Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Writing - breaking story (an illustrated precis)

Had an idea for a comic story - it was really an image of a man in a contemporary setting running from a dinosaur - that I've been working on, in between other writing, for a couple years now.  I shared, and received great critiques, on a number of iterations of a first-issue script at Andy Schmidt's Comics Experience online workshop.  This was invaluable.  And the last revision of that script received the following from Chuck Dixon, who had read and commented on the previous script:

This is a first issue that has all the components needed for a first issue but does not FEEL like a first issue. Quite a feat that.
Good stuff.

Yeah, I felt pretty damn good about that.

Dixon's full comments have spurred me to pursue this idea fully.  I am in the middle of working out the rest of the opening storyline and hope to find an artist with whom I can produce a proper submission packet.  So, the other night, I sparked up my laptop in order to break the second issue's story.  And it went something like this:



And then a bit like this:


Things became a bit more frustrating, and felt a bit like this:


And then, after banging my head against the outline of this second issue for over an hour, it was a bit more like this:


So, it was time for this:



Which was a good thing, because when I woke up in the morning, I unlocked the "keystone" that was pushing back at me the evening before, and the rest of the outline fell, pretty much, into place.  
[unlike an earlier story I was working through a couple weeks back, this key fell into place after I awoke in the morning, rather than at 3:00am, which was nice] 


I need to do some slight tweaking to the outline, and then, later this week, I'll begin scripting.  Looking forward to writing these characters again.

-chris

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