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12/24/2002: the malaise of plotting
As anyone who takes a look at my comics page will notice, I haven't drawn/written a comic in years. In fact since I only really get into drawing when I work on a comic project I haven't drawn much of anything at all for a long time. As with most things there are several reasons for that: A bunch of boring personal stuff (like feeling down or demotivated a lot, new interests, etc.), the fact that I need a lot of discipline and daily practice in order for my drawings not to suck badly (at some point I sort of like them, even though of course they still don't look anything like the idea in my head), the high time and labor intensity of drawing a single comic page in general -- all those things contribute, but the main problem is that I can't plot. Yet comics (at least the ones I like) usually require some sort of story to go with the pictures.
This is not a new problem. On the contrary, I have realized quite early that inventing engaging stories isn't one of my strengths, actually I think the only things coming to my mind I've been consistently even worse at are producing music (by voice or instrument) and inventing jokes. From the beginning my attempts to invent plots failed, even stories I've been rather proud of flopped with their audience. Still prominent in my mind is a creative writing exercise we had to do in fifth grade, I really thought my horror story was good (something with an abandoned house, a flesh-eating plant, and a scary library), however my German teacher, Frau Bahnsen, didn't think so, and rereading the thing today I can only agree, not because of writing skills, I was only ten after all, but because the basic idea doesn't work. Actually, I can't even tell what the basic idea was supposed to be. In short, it sucks.
My first attempt at creative writing, that time not school related, was even worse. When I was little I used to make up stories about a group of kids in an orphanage and what the pranks they played on their warden. There was also a human-looking alien with a sort of egg-shaped spaceship, who liked to eat phone receivers. Anyway, I just mention this, because it set a pattern: When I tried to write the things in my head down (that was sometime during elementary school), it turned out to be an exposition dump without any plot following. I wrote down who the characters were, I included a schematic sketch of the egg-shaped spaceship, but it turns out that the things in my head never had been stories, i.e. things with a plot, in the first place.
The way I played with my stuffed animals (that was a bit earlier), didn't involve real stories either, instead I developed a state for them (which admittedly was a sort of tradition, my siblings had states for their stuffed animals too, my brother even going so far as to play out his historical theories in the subsequent constitutions of his stuffed animal state, though since they are close in age to each other, their states when they played with them had been often at war with each other, involving kidnappings of important stuffed animals and assassinations etc., I think I remember my brother's stuffed mouse being hung at the lamp after being "tortured," I think in retribution of the "kidnapping" of my sister's teddy bear). Anyway, mine was a feudal state, I divided my room into areas which were given as lands to the nobility by the king for their fealty. About eight of my stuffed animals belonged to the nobility, the rest were divided as peasants and such. The apes were the royal house, there was a powerful church, with a frog as archbishop, collecting a tithe. I designed coins, and a coat of arms, and documents. For the documents I asked my brother for help, because then I hadn't started learning Latin yet, and of course I wanted the documents to be Latin. I was very invested in the set-up, but I can't remember much (if anything) happening.
A bit later I developed my first comic characters. They were furry things with big noses, two antennae and large feet (called "Wuschel", from German "wuschelig" meaning something between tousled and fuzzy), and I had written -- naturally -- lots of exposition on them. I still have a seven page treatise with illustrations (and several earlier drafts) of their origins, biology and social structure, language, schematics of their underground dwellings, their migration patterns, and regional differences, their livestock, I even covered their religion. My best friend (who had the bad luck to be my audience of choice) liked the drawings well enough, however she was far less enthralled than I was with the role of the elders in Wuschel society and such. As much fun as I had with world building, my attempt at writing stories about them failed, in fact there are just two unfinished comics, one was supposed to be about a Wuschel emigrating to the US and its adventures in NY (it never really got anywhere though), the other was a sort of football parody story, about how football (the soccer kind, not American football) works among the Wuschels. I wasn't too fond of football, even back then, though I remember collecting pictures of teams and players during some World Cup, it must have been 1986, and I knew the German players and the stars from the other countries of course, but then there is no sport quite as pervasive as football during major competitions.
For a while my sister helped me sometimes with story ideas, though she refused to be credited as writer, and I just transformed them into comics and added details. Sometimes I tried to adapt short stories into comics, however it's not that easy, I remember my attempt to adapt Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon, and it was just swamped by dialog, more than in a Tardi comic, and far less skillful, and anyway there's the copyright problem if you want to distribute adaptions, for example in publications like the school paper. Once in high school I collaborated with a friend, through she lost interest quickly, and wasn't all that great with stories either, especially not with something that was supposed to work visually as comic.
So the problem that the fantasies in my head tend to be more world building, not stories, and that a lot of my fun comes out of focusing on obscure details, is a persistent one (though actually I don't even have world building fantasies all that often). In fact, my one unfinished attempt at TS fanfiction has this problem too. I still think it is a very cool AU premise (Burton's monograph was recognized scientifically after its initial publication, and sentinels became public knowledge, however that premise handled realistically without society developing some ridiculous (pseudo-)slavery arrangements, that are so popular in TS AUs of this kind). However, I have timelines, statistics, essential parts of an alternate US history, fake propaganda material (including recruitment flyers for sentinels and designed covers for those), essays on how sentinels and common misconceptions about them influenced pop culture (complete with B-movie titles and posters), rewritten newspaper articles to incorporate sentinels into plausible scenarios of true historical events (including some photo manipulations), outlines about the civil rights movement for sentinels and what realistic discrimination sentinels might face, outlines of true government research projects, as well as the rumors and conspiracy theories that are circulating but aren't true, even if many believe them, ideologies of new age groups who think sentinels are especially connected to nature... but after a while (30 pages or so into the actual story parts of my writing) I noticed that whatever plot there was in this AU (a murder case) only had the purpose to frame as much of my background info as I could fit in it. The case story was so contrived, and eventually stalled, precisely because I came up with it thinking "how can I show the most of my cool universe?"
I still marvel at the ability to come up with actual stories. Somehow my mind just doesn't work that way, and it is kind of frustrating. I mean, for most activities I'm quite convinced that you can practice and learn them at least to some degree, compensate for a lack of natural talent, and get to at least adequate results. I can be fairly tenacious even if my first results are less than encouraging. For example I had no problem to practice for hours on end drawing nothing but paper creases and folds when we had the assignment to create a trompe-l'oeil in school, and while not a perfect illusion, my later creases were a lot better than the first ones, even though creases in paper are really not the most interesting thing to draw many, many times. And I've stuck with activities I'm far less talented at than drawing paper creases until I got at least some palatable results (knitting and crocheting come to mind). However, how do you practice/learn coming up with stories? Not how to make an idea work, or how to give characters motivation, or how to improve the structure, the pacing, all that technical stuff, I mean the basic thing, the core idea for some characters and what they might do.
*Sigh.* Maybe I should just look more insistently for someone to collaborate with, and resign myself to being hopelessly inept with regard to plots.
