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In Praise of "Just Writing."
🕑 Added 2021-10-19 19:26:43 +0000 UTCThumbnails for Chapter Two are finished! I still have to review everything, but in my mind, right now, it feels good and solid and like it does what it needs to do. And my worst fears were in fact unjustified—the whole chapter only came out to 80-someodd pages (instead of the 176 that my lazy estimation gave me).
As ever, this post contains story spoilers.
Around these parts and elsewhere, I talk a lot about different approaches to tackling a story. There are many tricks and techniques to make a story easier to understand during the process of writing. Lots of ways to help see the forest for the trees. I've used things like the "Scene / Sequel" approach, and I've got my stack of post-it note story pages. The iterative notes->thumbnail->roughs->clean pages process has worked well for me in the past.
But sometimes there are problems you can't solve in the outline, or in sketches, or from a bird's-eye view. Sometimes sequences don't segue well from one to another. Sometimes I feel like a sequence feels out of place. And sometimes I just feel like everything's very loosely connected, in a way where I worry that I'm just handing the reader an arm full of wet spaghetti, saying, "enjoy!"
That's how I felt about parts of Chapter Two.
I wanted to stick in a "church" sequence, but I didn't know what, exactly, I wanted to do with it. I was anxious, approaching that section of the chapter. I had a few ideas: I wanted to see what the church looked like inside, I wanted DD to meet an amiable pastor, and I thought it would be funny if the pastor was cleaning bird droppings from the rafters (the church is full of birds, because the system of belief is bird-based). The other priority was that I needed to segue to DD sitting on a roof, watching the Cordelia in the distance, and I worried that the transition would be clumsy. I worried that I would be wasting precious time pursuing a scene that would need to be cut later. But did my best to push those worries aside, following my stated principles of "just try some weird stuff," and I started thumbnailing the sequence anyway.
I don't think I'm a lazy person—I'll do the hard work—but I always try to avoid doing extra work. I do a lot of prep, and I take a lot of iterative passes so that when I get to the point of "actually writing," ideally I do not waste a bunch of time putting down words that won't get used. In animation, I would always plan my scenes out pose-by-pose so I wouldn't get sent off in some wild direction by animating "straight ahead." When composing an image, I always start with the image boundaries, so I can control how the entire composition works, instead of starting at one point and winging it.
That said, the lesson I reinforced on Chapter Two is: sometimes you just have to write.
Approaching the church sequence, I read my previous pages so I knew where I was coming from, then just started drawing the panels I wanted to see. I had a handful of loose notes scribbled out—I pick and chose from them like candy in a bowl. Working straight-ahead, laying track as I was going, I put some birds in the rafters.
Meeting the pastor, DD presents her problem and asks, "what do I do?"
He says, "have you asked Her Celestial Majesty for advice?"
Skeptical, but not wanting to challenge the pastor on his belief within a place of worship, DD says, "hoooowwww?"
Thinking of all the birds in the rafters, I put, "seek wisdom from the birds."
Outwardly, DD scoffs at him, thinking his cryptic advice is silly. Inwardly, she takes the advice to heart, because why not? Silly or not, she hasn't heard anything better.
This little notion solved one problem and offered two new opportunities!
Now I knew how to segue to the next sequence; DD would start the next sequence on a rooftop, seeking advice from a stork, with the Cordelia in the background. I like this because it reveals that she's desperate for guidance, even if she puts on a facade of skepticism for the pastor.
Also, this ties in to stork imagery that I drew in the first few pages of the chapter, which at the time I included only because the imagery was pleasant and true-to-life for the location. But now that stork has increased relevance.
And! In a later chapter, when DD is jailed at the top of a tower, feeling hopeless, she can ask for advice from a pigeon roosting outside her window. The pigeon will seem to respond very helpfully (spoiler: the pigeon will not actually be responding).
Now, I'm not claiming this little sequence and its connections are brilliant or even that they will absolutely end up in the finished pages, but that's not the important point. The important point is that none of this was in my notes or my outline. It was a series of ideas that popped up only by working through the scene a line at a time. And yet: I got at least three useful connections out of it. I don't know about you, but during the writing process, if I am ever able to surprise myself with useful connections, that's a feeling you can't beat. The challenge of writing offers so much uncertainty that when you get even the smallest sequence that feels like "ha! everything is coming together!" the clouds part, the sun shines, and birds sing.
That's my little victory for this week, just reinforcing the notion that sometimes you have to push all the planning and strategizing out of the way and just start following one idea to the next, working in "real time," putting words (and pictures) in order.
Thank you for coming along on this deep dive into one little moment of the writing process.
Comments
Ben Hatke
I definitely love this.
