Let the Editing Begin!

I've laid aside my 69 hand drawn pages with doodles, scribblings, and first draft text and am now working exclusively with the 25 Publisher files, each page of which has six panels.

The first of those 25 files was opened this week for the first time since I wrote it last December. As mentioned, I did NOT review what I wrote on purpose; I wanted to "flesh out" the whole narrative arc first.

That first file (named EU1) contains the text from Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 and is 19 pages long. Here's what I'm discovering.

1.  One of the characters in this fictional graphic novel speaks text that I did not write. This is perhaps unique in story writing. I am given dialog I cannot change, alter, or edit. Mr. Q speaks and I deal with it.

2.  As a writer I react to, interact with, and make my actors act upon Mr. Q's words. Think of a grain of sand in an oyster....I hope to create pearls around that often aggravating irritation.

3.  The me who interacts with Mr. Q has one brain, but that brain has neural multiplicity. Just like a shopper looks at a used car through various lenses (cost, mileage, color, MPG, leg room), I looked at Mr. Q's words through a variety of lenses, none of which was explicit or discreet. I just read quip from Mr. Q and jotted whatever came to mind. After 3 months I came up with 400+ pages of random reactions.

4.  Now that I'm revisiting my random reactions I'm sorting through them, bunching them according to common themes, and shaping characters from those common themes. For example, many student quotes were silly, off the cuff comments (like Chandler on Friends). Other quotes were absurdly serious, deferring, and loyal to Mr. Q (like Dwight Shrute on the Office). Still other quotes were panicky and reactive (think of the anxious Chicken Little). There is also an aging hippie, a vegan foodie, and a scientific materialist who embraces atheism. There are also bit parts played by an agnostic, Earnest Hemingway, a pregnant student, and even me in a cameo role (a conceit I copy from Alfred Hitchcock).

5. This seems like an odd way to create characters. I've never taken a creative writing course or asked any novelists how they come up with their characters. Maybe they all start with words/point of view and then figure out age, gender, costume, back story, and appearance later. I somehow had the notion that writers start with a body and give it attitude and then words; I'm staring with words, giving the speaker of those words attitude, and someday will flesh them out in 2-D. (If this were a play or movie it'd be 3-D).

6.  As I plow through those 19 pages of random quips and quotes I'm adjusting the size of the word balloons so they are uniform (Publisher has a nifty "shapes" tool which I use to outline the text boxes with round edged rectangles). I'm also mindful of pagination; I'll start EU2 with page 20.

7.  I then printed a paper copy of those 19 pages and read and reread them all in one sitting trying to imagine the flow, how this narrative arc is getting launched, and the trajectories that are being established. Since this is the first scene, readers will be making many important assumptions, so I gotta get 'em right. I want all the loose threads to eventually be tied up.

8. The decision to not draw anything yet (faces, rooms, desks, lap tops, costume, etc) forces me to stick with character development via ideas. I'm imagining characters as pure thought (like Plato's or Jung's arch types). Only later will the word become flesh (or in this case, ink).

9.  Since I do not plan on including any chapter divisions (a decision I may reverse), I do plan on helping readers distinguish each passage (what Bible scholars call a pericope) by coloring the backgrounds differently. In the case of EU1, text 1:1-8a will have a different color background from 1:8b-11.

10.  Editing text on paper is easier for me than on a screen. Seeing my dialog on a page as future readers will see it (the finished product will be a book, not an eBook--another decision I may reverse), I have greater empathy with my readers. Consequently, I'm astonished at how much editing I did on EU1. The text is now (so it seems in this moment) crisper, snappier, and funnier. This is evolution at work; much of the first creation survived, but natural selection has not been kind to many other of those first words--extinction! The remaining words are fit for survival. During this geologic era at least.

It strikes me just now (as it often does when I mix metaphors or create clunky prose) that if I were an English teacher teaching creative writing I'd love to stumble upon this blog wherein students can listen to one guy's creative process.

But then, I've been overly influenced by that nutty quote by Edgar Allan Poe, "If you find yourself being burned at the stake be sure to jot down all your experiences." I not only love to create but I love to describe the creative process, an experience very unlike torture.