A few year’s back, Sam Henderson’s always entertaining blogsite The Magic Whistle ran a notorious well known 3-page comics story by Sam Glanzman called “Please Don’t Cry, Johnny”.

Lemme save you some time;
you don’t have to read the entire story.
The first two pages are padding,
all the info you need is down below…

This is why it’s an okay story, not a bad story:
It’s short, it gets to its punchline quickly,
it has a visually shocking enough ending
to make it stick in one’s memory.

This is why it’s an okay story, not a good story:
Because there’s a million and one questions to be answered with that last panel.
Who are these people?  Why does the father look like this?  Is this Johnny’s fate?
How do they live?  Don’t they ever have to go to town?
Will Johnny and his family always be outcasts?

This should have been the very first page of the story.  It should have answered all of those questions, or at least intimated at answers.

Then it would have had the chance of being great, and if not great, at least much, much better than what it is.

Bottom line:
Never settle for the obvious in your writing.

“These letters and syllables we play with are like the gritty heads of comets—miniscule in mass, but vivid in the luminescence that surrounds them.  Why does a comet have a fiery tail?  From the impact of plasma as it nears the sun.  At the outer reaches of its orbit, a comet is a cold, sluggish conglomerate of interplanetary gravel.  But then it plunges toward the light, to contest its speed with the field of the sun that locks it in a long ellipse.  The stony nucleus stirs to life, whipped around the sun by the lash of gravity.  Words can be comets, carrying bright clouds of context, signaling to us with a glow of multiple meanings.  They splay out from the near weightless nucleus of syllables, challenged by a force field of ideas, made radiant by the impact of thought.  Leaf through the bulk of today’s mail: drab constellations of expected and smog-dimmed stars. Why not write in letters of fire?  We need events in our literary sky.  Astonish us with the coming of a comet.” — Robert E, Lee and Lucy Lee

(so what’s update #6
doing here after update #7?
I ska-rooed up,
dat’s wot hoppen…)

[previous]

Now to give them names and faces, histories and descriptions.

Creating characters is part art, part science, part inspiration.

When I was growing up, I read a lot of stories in Boy’s Life, the Boy Scout magazine.  Many of them were about plucky Boy Scouts[1] finding themselves in challenging situations where as luck would have it, their merit badge skills and knowledge came through to save the day.

I must’ve read dozens of these stories, and I can’t remember a one:
They all blend together in a blur of resolute young lads who
never had an ignoble thought or went to the bathroom.[2]

If my characters were going to be memorable,
the first thing I needed to do was to kill off all the good girls.

Nobody likes a goody-two-shoes (me, especially) and by making my girls
the losers,

the outcasts,

the problem cases

I ratchet up the stakes.

Logically there would be a supervising adult with them, one of the nuns, but my story couldn’t use a real authority figure, so I came up with Sister Agnes, a young novitiate who was an upperclassman when the other girls were freshmen.

She, too, had been a problem case and the other girls remember this and have a hard time taking her seriously.

A hard, hard time.

There’s no one way of creating a story, you don’t always start at one point and build out from there.  Once I had my basic idea and knew what type of characters I would be using, the next step was plotting the story out.

This story was going to be more picaresque than something with a more linear plot.[3] There were any number of things that could happen to the girls, so I drew up a list of all eventualities.

Soon they began organizing themselves:
These things could only happen while drifting at sea,
these would be items of immediate concern once they found land,
these were natural perils,
these were man-made.

And each idea had the potential for spinoff ideas:
The sister demands decorum from the girls, but it’s a desert island, how do you balance propriety with practicality?

[1]  Wow!  What are the odds of that!

[2]  Though they could, of course, dig a perfect field latrine and rig a rustic shower out of two saplings and an old bucket.

[3]  A mystery, for example, where each clue leads to the next.

(to be continued)

SAVAGE ANGELS — Update #1

[previous]

The ideas also dictated the size of the cast.  I started out with close to a dozen girls, bumping them off with drownings, sharks, suicide, infection, etc.

Hmmm, maybe too many deaths.
I want the story to have a semblance to reality,
but I want it to be upbeat as well.

More Googling, more research.  Combine incidents, offer less lethal outcomes.  The infection now becomes an acne-related cyst.[1] Draining that cyst now becomes a gross-but-funny scene.

And how do they sterilize it?
Well, turns out one of the
man-made complications
ties in with that, just how
I won’t reveal here.

This is one way of creating a story, following each idea through to its logical conclusion, then seeing how it connects.

Without the need to kill off as many characters,
my cast was soon whittled down to a core seven:
The novitiate and six students.

Already knew who Sister Agnes — “Aggie the Naggy” — was.
What about her charges?

Well, as stated, troublemakers, problems, losers.

One of them is the outcast Filipino girl.

She needs an antagonist, a petty little bigot, a bully.  Southerners of that era, I am sorry to say, were pretty open and upfront with their prejudices.  So we have one spoiled Southern belle in the crew.

All bullies have toadies, so give her an easily manipulated younger girl who views her with hero-worshipping eyes.

There’s the big fat girl nobody ever talks to, the one who does nothing but sit in the library and read and study and get straight A’s on her tests.[2]

We need a comic relief.  We’re going to get some laughs and smiles from all the others, but we need one who can always be relied on to say or do something to break then tension.

There’s an old British sit-com called Keeping Up Appearances about a social climbing middle class woman named Hyacinth Buckett (“Pronounced ‘Bouquet’!”) who drives everyone around her nuts with indefatigable attitude.  Okay, the social climbing is off-putting, but the indefatigable attitude that gets on everyone’s nerves is charming.  So we’ll add a Brit to the mix.

Finally, a character who at first seemed to be superfluous but whom I kept around simply because I needed one more player for the other characters to bounce off of.

When Savage Angels was being planned as a graphic novel, I really couldn’t find much use for her, but when it became a prose novel, suddenly she stepped forward as the narrator — and in retrospect, only she could be the narrator.

(I tend to do that a lot,
include characters and
incidents that seemingly
have little if any bearing
on the story only to later
realize they’re the lynch pin.)

Now that I had their types, I needed their personalities, their histories.

[1]  Acne is a severe problem for many Caucasians living in tropical climes.

[2]  And is her stock ever going to rise once the others realize she has knowledge that can keep them alive.

(to be continued)

SAVAGE ANGELS — Update #1

1. Get to the point
2. Write a draft. Then let it rest
3. Cut down your text
4. Be relatable and honest
5. Don´t care too much what others may think
6. Read a lot
7. Write a lot

Bonus:

“Any word you have to hunt for
in a thesaurus is the wrong word.
There are no exceptions to this rule.”

Ever a glutton for punishment, the always gracious Melchizedek Todd invited me back on his show The God Scene With Mel And Nicole, this time to discuss the writing process more specifically and how one adapts to Bible to comics, movie, TV, and other media.

It’s show number 7; my interview starts at the 24:30 mark.

Found here.

[previous]

For their part, the girls would have no idea where they were and would take pains to hide from the Japanese.  No big distress signals, no bonfires, no visible signs of human habitation.

Reconnaissance aircraft flying over the island would see no signs of people and, since both sides had cracked the other’s codes, they would know there was no enemy interest in Bidney Island so the girls would remain relatively safe.

Relatively.

Who were these girls and how did they would get there?

Well, they couldn’t be from the mainland USA or even Hawaii, that would make no sense.  How in the world would they end up on the other side of the Pacific?

World tensions the way they were,
nobody would fly students into a hot spot,
they would be flying them out.

That meant they had to start in the Philippines and be heading south to safety in Australia.  And they had to fly:  An aircrew could get killed easily but on a sinking ship there would be at least one sailor assigned to look after them on a lifeboat.

So…what are these all-American girls doing in the Philippines?

Obviously the children of diplomats, trade managers, oil company executives, etc.  People of privilege who could afford to bring their families halfway around the world back in the 1930s.

The school would cater to that class of clientele, though as often the case, the nuns running the school would be using it to fund another school for needy children in a rundown Filipino only neighborhood.

The girls in the school would all be white Americans or Europeans, certainly all English-speaking.

There would be one Filipino girl among them, an outsider.

As war tensions ratcheted up, their parents evacuated them to Australia, youngest girls first, until only one planeload of girls in their mid-to-late teens was left.

That would be the flight that got shot down on December 7th, 1941 (yeah, yeah, I know, I know, when the Japanese attacked the Philippines it was December 8th because of the International Dateline; it’s called artistic license, folks).

(to be continued)

SAVAGE ANGELS — Update #1

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

(wot he sez
found at AllPoetry-dot-com
via Andrew Sullivan
art by R. Crumb)

Disney’s first stab at
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martians,
before they owned the trademark.

If you have even the slightest interest in seeing John Carter in a theater, please, do so.  Friends whose opinions I trust have seen it, think it’s great, and urge others to see it.

So, based on their recommendations, I urge you to see it.

Me, I’m not going to.  Not in a theater, anyway.[1]

Read the rest of this article »