Posts tagged “writing”
Collin David, by way of Frederator - “Why Adventure Time is the Ultimate Cartoon”
I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing a lot lately. I’m a firm believer in respecting the intelligence of your reader or audience. I also believe that not everything needs a backstory, or an explanation, or to be spelled out and telegraphed home.
I am reminded of an interview with Harold Ramis in which he explained how the studio heads wanted Groundhog Day to include a scene that explained why Bill Murray was trapped in a repeating time loop — a scene that involved a jilted ex-lover and a voodoo curse. I know, right? Obviously, this was ultimately discarded. And not only does the movie not suffer from its omission, it is a stronger and smarter movie because of it.
I recently revisited Superbrothers’ Less Talk, More Rock essay on the language of video games. It’s a thoughtful piece about how to communicate ideas and emotions effectively in games by eliminating the “disruptive talk” — the exposition, the hand-holding, and the noise. I think it’s a solid philosophy for all creative work.
Nick Lowe on style
I’ve been using Huffduffer to bookmark found audio into a custom podcast. Tonight I re-listened to an interview with songwriter Nick Lowe. His thoughts on developing a style—and how affectations eventually meld together into something original—apply to any creative endeavour, cartooning included.
Obviously, like everybody, your first efforts are really just rewrites of your heroes’ songs. It’s basically the same song with a couple of words changed. And you get very keen on somebody. And then you use them up. You sort of rewrite all their stuff, and you move on to somebody else, and do the same to them—rewrite all their stuff. And somebody else comes along, and you do it them.
And then one day, you’ll put a little bit of the first person, whose songs you all rewrote, into your latest fad, and you have a little touch of these two things going on. And then maybe a third element will come in on a song you’re writing. So you’ll have three different influences in there. And then the more you do it … ‘Cause it’s all been done. It’s all been written. There is nothing new under the sun, especially nowadays. Absolutely nothing. But what IS new is the way you tell it, and eventually, you have so many influences in a song, that it just turns into a new style.
Conquering writer’s block
I sat down this afternoon to fill in the missing holes of a story for a comic that has been occupying my thoughts for the last six months. It has otherwise been in a perpetual state of nearly-there-but-not-quite. Every time I sat down to piece it into completion, I found myself blocked, often avoiding the thing entirely.
Today I unplugged the Internet. I broke the story down onto post-its, and laid it out visually on my drawing table, rather than continue to stare at the same words on my computer. I could instantly see which holes needed to be filled, which elements were misplaced, and got a birds-eye view at the beats and rhythm of the pages. Two hours later, I had whittled sixty pages of story down to twenty-three, and have every panel accounted for.
Austin Kleon shares this advice from Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin, which sums up my afternoon of story-hacking perfectly.
The third step was crucial; it wasn’t until the pieces were arranged on more than a single, linear axis that I saw what needed fixing, what was missing, and what needed to go.
