While Comics don’t get as much respect as more “legitimate” forms of Art such as writing Novels or making Movies, on the most basic level of Creation I believe everything is the same. If you ask Comic Creators what their biggest issue is when it comes to producing new work, their answers will probably be all over the map- some may blame “life issues,” such as working a day job, maintaining Human relationships or something in that regard. Other people may fixate on the “mass production” aspects of Creation- having to please Editors or just working with other people in general who don’t always agree with your “vision” 100%. And then there are the people who admit to being flat out lazy… or who just admit that they only push themselves when a drop-dead deadline is looming.

To be truthful, ALL these are issues, but I don’t think any of them are really what Comic’s Creators FEAR. The one thing that stands in their way is what novelists have long had a name for… Writer’s Block.

Today’s lesson in Failure is: Direction Is As Important As Speed.

If you read the work of Scott McCloud at all you have learned one thing above all else, and that is Comics are READ, not just looked at even when there are NO words on the page. That point cannot be overstated- what it means is that “Reading” Comics is NOT just reading captions and word balloons. The sequence of Images on a page are ALSO read, and regardless of how much detail a writer puts into a script, there is an aspect of that which the Artist has to figure out in the same way that a Writer has to figure out telling the story on a script level. What that means to YOU, the Comic Creator, is that whether you are doing the Art or Writing the script, there is a potential that you will suffer from “Writer’s Block” at some point.

The problem with knowing that you could, at any time, be “stuck” for an idea is that in this case, being prepared doesn’t mean a thing. There is no formula or strategy for getting out of your mental block- proof of that is that people have been going through it for centuries and nobody has “solved” the problem. It’s something that happens from time to time to just about everyone, and there is no way to “fix” the problem 100% of the time.

“Why,” you may ask,  “even bring up a problem if it has no ‘solution?’”

I mention it for two reasons- first of all, mental blocks have killed countless projects. In fact, in the Independent Comics world, I think it’s fair to say that as many (if not more) projects have died an “early death” because someone was stuck and didn’t know where to go next as for any other factor you can name.

The reason I say that with such confidence is that most Indy projects aren’t fully mapped out before they are begun. A Creative team may THINK they have planned out their book for X number of issues, but quite often that isn’t the case. I knew someone once who told me they had 150 issues of their Indy book worked out. Since we knew each other for quite a while, I asked to see what they had written & wanted to know where he was planning to take his characters that would take 150 issues… He told me, and I had to let him know that what he thought was 150 issues of plot I would do in about 20 pages or so. That’s not to say “my” way is the best or only way to do something, but there is a huge difference between an idea that you WANT to stretch out to an epic and something that a reader will want to read for the next 150 issues. While my friend didn’t agree with my assessment, when I read his finished book I found that his 150 issue plan wound up being 3 issues when all was said and done.

For a variety of factors, while most Creators have no problem coming up with a beginning, most have an issue with getting even to a midpoint. For some, they really don’t have an actual concept of what constitutes a story idea.

Rather than dragging out this point, I am just going to be blunt- a Story at its most basic is when you have a character (or several characters) and some action takes place which causes conflict to that character and that character changes in some way because of it.

That means:

A Character design is not a story idea.

A Character description is not a story idea.

All the detail you can gather about the “world” a character inhabits is not a story idea.

Even a Plot, in fact, is NOT a story idea, unless that plot has a focal point and you can demonstrate how that focal character changes in some way because of your plot.

That is why, for example, that News events are not stories in and of themselves. News only becomes a story when you are looking at the level of Human interest- 9/11, while a big News item and a tragic event, is not a “story.” Telling me about one person and what happened to THEM on 9/11 and how that changed them- THAT is a story.

What that means is that storytelling involves understanding that flow- whether you write or draw or both, you need to understand that you are doing more than walking your characters past events A, B & C… you are changing the character in some way during that flow. Now, to be fair, that “change” doesn’t have to be permanent and it doesn’t have to be some HUGE development. It can be something as simple as learning a “lesson.” The key is, however, that you need to convey that change and figuring out how to do that can be a puzzler.

While this isn’t true for everyone, I do think at times that we get blocked in Comics because we forget that we are telling stories and that telling a story has rules. Maybe you are legitimately stuck, and maybe you stopped telling a story and have resorted to just depicting events with a series of pictures…. You don’t know what comes next because there IS no “next” when it comes to a string of events any more than there is a “plot” to the morning newspaper. Once you get back on track and think about actually telling a story, you will often find that you aren’t stuck anymore.

That brings me to my second reason that I am bringing up a problem with no clear solution, which is a “solution” to what comes next in your story doesn’t have to be unique. No matter how “different” your Comic idea is from everything else out there, it is, on some level, a story. Other people before you have made Comics, and somewhere out there is a comic similar enough to yours to a point where you can learn something from it. Now, I am not saying, “If you are stuck, steal something from an already published Comic.” What I am saying, however, is there is nothing wrong with using someone else’s example as the starting point to fix your problems. What you need to avoid, though, is being “inspired” by something that is the unique selling point of someone else’s comic.

Say, for example, you are in the middle of the crazy action scene and you are stuck with how to move on from that to the next thing. Looking at how other people did a similar scene may help, or you may want to look at something in a totally different genre than you are working in and draw some inspiration from there. Many classic Westerns did just that- although they are set in the American West and feature cowboys, the best Western movies owe much of their plot and ideas to Samurai films.

While I wouldn’t recommend leaning on the work of others like Westerns did on the work of Akira Kurosawa, I do think that sometimes we are stuck because we are trying too hard to be “novel.” If your hero is in a diner having a cup of coffee, you don’t have to revolutionize the Comic industry with your “new” approach to that scene. Often you will find many people doing very similar things in similar situations, and if you are stuck, there is nothing wrong with that. The key in everything you do is to get past that bump in the road and move forward. And believe it or not, you actually CAN revise your work! That’s right- if you try something that is a pretty “average” solution to your problem now, you can always replace it with something cooler down the road….

On the other hand, if Failure is what you want then there isn’t much more of a Fail then to be stopped dead in your tracks. What’s more, it is extremely easy in the Indy Comics world to go from paused to stopped to having quit all together on an idea. Quit on enough ideas and you start building a whole portfolio of failed attempts at Comics. DO that, and you start making Failing your career.

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