Sara Ryan

Writing comics has stayed on my mind since I wrote my last post, in part because I’m closing in on finishing the script for my upcoming graphic novel for DC Vertigo, Bad Houses. And I’ve realized what has helped me the most as a comics writer: hanging out with cartoonists, listening to them complain about scripts.

So I thought I’d ask some artists for the advice they’d like to give novice comics writers, and share it here as a public service.

First up is Ron Randall, who says:

Please do not direct the artist to draw something “big, impressive, spectacular, or awesome.” Do not instruct the artist to “outdo himself,” or to “really impress me with this shot…” A capable and engaged artist will draw things well, whether instructed by the writer to do so or not. Vague, generic instructions like these are not helpful or “inspirational.” Quite the opposite. They are maddening and infuriating. Worse yet, they sound amateurish. If you want to get inspired work out of the artist, look at their past work or talk to them to determine where their strengths and enthusiasms are, and incorporate those elements into your script as much as possible. If you don’t know who the artist is before you write a script, it’s a safe bet they’ll be happy to see a story that isn’t laden with arbitrary details or structured like a TV episode– filled primarily with people walking and talking their way through abstract problems.  Remember– you are working in a collaborative and a VISUAL medium. You get the best out of a collaborator the way you get the best out of any relationship: by treating him/her with respect, and keeping their interests in mind, as well as your own.

One last shot– it’s better by far to have a character’s traits, temperament and abilities revealed by actions rather than dialog or description. (Thanks to Kurt Busiek for that one…). When you figure out how to do that, you’ll be on your way to becoming a writer.

Thanks, Ron!

It was probably in Cricket. Or maybe I saw it on 3-2-1-Contact! Or, heck, maybe it was a plain old school assignment. Anyway, sometime far Back in that very long conceptual Day, I encountered a Thing that involved telling a robot how to make you a sandwich. You’d write down the steps, and then the interrogation would begin:

Did you tell the robot how to unscrew the peanut butter jar? Or how to identify which jar contains peanut butter? Or where the knife is? Or how to open the silverware drawer? The point of the exercise was to demonstrate how easily you could screw up the seemingly simple task by leaving out essential steps. (And, possibly, to assuage the fears of any of us who might have been worrying about robots taking over the world. Clearly, they weren’t too bright. They had a ways to go.)

When I approach a comics script, I often have that robot in mind. Thinking of the robot helps me to avoid a mistake that’s very common for writers who are new to the comics format: including multiple actions in a single panel description.

But wait, I hear you say, there are, like, ten actions on this Captain America cover!

Fair enough. There’s certainly a lot going on. But each character is only performing a single action. It’s just as though Cap & Billy were caught in the middle of giving those Nazis what for by an intrepid photographer — Jimmy Olson, no doubt.

Seem obvious?

It may seem less so when you’ve started writing your script and you’ve got something like:

PANEL ONE

He puts the glass in the sink, goes downstairs to the garage, gets into the car and drives away.

It’s a perfectly reasonable (if inelegant) sentence. In comics, though? That is impossible to execute in a single image.

How about a panel for glass-in-the-sink, a panel on the stairs, a panel to open the car door, another to shut it, another to turn the key in the ignition, and you might want to have one with the garage door going up, unless he’s maybe so angry or drunk that he’s just gonna back the car right into it.

But here’s the cool thing: you don’t HAVE to include all of those images as panels. You could, for example, cut right from the glass to him in his car on the highway. Or you could slow it down farther. Maybe you want to show that it’s a struggle for him to make it down the stairs, so you split that up into multiple panels. Or maybe you move in closer to the glass itself, and something’s reflected in it that tells the reader why this guy is then going to get into his car.

What you can’t do is everything all at once.

Saw this passage as I was deleting a screenful of spam comments. Seems like it’s been Babelfished a few times?

Now I think if he’s curious, he’ll establish eye touch. If he smiles that’s a green fine for you say “hi”.

If he knows you he titillates you a lot, he clashes his hand against yours. The virtually sudden reaction might be the best to number out real affairs about that somebody. Spontaneousity isn’t leading on. Try to scare that individual, or just take him by surprisal and see what happens.

I love the not-quite-right-yet-still-somehow-evocative language. Establish eye touch! That’s a green fine! Spontaneousity! Take him by surprisal!

I can just picture their clashing hands as they number out real affairs.

In other news:

• Have you ever wanted personalized signed copies of my books? (If you haven’t, you know, that’s okay, ’scool, I’ll just be, uh, over here…) Now you can order them! The lovely folks at local independent bookstore A Children’s Place are making them available. Just order what you want and include the name of the person or persons who’ll be getting them. I’ll go to the store and sign the books, and A Children’s Place will mail them to you! So easy! (Okay yeah, you still have to pay for them.)

• I recently did an author chat (on the INTERNET!) with some of Beth Gallaway’s students. It was super fun and they asked a lot about writing comics, which led me to conclude that I ought to post about the aforesaid activity. And how it resembles getting a robot to make a sandwich. TRUE! So that will happen soon. Ish.

So as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to the relief of many among my friends and acquaintances. A chorus of folks has been telling me for years that my Buffy illiteracy represented both a gaping lack in pop subcultural knowledge and a bunch of fun out on which I was missing.

I concede. And yet, I’m glad I waited. I watch two or three episodes at a time — I can get through a season in a weekend, assuming deadlines and non-screen-based life don’t interfere — and that means I watch differently.

Sure, I’m finding my Buffy binge-viewing  fun: Don’t Have To Wait So Long To See What Happens, More Witty Banter Per Day, Plus There Is The Amusement To Be Derived From The Morphing of Cast Member Hairstyles and Fashion.

But I’m also finding it useful.

When you consume a lot of stories in a row — perhaps especially, as in this case, a lot of related stories — it gets easier to see how they’re put together.

There’s less time between when you first see the rifles on the wall and when they’re fired.

Character arcs also come into clearer focus when experienced in a compressed fashion.

In my own work, I’m trying to become, as my yoga teachers would say, more intentional about pacing and structure. Making and working from more detailed outlines is part of that process. (I seem to do better when I operate under constraints, even if I’m the one imposing them.) Apparently, another part of said process is absorbing story-structure thinking via multiple-episode-watching osmosis.

(Maybe what I’m really working on is my capacity to rationalize…)

Head on over to Chasing Ray for the latest What A Girl Wants post, “On the eternally infamous bad girl.”

And as usual, I’m pairing a link to the latest post with a repost of one of my responses to an earlier post in the series. This one was my answer to Colleen’s question about book recommendations for girls for holiday gifts. And you know, um, St. Patrick’s Day? It’ll be all about the book-buying, right?

At the risk of being a. obvious and/or b. a suckup, I would like to begin by suggesting that many fine books one could purchase for a twelve year old girl for whatever holidays one might celebrate have, in fact, been written by my esteemed fellow What A Girl Wants panelists.

That said, I’ll do what I’ve done so often in previous responses to this series: return to a book that was highly significant to my twelve year old self. In fact, I mentioned this title in my first WAGW response, but I have more to say.

I reread Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising every year around this time. Will Stanton comes into his power as an Old One as his family celebrates first his birthday and then Christmas. The weight of the struggle between the Light and the Dark is balanced by the weight of holiday traditions, both within Will’s family and in the larger world. Over and over, Will is pulled away from a warm, festive context to confront the menace of the Dark. Over and over, he sees himself with double vision, both as the eleven year old boy he still technically is and the Old One that he is, too: alert to threats, and all too aware of the limitations of the adults around him.

Am I making the book sound grim, too depressing to be a holiday gift? It isn’t. There’s affection, there’s humor, there’s adventure. But once Will is fully conscious of his identity as an Old One, Cooper never lets the reader forget that his life and the way he relates to those around him has really, significantly, irrevocably changed. And the constant awareness of that fundamental shift in the protagonist’s relationship to his world, even as the reader is pulled along through the turns and twists of the plot — that’s one of the qualities that sets The Dark is Rising apart, making it a book that a reader can return to, even when she’s very far away from twelve.

Head over to read others’ responses (that’s part one of three) to that question if you missed them, and also, of course, to the Bad Girl post I linked above!

Funny thing.

When you write a post that resonates strongly (counting LJ, Facebook, and sararyan.com, that’s more comments than I’ve gotten on a post approximately ever, and I appreciate all of them) you find yourself suddenly shy. Or rather, I do. I don’t know if you do. But if you do? I totally get it.

See, FYI, new readers, I don’t write posts like that all the time. Not even close. I have massive respect for the bloggers at sites like Shapely Prose and Racialicious, sites devoted to topics — body, gender, race, pop culture — that regularly attract lots of passionate commenters, not to mention scores of vicious trolls.

Over here, well –  mostly I write about the books & comics I’ve written,  my writing process and associated life-organizing nerdery, upcoming and just-past appearances, and other random bits of my days. Sometimes I write about other people’s books and comics.

And I post pictures, mostly of street art, and also (like the rest of the Internet) of my cat. Cases in point:

<Eddie Izzard voice>So…um…yeah…</Izzard>

That’s mostly what you’ll find, new folks. Every so often I get passionate and inspired, and write posts that more closely resemble actual essays, but I just want to be clear; they’re the exception, not the norm.

Welcome, and I hope you stick around anyway. :)

…but here I am.

I was reading the introduction to a book, a book with stories in it from authors whose work I love, a book I was looking forward to reading.

And there was a reference to “gay, lesbian, and transgender.” Several times, throughout. “Gay, lesbian, and transgender.”

Okay, so I am not the biggest fan of the actual word “bisexual.” I will concede that it has a certain seventies, bow-chicka-bow-wow quality. I prefer the offensive-to-some, inclusive-to-me term queer.

I also have a certain sympathy with my friend Jack, whose version of the seemingly ever-expanding sexual identity acronym, what Nicola Griffith calls the Quiltbag, is GLBTQWTF. But in the context of what appeared to be intended as a careful enumeration of possible identities, the omission of bisexuality felt deliberate, and it was hard not to interpret it as a slight.

Here’s why. People who self-identify as bisexual are very, very familiar with (and tired of) hearing variations on both “Oh, come on, admit it, you’re really gay” and “Poser, you just want to co-opt a queer identity — you’re really straight.” Doubting the existence of bisexuality is common enough, both inside and outside the queer community, that there’s a Wikipedia entry for “bisexual erasure.” A common assumption is that if you have a same-sex partner, clearly you’re really gay, and if you have an opposite-sex partner, obviously you’re really straight — and have been all along, regardless of all your previous experiences, patterns of attraction, etc.

I beg to differ.

There was a time in my life when I’d find a way to announce my sexual identity to any new acquaintance. You could not stop me, no matter how awkward the segue. “Really, you’re a Taurus? That’s so interesting — I’m bisexual!”

I don’t feel the need to do that any more, in part because hey, I’ve written these books that totally have queer characters in them, and you know, that’s really kind of a tip-off! (Leaving aside the deeply problematic nature of assuming that anyone who writes about The Gay must obviously be some version thereof.)

But you know? When fans write me, as they gratifyingly do, and thank me for writing about lesbians, I do not write angrily back to demand that they read Empress again, and notice that Nicola Lancaster doesn’t use that word to define herself. And Battle Hall Davies is lesbian, and that’s very clear in Rules, so, really, I tell myself, it’s not that big a deal that they don’t get that Nic is actually bi. I mean, even though there are, thankfully, more now than there used to be, it’s not like there are gigantic shelves full of books about teenage lesbians. So if readers want to “read” Nic as lesbian, who am I to stand in their way?

Well, evidently, sometimes I am someone who wants to take a stand against bisexual erasure.

Here are some things I believe about sexual identity:

• It exists on a continuum.
• Where you are on the continuum today may not be where you are tomorrow, or next year, or ten years from now.
• There is such a thing as — as a T-shirt I had in the nineties but was rarely brave enough to wear proclaimed — a Kinsey π.
• We like to put things, and people, into clear-cut categories. They don’t always fit.

[A character is in the midst of attempting to describe a church spire that he sees outside his window every day.]

Terms swarm up to tempt me in the course of this description: Greek Orthodox, Romanesque, flying buttress, etc. These guessing words I find junked into my brain in deranged juxtaposition, like files randomly stuffed into cabinets by a dispirited secretary with no notion of what, if anything, might ever be usefully retrieved. Often all language seems this way: a monstrous compendium of embedded histories I’m helpless to understand. I employ it the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars. They don’t. Yet I go around forming sentences. (Chronic City, p. 125)

There are authors out there — I know, I’ve read their blogs — for whom writing, most of the time, is a giggly delight. Inventing richly-detailed, sparkly worlds full of fascinating characters and thrilling events! Writing considered as Getting Away With Something! Gosh, I just can’t believe I get to do this! HEY, KIDS, LET’S PUT ON A NOVEL!

Those folks represent one end of a continuum of attitudes. The other end is occupied by Mr. Earbrass’s Hand-Permanently-Attached-To-Furrowed-Brow School, for whom writing is a constant torment. The unbearable and unbridgeable distance between the idea and the words on the page! The horror of composition, matched only by the horror of revision, followed by the unspeakable traumas attendant upon publication and reception from the outside world! YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND HOW DIFFICULT IT IS.

I readily confess that I more frequently play for Team Earbrass than Team GoshWow. But the other day, I spent a significant chunk of time in the GoshWow corner, and being me, decided I should analyze the characteristics of that writing session to see if I could perhaps replicate it more often.

Some Factors Involved That One Time (Sunday, Actually) When I Had Fun Writing

1. I had exercised earlier that day. Sara Zarr and I have discussed the miracle of the elevated heart rate at some length. There’s something about focusing on your body (and perhaps the awesome selections on your portable music device) that frequently manages to shake ideas loose.

2. I knew what scenes I’d be working on, and what each one needed to accomplish.  The project I’m working on, the graphic novel Bad Houses, has a detailed outline, and — GoshWow! — I have found that working from an outline helps me considerably. (The actual process of making the outline, on the other hand, sends me right back to Earbrass. But we’ll ignore that for now.)

3. I was able to picture, vividly, what the scenes would look like when transformed into comics panels by the capable hand of my collaborator, Carla Speed McNeil. (This could be said to argue that I should write nothing but comics & graphic novels in future, but it can also be interpreted as relating to #2: being very clear about the point of the scenes.)

4. It was nice out. Okay, so I can’t actually control for the presence of sunshine-generated mood-lifting Vitamin D, but, you know, I could drink more milk maybe? (In a latte, of course.)

Writers who are reading, where do you fall on the continuum? And what makes you veer in one direction or the other?

I was contemplating posting the latest variation on the post I always post, which is, of course, something about OMG The Very Serious And Challenging Challenges Of Balancing LibrarianLand and WriterWorld.

And then I thought, geez, speshul snowflake much? What, you have more than a single role in your life? Amazing! So does basically everyone else on the planet. How about instead you write up some strategies that you actually use in order to work effectively (read: not lose your mind) on multiple projects, in multiple roles?

Hence:

I strive, always, for an empty email inbox. This is a pretty common technique for enhancing productivity. Fewer emails=less stress. But because striving, by itself, sadly does not make any actual difference, here are some ways I back up the striving. (Caveat: some of this is Gmail-centric.)

• Folders. Will the project generate multiple messages? I make a folder.
• Labels. I label any and all project-associated messages as soon as I receive them. I don’t file them until after I respond. That way, when I look at my inbox, I get a quick visual sense of what requires my attention. You can set up rules so that any message that comes from a particular address is labeled automatically; I have rules set for my agent, editors, the friends with whom I frequently correspond, and all the groups & discussion lists I’m on.
• Is it from a discussion list or a group? Are the archives online and searchable? Then I delete the messages after I read them.
• Multiple addresses. It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law. I have a librarian address, I have a writer address. It keeps the boundaries distinct. If someone contacts me at the wrong one, I just forward the message.
• Err on the side of under rather than overcommunicating. I may come off as less supportive online than I’d like to think I am; I don’t often join choruses of congratulations, and I lurk more than I comment.

Social networks: all stripped down. I’m on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. But I don’t get email notifications, and I ignore and block relentlessly. I understand that this means I’m not Taking Fullest Advantage Of The Great Networking Opportunities, and I certainly don’t think it’s the One True Way To Manage A Social Network Presence. Minimalism works for me because it takes a lot of dilemmas out of the equation: if I ignore ALL the requests to become a fan of Whatever, then I don’t have to explain (even to myself) why, for instance, I said yes to Friend X Who Made A Fan Page For Their Book but no to Local Nonprofit Y. I do respond to friend requests, and I keep an eye on comments. I prefer not to use Facebook messaging, because it’s a gray area between writer address and librarian address. Again — not the One True Way, just what works for me.

So I’ve talked a lot here about organizing and coping with email and social networks, because for me, that’s where a lot of the logistics of project-and-role-balancing happens. What are your favorite ways to balance, juggle, and perform other circus acts of project management?