Log 4.1 Reflections

I got my last piece done despite being dogged by illness. A month of hard graft transformed itself into 4 days of bliss as I became inspired by what I was writing.

I've heard talk that the idea of artists being "magically" inspired, of being swept off ones feet by an idea, is a myth to make ones work seem more mysterious. That artists are in fact crafts people and spend long hours learning a skill. A rather cynical academic approach, in my eyes. Why would anyone sit and stare at a blank page and then string words together in the nowhere of their offices if not for love? Money? Do me a favour. Writing ain't worth money. It's too painful.

Anyway.

I felt like I'd finally found a way to clearly express all those idea's I've had building up over the years, without degrading or relegating any of them. That was quite something.

So it's turned a new sorta leaf for me, in that I'm now looking into graphic novels as a medium for the next month. The novels will take a back seat as I immerse myself in the unsung complexities of comic books: the terminology, the style, the collaborative elements. Writing scripts rather than prose, I guess. Not that I'd be able to avoid writing prose.

There's something about their "punchy"ness that I enjoy. No beating around the bush, no drawn out reflections on root vegetables. Just POW. Pow.

So I read a couple of the last couple of days, PREACHER and CONSTANTINE (odd how my last post actually reflects the use of CAPITALS in scripts, as if I was trying to say something to myself, or maybe I'm doing that now and there's nothing odd about it at all and it's just a coincidence).

With the course I've managed to work on my dialogue and narrative so that "stuff happens" and I don't just think and reflect at length on the nature of root vegetables (a habit I was getting into on my own). To begin with my greatest struggle was not stringing words together to create pictures or emotions, that I had at least a rudimentary grasp of, but creating a...dialogue?...a beginning, a middle and an end. Creating obstacles and resolutions. Now I'm getting that down clearer and clearer, and I've just finished penning a first draft of a chapter/episode/issue. Complete. Beginning, middle, end. Short, simple.

"Short, sweet prose" Alan said, "don't try to astound". Graphic novels are good for that, writing them is good for that, since I'm just trying to get to the point. None of the emotional impact is lost, it seems to me, the way I feared it would be if I didn't draw everything out and use big words or essay-ist explanations.

Just POW. Like a breaking wave.

After the last month my dialogue is good enough for me to compose a sequence and not feel like it's just myself talking to myself. If the parts of the course devoted to scene and characterisation taught me that my language creates a bigger picture, that it should resonate within itself and amplify itself through its continuity within the piece, then dialogue has shown me that the story is a DIALOGUE. It was the essential missing ingredient from my understanding of art (thanks Jo), or my most unrealised ingredient. I feel like I can make stories happen now.

So i wrote this narrative, an introduction in first person, a meeting with an old friend, a flashback. I penned in a few brief notes on movement and posture as I went through, and visualised the scene.

Came to 1200 words.

And I have no descriptions of the frames.

The frames, man, the frames! It's a whole other world. Perhaps because graphic novels are broken down in scripts into chunks - dialogue, scene, caption - the nature of prose is easier to grasp. And fuckin hell its fun to work on a comic. It's fun! I'm enjoying myself. Why does this feel like a bad thing?

Anyway.

I realised that I have no idea what the frames look like, how they run in sequence. I have a basic idea of a man walking through a city and ending up at a church during the first page, so there's this basic idea next to a developed dialogue and it's hard to piece them into a NARRATIVE, to unite them.

That'll be the next challenge, and its a challenge that wouldn't have even presented itself where I to stick to prose. Probably because I'm a bad prose writer, but ya know...that's by the by. Something about having to synch everything in a graphic novel feels more complicated than synching it in prose - perhaps because the dialogue and the scene are, in the case of a graphic novel, different mediums.