Q&A 34: Writing techniques

Zander Cannon asks:
"When writing, do you work from a structured plot and flesh out scenes, or do you bank a bunch of loose dialogue and character interactions and then build out the story around that? Or some secret third method?"

Zander is a great comic writer and artist with a unique style (check out his brilliant series KAIJUMAX and the new SLEEP) and I am sure he can see (to an extent) what is going on behind the curtain of my work. The reality is that it's both things at once. The need to balance character moments and underpin the plot are conflicting elements of my work. They battle against each other constantly.

The pace of my work sets up a tension between these two things. The mode of delivery, serialized on the web with pages each representing an individual story beat (even if that is within a discrete scene), makes me wary of dragging. I was recently recommended a popular webcomic that was very artfully drawn and carefully written, but my reaction when I saw it was one of creeping disappointment, as a long sequence of almost identically composed pages delineated a not-that-long conversation. The next scene was another long series of pages of static, talky panels, all worked visually to the exact same level. My immediate response was "how can anyone tolerate this?" – because I am a terrible person. My approach has been honed to be - metaphorically - banging a drum or blowing a whistle every day. LOOK AT ME! I say. Again and again and again. There is no guarantee that this is what anybody but me wants.

Of course, a long graphic novel has space for protracted digression, and nothing is ever wrong. My appetites are jaded, and I know they are. But I am wary of letting the grass grow under my feet in a webcomic or serialised work. This doesn’t mean there isn’t room for quiet, or reflection in this kind of material - Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tokyo These Days is both of these things, but it is also compelling visually and narratively. It is constantly on the move. I like to keep my characters on the move, from place to place and scene to scene. Without that movement I feel like I’m only doing half the job.

As my process has formalised over the years, plotting has become a lot more important. I have to have a sense of a destination for a story, even if it changes as I work. In 2022 I attended a talk by the Italian cartoonist and illustrator Bianca Bagnarelli, who has written and drawn a lot of short story comics. I struggle with that format, so I asked her how she fit things in to six or eight pages. She said that she thought of a good, splashy ending and worked towards it. I’d only ever thought of endings as a vague shape on the horizon that slowly came into view as you neared it – feeling rather than a fixed point – and that has worked for me over the years. But I have written a number of stories since I asked that question that used Bianca’s technique, and it has been repeatedly helpful.

Before I really nailed down my writing process (when I was forced to, submitting provisional arc synopses and scripts every month for Giant Days), the first few weeks of any Scary Go Round, Bobbins or Bad Machinery story would be exploratory, vague, and dialogue driven. I would get a sense of where I wanted to go next by writing these little sequences, four or five pages at a time. They were foundational to my “style”, but not economical in terms of effort. The 22-page Giant Days issues (note my requested two pages more than most direct market books have these days) were the shortest things I’d written, so I had to cut back on my little digressions. The self-published Giant Days (1-3) are all longer than that. Giant Days didn’t lean heavily on plot (with the three-year undergraduate arc doing much of the heavy lifting without ever needing to come to the foreground) so it had space to be more digressive. Other books I did after that (By Night, Wicked Things, Steeple’s initial arc) saw more complicated plots eating up the limited page count and they suffered for that. I had to write them plot first, because there was no other way to do it. If I didn’t plot first, I’d run out of pages. The digressive, whimsical asides that I most enjoyed were often reduced to a panel, or cut altogether. But this was a learning process for me. On Giant Days, I could fit a complete plot AND as many fun character moments as I wanted into a single 22-page issue because there weren’t too many moving parts. That wasn’t possible in the other series.

So, since those three projects, I have approached writing differently, and I will spend time on character moments in a way that exists both inside and outside the project. When a story is in its earliest for, I will sit with pencil and a lined pad and noodle out character dialogue and silly little faces and poses, a liminal space for the kind of exploration that used to make up the first two weeks of a Scary Go Round story.

Some of this will go into the page-by-page plot breakdown sheet, to be used in the final scripting stage. Some of it will never be used, and will likely be forgotten. Some of it is very throwaway and inessential. Sometimes it is simply a way of working out whether there is anything in a story at all, as I do throw a few away at this stage. But it helps me reconnect with the characters when I am moving from Steeple to Solver or Destroy History or something else. It’s exploratory and improvisational, the closest my creative process gets to “play”, in contrast to my plot work, which is (in theory at least) disciplined problem-solving.

The plot is the drum-beat and the fun character stuff is the blown whistle, and I have to actively consider both simultaneously. The visual component, and my own demand for the story to march forward relentlessly, seems to require this of me. The economy of comics, the restricted word count and the time taken to draw anything to a half-decent standard, means that a lot has to be discarded before the rubber meets the road.

So, I suppose the short answer to Zander’s question is that I bank the character stuff and I flesh out the plot. And the secret third method is working towards a pre-conceived finale. I hope that answers the question.

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I have almost exhausted the Q&A pile, but not quite! More answers soon!