My parents cringed as I learned how to shift gears.
And who hasn’t gone through that? If you aren’t a parent, you won’t know how it feels on both sides, but that’s okay. Trust those of us that have that it can be the stuff of nightmares.
That sound of grinding gears is something that’s instantly recognizable. In cartoons, films, and comedies we know that there will be stoppage, that some of the gears may crack or pop off their axles, that there may be smoke and heat. (more…)
“Pardon me,” the ghost said, “Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein.”
Electricity surges through the air and wraps me in a current of excitement. The papers on my desk flutter though the window to the library is closed. “But you are Professor Einstein, aren’t you?”
The old man shrugs. “Professor Einstein passed away.”
“Yes, I understand,” I say. I stand up. My fingertips hold the papers down, keep them from drifting to the floor. “But you’re him. You’re Albert Einstein.”
“Whatever makes you think that?” That white shock of hair is distinct. Who else could this be?
“Hold it.”
A woman wearing a black suit is pointing a ray gun at Professor Einstein. I wish I hadn’t seen all those science fiction B-movies now, they didn’t mix well with the whisky. She’s almost as tall as me and her suit was tailored, her shirt open to show some cleavage. She had bracelets on her left wrist that clattered against one another and she was wearing two-inch heels. “Who are you?” (more…)
I played with these as a child. Likely the inspiration for my belief in The Line. Pulled from here.
I believe in The Line.
When humans first demarcated space they started telling stories. “Yours,” pointing to one side of a Line drawn in the dirt with a finger or a stick; “Mine,” pointing to the other side.
Humans have evolved the line as they themselves have evolved, using it to define shapes of animals or other people in the service of telling a story. This culminated in the storytelling of cave paintings that started as early as 40,000 years ago.
As far as my limited research has gone on the subject of cave paintings it’s obvious that scholars don’t know what purpose the paintings served. Whether for religious purposes or to brag or communicate that hunting in the area was good is a mystery. For all anyone knows, it may be the earliest form of “Kilroy was here”-type graffiti. Regardless, the paintings are a form of storytelling. Pictograms go back at least as far as cave paintings and culminate in Sumerian and Egyptian cultures, becoming more than just ancient versions of Powerpoint presentations, but actual language. (more…)
Director Carol Reed and star Orson Welles in the sewers under Vienna during the filming of The Third Man.
It used to be that the hero would have to climb a mountain to find the sage old man in a lotus position waiting for him, apparently immune to the cold and wind and not needing any sustenance like food and water. The hero would then ask a really – I mean REALLY – silly question that would inevitably be answered with a cryptic “Because it is there” line or some such. Or the hero scales the cliffside in order to visit the teenaged oracle who’s higher than a kite and the sexual plaything of a suspect religious order. The oracle then mutters some barely intelligible riddle that the hero takes back to the horny old goats of the order and they ‘interpret’ it to mean what they want it to mean. Usually this involved the hero taking a powder away from the village so that they can do what they want without any interference from the do-gooder hero.
Seeking advice is as old as people are. We go to those we trust in order to gain validation for what we want to do or are already doing. That we trust anyone enough to seek their advice is amazing in this day and age. At least to me it is. There’s so much free ‘advice’ laying around waiting to be picked up that it’s hard to understand why there aren’t more success stories. (more…)
Each team member gets their turn at Magneto. How they get there is a subplot. Art by John Byrne. Image Attribution.
When I was growing up Chris Claremont and John Byrne (with Terry Austin, Glynis Wein and my favorite letterer EVER Tom Orzechowski) were taking comic books to new levels that are taken for granted now. Their run on Uncanny X-Men from 1977 – 1981 shaped how comics are made forever. What did they do? They built up anticipation with subplots that would run over the course of several issues as a ‘D’ or ‘C’ story of a couple of panels or one page or so and then graduate it to a ‘B’ story for a couple of issues before it became the ‘A’ story. The one featured on the cover.
It was classic soap opera storytelling but it was NEW. Well, not absolutely new, but they did it in a way that was so fresh it appeared new. I suspect they learned it from what Paul Levitz was doing as he was writing his classic Legion of Superheroes runs and he did the same thing. Anyway, that’s enough about comics for the nonce. (I always wanted to use ‘nonce’ in a blog post. Check that one off my list.)
This is what influenced me in storytelling, these amazing comics that took me places I’d never been before, told me stories in ways I hadn’t seen before. That particular run, Uncanny 108 to 143, made me want to make comics. I wanted to draw like Byrne (with Austin) and write with the style of Claremont but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what to do. It took me years to realize there was a secret I hadn’t picked up on and even then I wasn’t sure how to go about discovering it. (more…)
It may take a lot of coffee to work through Writer’s Block. Are you prepared for that? Picture from here.
Writer’s Block is the invention of a scribe who couldn’t turn an assignment in on time, who had too many other things on his mind (yeah it was a man who invented the cop-out, go figure), or was just plain lazy.
Well, maybe not. Maybe being blocked is real. Maybe. But there are ways around it, over, under, through it and the determined writer has to be prepared to find those ways. Most of those ways are constituted in actually doing the work.
Anxiety is what it is. One isn’t necessarily ‘blocked’ but rather is anxious about either the work or something associated with it. Overcoming it is basic problem-solving:
1- What do you want?
2 – Why can’t you have it?
3 – What are you prepared to do to get it?
Being blocked is when the writer gets to the second question and says “I don’t know!” and that’s where the cop-out is. Right there? See it? I. Don’t. Know.
Block is continued when the writer doesn’t have any idea of how to overcome the anxiety that has afflicted him. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do to get what he wants, which is to Write. So instead of calling bullshit and working through the ‘block’, some writers crawl into a bottle (liquor, pills, whatever) and go down for the count, making the anxiety worse.
The best cure I’ve found for being blocked is to actually write. Not what I want to write, but something else, something light and fluffy and not at all related to what I should be working on. The old brainbox is stuck on something, some problem, and it’s all rooted in the subconscious. Time to dig our your Freud, kids, and examine what’s in your head. For instance, I’m writing this post in early June because I’m stuck at a point in my novel where I need to solve a problem that’s going to get out of hand if I don’t think it through a little better.
So yeah, writer’s block is real and has been studied and studied and studied by people smarter than you or me. Being blocked is no excuse. It’s a cop-out to say “I’m blocked so I’m not writing.” That’s an unacceptable response to your craft if one is a serious writer. A lack of inspiration is one thing and also easily solved by a writer who wants to write: go somewhere and open your mind.
You need stimulation but don’t go overboard. You still need to sit down and write. Remember the recipe for a good story: butt in chair, fingers on keys.
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