Drawing. Fandom. MYSA-AS.

We should have known it would happen.

This entry goes on and on and on. Just assume I, once again, didn't have enough to do at work today.

Last night, on the way home from work, I heard a song (not telling you which one) on the radio that has always struck me as the perfect structure to build an XF story around. I've always meant to write that story. Maybe I will some day. I was pondering the rhythm the story would need, in order to match the song, and it could be done. (Note: This is not in any way meant to suggest that this would be song-fic, a thing which would be unthinkable in any decent society.)

And I got a feedback e-mail from someone today (someone read something of mine?) pointing out that a piece I posted as a story fragment "feels unfinished." I don't know how to answer that. You know. It's a fragment. Labeled as such.

So, I was thinking about fandom today, a thing I don't often think about any more. For instance, on the way to work, I had this entire plot for a MYSA-AS story just pop into my head.

No, I'm not becoming delusional on the strength of two art classes and one successful rendering of a tea-towel. The story popped into my head, not the drawings. Stories not infrequently pop into my head. Had I not lost the knack of translating them from brain waves into text, I'd still be writing.

Anyhow. I may go ahead and plot this story out on paper. That's the really fun part of writing anyhow, for those of us who can't produce Finished Text. (I really enjoyed the SEN during the Plotting Stage. It was during the Writing Process that I flamed out.)

And it would be a New Thing to experiment with, always an attraction for me.

One of the books I have talks about how your graphic story won't be successful unless you start by visualizing it. You have to design the pictures first, then find the words to fit.

As someone who "hears" stories (okay, mostly dialogue) and struggles to get enough visual detail into them to tell the reader what's going on, I naturally find this approach entirely alien. When I think about it, I get this big gray cloud covering my brain, and I can't penetrate it to figure out the process.

That would be the fun of it, don't you think? It would be an adventure to "plot" out an entire story purely in descriptions of setting and character expressions. I mean, naturally one would hope to avoid the excesses apparent in so many MYSA-AS stories, with characters spurting blood from every pore to indicate violent emotions or morphing into animals...but then you'd have to find another way to express that, wouldn't you?

The imagery would have to be expressive enough to convey both subtlety and passion. You have to use a kind of graphic shorthand to avoid drawing fifteen pictures for every scene (and thus draining each scene of any potential emotional impact) and yet if you want to avoid some of the more common conventions already in use, you'd have to develop your own system and it would have to be something immediately comprehensible to the reader/viewer.

It's an interesting problem.

You'd want it to be s*xy, if you were me and primarily a slash person. That's an area in which pictures have an advantage over text. I could (well, one could, because I couldn't) convey in a picture a nuance of expression or reaction that it would take an entire page to describe in text.

And you'd want to make them cry, because a level of emotionality can work in pictures that could never work (if you were me) in text. Besides...I like the idea of a pretty guy having his tears kissed away by another pretty guy.

And a serial! I've always wanted to write a traditional serial-style story, with periodic cliffhangers and stuff.

Lordy. I could write h/c, if I could use pictures and didn't have to find words to make it sound sensible! What fun!

Ahem. Pictures.

I pondered this once before (but I can't remember if I actually blogged it or not and in any case even my egotism stops short of expecting you to remember every casual world I post) and I've kind of had it in the back of my mind.

Let's say...nine chapters. Because you don't want to rush through it too fast and you need some time for character development but you're only doing it as an exercise so there's no point in planning out twelve books or anything, right?

...long pause....

Okay, I did some experimenting. You need at least three arcs to each installment. More complicated arcs will require five. That's sparse, but it's not like I can actually draw this stuff anyhow, so let's plan a minimalist approach. Each arc requires 30-50 drawings. Again, that's a minimalist approach and presupposes you're planning to sketch some transitional graphics on the fly. Split the difference and say 4 arcs, an average of 40 graphics per arc.

Whassat? 9 x 4 x 40 = Wow. 1,440 pictures. Minimum.

A) That's a lot of pictures.

B) No wonder it seems like sometimes those novelists are reusing graphics. I would, too. (I wonder how they do that? Do they have to trace and re-draw the details, or is there some way to transfer the entire drawing? Or is this why they're all using computer graphics these days, so that they can cut-and-paste? Not that I mind...because otherwise we'd all be waiting two years between installments, wouldn't we? And then the artists would have nervous breakdowns because they'd realize that their drawing style had changed so much in four years that by the fourth book, the characters are unrecognizable as the ones in the first book. Not to mention the burn-out factor of people deciding they're tired of a story long before the decade required to produce it has passed.)

Where was I?

Oh, yeah. Plotting on paper. Done.

I created nine primary characters (well, the Two Primary Characters and the major supporting social network for each of them). Gave each Main Guy a job, a hobby, a past, a family, and an interest they'll discover they share. Thought of 9 chapters, structuring them around the pattern of one guy's job.

Briefly roughed in the framework and outlined the development of the romantic storyline through the 9 chapters. Wrote a brief outline of the frame-by-frame development of the first three chapters (the first "book"). (I decided that there need to be at least three chapters in each "book," which will produce three "books" for this story.)

Came up with a title that lends itself to being used as a "theme" so there are related titles for each chapter that also suggest the development of the story overall.

I thought that would take longer, but I guess killing one slow work day is worth it. (More seriously, some of this was in the back of my mind already, from the previous time I was wondering what it took to put one of these together. So all I had to do was key some of it in.) Of course, I need to design the physical world, create a few more transitional and supporting characters, and flesh out what's turning out to be a pretty skimpy storyline. (But since when aren't my storylines skimpy?)

Still. I learned a lot and brought up an entirely new list of questions for myself.

#1 - 3 arcs to a chapter, 3 chapters to a book is pretty skimpy. 5 arcs to a chapter, 3 chapters to a book is probably a more realistic minimum. The 3/3 combination is perilously minimalist PWP territory since it proved to be almost impossible to get more than the barest amount of character development into it.

#2 - Visualizing a story is hard. Things that made sense as one static scene when I thought of them proved, when I tried to describe the picture, to require 3 or four pictures to adequately convey.

#3 - POV is much less critical than in text. You can hop into some minor character's head for a graphic or two, and then leave him callously in the dust, never to be heard from again. A technique that would be jarring and awkward in prose works beautifully in pictures. Sadly, POV isn't a thing I have problems with, so this doesn't smooth over any particular weakness of my own.

#4 - Setting, a thing I normally ignore in a store unless I find it necessary to describe Mulder's rubber waders or Skinner's birthday present, is critical. You do, in fact, have to be able to "see" a story in process in order to plot a graphic story. Something that was already a weakness in my prose turns into a crippling limitation in a graphic story.

#5 - Creating what look like cliffhangers is easy. Knowing if they're going to work or not is impossible until you backfill the preceding scenes.

#6 - Thinking up original characters is easy. Making them three-dimensional, with distinct personalities, likes, dislikes, weaknesses, and strengths, primarily through the use of graphics is a whole, new problem.

And there are stylistic questions. Should the Dark-and-Brooding hero be blond with a sweet face, or be, in fact, dark and ostentatiously brooding?

Should there be a Hopeless Romantic, and should it be Mr. Sweetface, or Mr. Squarejaw, just to throw a curve at the reader?

Who's going to be softhearted and does either of them have a streak of ruthless efficiency? What makes A pout and why did B get his hair cut? Are they going to be competitive with each other, and if so, over what? Who gets his feeling hurt first and how does he deal with it? Which one is the emotional risk-taker and which one would take out an insurance policy before walking across the street?

#7 - Where the hell did that cat come from?

I may have to finish outlining the story just to figure these things out.

Bottom line? Writing a story is writing a story, regardless of framework. Consistent characterization, balancing a "romantic" storyline with an "action" storyline, keeping the story moving fast enough to keep the reader engaged without moving at warp speed and skipping critical development steps, and building to a satisfying resolution of all story lines within a (relatively) short section of the overall work...all of these things have to be resolved.

And you get to add the problem of having to be able to draw. Boggles the mind.

Anyhow. So much for that experiment.

I fell in love with my two guys while I was playing with this. Sadly, I was just playing and they're never going to get together. (And I gave them names and everything! One of them even had a Japanese name, and Japanese origins, in honor of the MYSA-AS roots of this inquiry! He wasn't Japanese...even in my imagination I stopped short of pretending I was going to research an entirely unfamiliar culture, but still.)

Admit it. You'll be really, really glad when I get a job where I have work to do during the day, won't you?