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Post by Nixie on Mar 26, 2010 2:40:49 GMT -5
I'd rather decide to change major things like the main character, species, pacing and layout of a comic BEFORE posting the real thing. So here's the scrapped intro to that card comic I was talking about. Attachments:
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Post by Kristal Rose on Mar 26, 2010 4:47:30 GMT -5
I'm glad you didn't invest heavily in that one.
You said the other night you don't do stories well. The MDS story is awesome. You just don't do comic book stories as well for some reason.
You were right about one thing, people need to do things, not react. If everone is in confusion, use that as a backdrop context for the person who does do something.
This story is one of meadering.
Ah, I see what you are missing, it's not action, it's even a level deeper than that, your comic characters lack intent. Even in something as shallow as a James Bond action flick, the mystery is the bad guy's intent.
Teleporting is not story. Having wings is not story. Both are methods of intent to travel towards some objective, and nothing more (except eye candy). A person leaving you is story. So is wanting to go home.
You have character qualities down already. Now they need motives and goals. Even if those aren't achievable in the story, they affect how the chars operate. A person who's goal is to have 1000 worshippers, is different than one wanting a comfy home or wanting to know things that no one else knows. Ideally the goals and motives of all the characters are highly interwoven with the plot. If there is a plot, but no goals or motives, the story will still be empty. The two have to exist and interact. 'That' is the story. Pop Foamy or Bush into Frodo's role as ring bearer, and you have a different story. Alice in Wonderland isn't really a story, just a meandering spectacle. Write cards with a story summary for each page, then fit in the ironic humor ar whatever fits around it.
A story requires drive. Nature alone doesn't supply that drive. If the world is ending, people could choose to play video games while it happens. The characters drive the story, thus, any character contributing to the story has some sort of drive. Each of them are a vector or pattern, and how those pattern vectors intersect to create ripples is the meat of the story. The plot is the skeleton. Their attitudes and reactions are the skin.
Try writing a story, then stripping out all the stuff like teleporting (replace it with the generic verb travel). Once you have the bare bones of a story, assign that to panels and pages, then go back in and fill in the flesh. That way you'll have story in every page.
You seem to keep revisiting "They're comfy at home (even if that's the deep sea) then find themself lost in some place they don't understand".. and then you don't know where to take it.
Professional writers often say that if you know your characters well enough, the story will write itself, but they fail to mention that these have to be characters with drive. One's who just watch video games won't write your story for you.
You seem to mostly be trying to write your comic stories from circumstance, attitude, and style.
Stories aren't easy to come up with, but I just came up with an easy method to do so. Think back to your own most intense and complex story ordeals you've lived, like not being able to turn your homework in, and reduce that to generic verbs and nouns. Then replace the homework with the save the world machine you need to build, the dog who hides things with some eco-rebels, the teacher with the public media, etc etc. The close calls, the surpises, the heroic effort, all the stuff that makes for a good story will still be there, andi you won't be stuck with a meandering daydream you wake up from before ever finishing.
I have my suspicions that you haven't ever come up with a satisfying end to a story (sorry I still haven't caught up on MDS to know how that went). A good story is usually one that you can read off in 20 sentences or less, and be left impressed with. and then you need good writing to fill it in, which you do certainly have. Greek myths were great five sentence stories, and form the backbone of most western stories two millenia later. A good story takes you somewhere, in some building, falling apart, or transformative way. If characters encounter a new environment, but don't change because of it, no story has occurred. Likewise a sequence of mental states is not a story unless there is some causal relation between them.
As the core of building stories, I recommend you forget environment and persona entirely (your elements of good writing), and concentrate on intents. Story is not flavor and texture, it is engineering process and architectural construction, forces acting upon each other to create something which is greater than the sum of the parts.
Too bad you and C aren't collaborating on something. You both seem to be missing each others awareness for writing fiction. Actually MDS is still my favorite reading, and I have my doubts C will ever match it as far as my tastes go, but he does have some knack for plot construction, at least in theory. I've never seen him put it to use.
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Post by Nixie on Mar 26, 2010 6:19:16 GMT -5
I'm afraid most of my comics die too quickly for the characters to realize what their drive is. In Mirror/Mirror or Humans, their goal at first would be to go home, but as they wandered through the world looking for ways to return, they would realize they were really supposed to save that world and never go home. It would've been a story of sacrifice. The environment would've changed the characters a LOT, mostly by forcing them to be independant of parents yet dependent on each other.
Now that I think about it, all the comics I've read that had conclusions were short. Like Archie Comics short. One problem, one solution, done. Even the novels I choose to read are often serials and some have yet to be completed. Many end with cliffhangers implying that the reader should continue the story in their head. The ones I read that do have a clear conclusion are often very long, because it seems as soon as a character has a goal and takes action the story ends.
In this case, again, it's too early for a character to realize their goal. Lydie still doesn't even know where she is or why she's there. If I fix this up and continue working on it, I would establish from the start that she likes jogging so much because she wants to get away from her busy home life. Too much homework, too many siblings-- she wants to do something exciting with her life. She could find it in this card realm by helping people who lose control of their cards and become monsters. She would also have to grow a spine and learn some responsibility. I'm considering having her panic and run away, leaving a newfound friend to get mauled by a monster; thus giving her a painfully guilty learning experience.
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Post by Kristal Rose on Mar 26, 2010 21:33:20 GMT -5
Comics tend to be shallow because there needs to be story on each page, and yet one can only express so much depth per page. Look at typical stories - five pages to gather friends and build a treehouse only to have birds move in. Typically each page has as at least two or three scenes and a story objective was met in each of them. You've managed at times to do half a dozen pages in a row with nothing more (plot wise) than passing through a mirror. That would be fine if you were writing 200 page comics that people skimmed through to get a story that's delivered even slower that a movie.
But you can't create pages that quick, and thus really you need to be creating pages where the story moves even faster than other comics - If you want story; Your filler alone makes for interesting reading.
Moebius was an ongoing, somewhat meandering sci-fi series, not unlike Humans. In spite of the guy having a story to fill a sizable coffee-table comic book though, there was enough story going on to keep up the interest of Heavy Metal readers with only a four panel strip each month. Each strip was enough to meet the clone designer or be sent on a mission above ground.
Jokes and human interaction might be more your thing than story, but there should at least be a couple of story objectives introduced or met per page.
Your HP comic had story for each panel. Maybe that's because it wasn't your own personal daydream, but something you were more observing.
Your story rewrite above could take place in nine panels, not 14 pages, and the way many comics are written, it would indeed be closer to 9 panels than 14 pages. I like something deeper that that sort of pace.
Because a story is written as a serial with cliff-hanger chapter endings doesn't mean the story progresses slower, it just means that each chapter has a complete story. The typical formula wraps up the last chapter at the beginning of the next while introducing the new chapter story elements just as quickly and making the episode of them.
To rephrase, a cliffhanger is typically a sequence of complete stories, the only difference being that the ending of each story is at the beginning of each next story.
An alternative is multiple story lines, flashing between them, and interweaving them. You still have to pace introductions and resolutions in that format too. One advantage to that format is that any reader rocognition of lacking story will be something they can less consciously pin down. But they still won't be happy about lack of story if you were to do that, they just won't know why.
I'm not terribly fond of your choice of story either, but that's just personal tastes, not for lack of there being a story.
The leaving a new friend to get mauled is one of those causal relations to happen in the middle, not near an ending. It's only a learning experience if we observe her having learned from it. That's more of a story.
If you want to write this as a serial, each card monster environment/circumstance could be a new lesson she makes it through, eventually having to confront the card master their self, maybe even becoming the card master (very East Europe fairy tale).
Again I recommend taking up reading international mythology and fairy tales, maybe download some Clarissa Pinkola Estes lectures on new age analysis of ancient fairy tales.
Unfortunately a good deal of your story writing limitations comes from you doing what good writers often do, writing their own life story, and you simply don't have a huge amount of that yet.
Towards addressing that I might suggest that you step out outside yourself even further, and imagine the lives of outrageous people, and what they would seriously do in intense experiences. Otherwise draw from mythology templates or deeply study the lives of others for their intents, and how that manifests.
You don't want a story to be shallow because you don't fully understand it. Steal the stories of friends and family members, people you do roughly understand.
The plot you want to write is "Set out on a journey and find yourself". You'll be 40 before you can write a satisfying ending to that sort of plot. It's a good journal exercise, but not something yielding a product. You're asking for too much. Look at the successful stories young writers and directors do produce. They find the importance making family work out, or land a good job. They don't find the meaning of life.
Choose stories (or serial chapters) that you have witnessed resolved. Don't make your comics your own current life learning experiences, or you'll never finish one.
In fact, as an exercise, try writing one paragraph stories which start with a specific ending as the premise.
That chart you posted was a start. Try writing brief Flash-style timelines with one line per character. For instance the queen's timeline might be: Content - disrupted - content. Her motive is to remain content. The monsters, heros, and victims each have their plot anchors, and own intents. Draw arrows between timelines for the character interactions which cause changes in the personal timelines. On the queens timeline, the disruption anchor is her trigger to send out characters which interact with other characters.
Your alternative is to further the art of fleshing out fantasy stories from what is essentially your own journal. Walter Mitty did this, but his answer was to create alternative hero selves which resolved his circumstances differently than he as a person was doing. There may be other format solutions as well.
To write stories will require story awareness. Look at any scene going on around you, and instead of looking at what it's color and texture are in the moment, identify instead where they are in what story. Why is a person grouchy. What happened long ago to cause that beyond immediate circumstance. What could resolve it?
Another approach is to work with your theme elements. You seem to have: spinelessness, abandonment, guilt, and responsibility as your theme line. It looks like the transformation between guilt and responsibility will require something like 1) Hitting rock bottom with nothing left to lose, 2) Sudden recognition of the nature of the problem, 3) Outside intervention, 4) Rebellion against the status quo. If you have a generic story line outline analysis, it's easier to see sequences and where force-elements need inserted to carry the story.
Your stories may be subjective, but it will still help to reduce them to 'objective' outlines to structure your story and identify what subjective material needs to occur where.
I like your story better when I can slightly juggle it into more of a story format, and less aimless unresolved meandering.
The classic author Beckett does nothing but reduce ongoing human interactions into a steady stream of meaningless activity. James Joyce is known for insightful flow of consciousness writing. Neither though are popular reading. People prefer a solid feeling that something has happened and been resolved.
Comics are typically more like sitcoms that movies. Thee tiny plots al quickly resolved.
I'd prefer what you were trying to do with Humans, but that's probably going to take you having your own staff, because you can't produce 20 pages before even digging deeper into character psyches and introducing the story. I prefer movies so foreign that the setup takes 20-40 minutes before you can even get solidly into it. The paradigm needs introduced before the story can even start. Until you can produce that many pages, you should be thinking more towards that HP page, whole story per page, or just going deep into two sentence stories. You can't yet afford the combination of deep, long, and complex. Not without a lot more committment, and being ok with slow delivery, at least.
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Post by Nixie on Mar 26, 2010 23:03:28 GMT -5
... I've been thinking about kind of stories I do enjoy. I have a lot more manga than actual books, and I only have three mangas that actually end. They're all in a series. Every page is NOT a self-contained story; most stories in manga are between 20 and 200 pages long before you have a scene that wraps up one story and begins another. Most stories I like do start off with the characters bumbling around aimlessly. They have extremely basic goals like "stay alive" or "get through high school." The fantasy-based comics I read often start off with a confusing supernatural thing happening in a 'normal' setting; for example, +Anima starts off with a shocked circus ringmaster buying a child living in a giant pot of water, with no explanation given until page 28. Even then, the first story arc lasts 49 pages. Translated into anime, a story lasts for an episode or two, not just five minutes. Comics aren't all as fast-paced as you seem to think they are. Also, in most of my favorite stories, the only things that remain constant throughout story arcs are the characters and the genre. In some, like Zelda: Oracle of seasons, you start with a whole 30 pages of character development and wandering around the farm before a story begins. Even once the story begins, the main character is just wandering around lost, allowing things to happen to him instead of acting on his goals. It's not until chapter five that Link actually starts working toward his goal of rescuing the kidnapped goddess of seasons. All my books mangas "end" with "to be continued," unless the main character died in the climax of the story. Which happens. I just don't like short stories. The most interesting short story I ever read was about a man delivering medicine through space to another planet; the challenge was a stowaway on his ship, whose weight meant he didn't have enough fuel to reach the planet. He called his superiors, they told him to jettison the stowaway into space even though she was a little girl, and he did it. Problem solved. Onward to the planet, to save the day. That story SUCKS BALLS. The problem with endings is, I never see any endings. I haven't seen conflicts resolved any way other than shutting up and letting things die off. The closest thing I've seen to endings was graduation, and even then, where was the conflict and rising action part of the story? What was the exposition? I'm still having the same problems I had in college, nothing's been resolved.
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Post by Kristal Rose on Mar 27, 2010 8:55:49 GMT -5
I never said each page should be a self contained story (ie the HP page), just to head in that direction. Rather just that each page contain 'some' story. What you like is most important. Are you content reading your mangas one page every two weeks, or does the format require that you read 200 pages in one week to feel satisfied. If so, it's not the format for you, at least not yet. Unless, as I'm reading now, story occurring during your reading doesn't even figure in as important.
Most every movie except some foreign stuff is resolved within that 90 minutes. Most people don't care for ones which don't. Same with any TV episodes. I can't think of any books I've read (except for folks like Joyce and Becket which I would never bother reading further once I got the idea in a couple of pages). I generally turn off any movies if it appears nothing will happen, and I can get the idea in the first few minutes.
No one's life is ever resolved till they die. That's probably why they like fiction in the first place. It provides something they don't actually get in real life.
That formula, and satan in heaven is actually humorous on it's own.
Even all the HS and college movies I see concentrate on winning a soccer game or something.
Even if you're going to meander aimlessly, you have to give your readers useful like insights on life or something, maybe a fresh perspective on what they are going through, otherwise you might just as well spend days watching an aquarium.
Just watched Aliens vs Monsters. Sophisticated caricature references.
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Post by Kristal Rose on Mar 27, 2010 10:52:23 GMT -5
What did you do the page layout in anyhow?, looks very professional. For simply expressing what the characters experience, you do well. I like the dizzy rock on #4. Except for that smug moment on #5, this is very passive, and yet does a lot of active sweeping. For all your fighting to ever draw 3D perspective, this demonstrates you can draw a camera story. Story boarding camera angles alone is probably a specialist job available. It would help if you know the numbers, but another specialist, if not the (virtual) camera crew can recognize what to set in their sweeps directly from the storyboard.
You might have to point this sort of thing out if the person interviewing can't see what you've accomplished.
It's unfortunately unlikely that you will get much of a critique. More likely you will get one of three responses: (An implicit) what do we have here, can you do what we have in mind, or what else have you got to show me, in which case a good answer might either be 'what direction do you want', or the stuff you'd most like to do if they are mezmerized, moving quickly back to your asking what is of practical need there, suggesting both that you both have a rough idea the range you might be capable of going, and that you can learn it otherwise if they want something different. I'm guessing they would wish to see what they want, then exchange what they might get. It might not even be a business interview, but more a person to person interview, if they don't feel they have to put on professional aires, and either can talk frankly with you or and can find out that way if they have a job for you and if you get along with their scene. If you have a choice to build up, I'd go for frank and honest first, maybe showing a capacity to act professional. You can always fall back on a business facade if the natural approach to interviews doesn't seem to be what people are doing these days. I'd ask for second opinions from neighbors on all this first, if I were you. I had better luck on all the interviews I can recall when I was more natural. When you get unnatural, you got yourself in a position for tension and invisible barriers, and can get yourself fired without even seeing it coming, just because that's the easiest way for a person to deal with you when there is no natural connection. On the other hand, your showing business propriety takes a load off them having to watch out for you personally, and guiltlessy allows them to conduct business however business calls for it.
The likelihood of some Mr. Magician taking you under their yoda skywalker tutelege is rare. Even relying on your peers to show you the ropes is more likely than unless someone is messed up and not entirely in the job for the art business.
I worked with a great deal of 'Can you do this?' and 'I'll see what I can do.' I had one programming job that consisted of one interview of 'yes, I'm pretty sure I can do that', followed by two months alone mostly proving the point, and failing because I only delivered 99.8% on the review date. Pretty messed up, not what I think of it, and I still always wonder if it's because I wasn't getting along by someones hopes of properly with the bosses daughter. There was a slight lovers quarrel quality going on there.
I've had quite a range of hired experiences, and thus I have no reason to even believe there will be any overlap between the types of hiring experience we will even have. The best I can hope for is that you learn from my experience in case you do recognize running into something I've encountered.
I guess one thing I've passed on to you all these years is preparedness such that you can start right into your career instead of spending more than a decade in food and cars, or something first, not that I think I would have happy as a pure programmer anyhow. It might have helped me have resources to shift into anything else though, if that course still gave me other things I might want to shift to. I don't see though that anything short of hobby time could have prepared me for making musical instruments though. I barely knew when I was younger adult that I'd even want to do that, although in fact my very first programming interview was with the sound designers at Emu synthesizers/sound-cards. That was my passion which felt like too much of a big-league fantasy come true for me, and thus my intrinsic knack for database structures came to be of more practical use to people.
~
Ah, now I'm seeing more of the story in this. It's the dynamic between being messed with and trying not what you face to contend with while hoping on simple innocence to pull you through. A bit like Labyrinthe. As many times as you watched that, I'm not surprised it left a mark in your angle.
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