I live and work in the film and television business. I have a lot of
film-maker friends, directors and writers – all trying to find their way
to getting their (film) vision in front of audiences. Some of these folks
have read comics in their past. And some may even read a few comic book
mainstays these days.

Lately, Hollywood has turned to mining the comic book industry for
material, searching for fresh stories and new franchises. The graphic
story gives the producers and money-men an idea of what a project may look
like. As this trend has continued, more and more screenwriters are
finding that producers respond to their just-out-of-mainstream spec
scripts by saying, “It seems interesting. But what will it look like? Is
there a book? A graphic novel?”

Because of this new stumbling block, lots of screenwriters are looking to
turn their film scripts into comic books or graphic novels.

Easy, right? Simple, yes?

I can only sigh when I encounter this attitude. Usually, the writer
planning to “turn the script into a graphic novel” hasn’t picked up a
comic book since he (and it is usually a guy) was 13.

I have one friend who is seriously pursuing the “make it a graphic novel”
path. He’s already shot his film, and sees making a graphic novel
adaptation as a promotional tool to assist in getting film distribution.
I get the feeling that having any readers is entirely a tertiary matter
for him. When he first asked me about getting into this, his plan was to
find a (cheap) artist, and give the artist a copy of the film script and
screencaps from the finished movie for references, and just let the artist
“do it.”

At which point, I wanted to find a wall where I could bang my head.

It’s a big mistake many screenwriters – indeed almost any non-comics
writer – makes about comic writing: that it is nothing more than a movie
script with frozen moments. Easy.

Most of these writers have never considered how long it takes to do the
artwork for a comic. I’ve had various artists give me an estimate of a
page a day. And I’m assuming that’s for working from a clear script that
has the panels and page turns nicely delineated. I gave one artist a
sample script of a few pages setting up the main character for a graphic
novel project of my own. He got jazzed by it, right off the bat,
expressing appreciation for the way I wrote it, focusing on the key
moments. He explained that he’s often given scripts that he has to wade
through and sort out himself, before he even starts drawing. To get a
script that was clear enough that he could easily see the images in his
head energized him.

I suspect the biggest stumbling block non-comics writers have in trying to
understand comic book writing is that they’ve never thought of story as an
object. When you’re writing prose, you’re thinking about the forward
motion of the characters in the story, and movies are… well, moving!
But in comic book writing, the end manifestation is an object.

It’s not an easy switch to think of what the story will look like On. The.
Page. The combination of image and narration, the flow of the story
across two facing pages, the possibilities of the page turn or what
happens between the panels, “in the gutter”, these are all elements
specific to comic book writing. What some writers overlook is that even
the dialogue has an appearance on the page. For instance, in a script or
even a novel, it would be possible to spell a character’s name “Said” and
not have it be a problem, because grammar and capitalization provide clues
that it is a name. But in comics, where dialogue is frequently in all
caps, it’s not as clear. Is “SAID” a proper noun or a verb? (At which
point, the writer should opt for alternate spellings like “Sayd” or
“Sayid”.)

Like any other craft, comic book writing has its own rules and needs.
“Writing is writing” is not really true, not in the sense that if you have
mastered one form of writing you have mastered all forms. People easily
grasp the difference between writing poetry and prose. It begins to sink
in that there is a difference between prose storytelling and scriptwriting
(be it plays or film). But too many still underestimate the skills needed
for comic book writing. “It’s comics. It’s easy!”

Comic book writing continues to be treated as an unwanted step-child in
most writing circles. I recently joined a writers’ society, and comic
book scripting gets mentioned only as an afterthought. Admittedly, this
is Hollywood, where most are screenwriters. But the perception remains
that it is an “easy” craft, not even worthy of it’s own consideration.
Hopefully, things will change.

(And I’m not even going to get into the matter of folks not bothering to
understand comics business, publishing and promoting.)

Sarah Beach

About Sarah:

Born to the rolling landscape of Michigan, I got
transplanted to the flat coastal plains of Houston, Texas when I was 16.
Retreating from the world (at least as much as an extrovert is capable of
that), I began working on my writing during endless hours. Artwork
continued to be an important recreation. Along the way, I earned a
Bachelor’s and Master’s in English, and became a medieval scholar.
However, Academia was not my cup of tea, so I eventually moved on to the
entertainment business (and the mountains of Los Angeles). After 18 years
of doing fact-checking for Jeopardy!, I’m now back to immersing myself in
my own writing. And even the recreational artwork is coming back.

In the midst of all that, I labored and brought forth THE SCRIBBLER’S GUIDE TO THE LAND OF MYTH, which involved four years of writing, research, and review of over 150 films and television episodes. The website for the book is here.

My personal website devoted to broader writing interests can be found at Scribblerworks.

Entire contents of this post copyright 2009 by Sarah Beach. Used with permission.

What Is Wrong With This Picture?

My mother told me this story: when she was a teenager, the musical South Pacific premiered on Broadway. By then she was no longer living in New York, but in Seattle, so she didn’t get to see the musical live, but my grandfather, who was a big Rodgers and Hammerstein fan, bought the cast album and played it. After hearing it for himself, he summoned his four kids into the living room and sat them down.

“I want you to hear this,” he said to them, and put the needle to the vinyl. This is what he wanted them to hear:

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

These words are sung by a white, American lieutenant named Joe Cable, who is in love with a Pacific Islander girl named Liat. They were sung to a French widower who had mixed-race children and who could not understand why the American nurse he had fallen for would be upset by the mere existence of his children. The lieutenant is trying to explain that, in the culture they come from, racism is institutional. “It’s not born in you,” says Cable bitterly; “it happens after you’re born…”

Lieutenant Cable understands how it has happened that he’s broken Liat’s heart, and how, despite the fact that he loves her and she loves him, his upbringing and the social conformity against “mixing races” is so strongly ingrained in him that even though he sees that freight train bearing down on him, he cannot move himself off the tracks. He is angry and frustrated at himself for being that way; he does not want to be, but cannot stop himself from it.

That this song caused the production a few headaches when it came out is a major understatement. More than a few times during the rehearsal period, Rodgers and Hammerstein were counseled to cut the song. And every time they heard that, they dug their heels in a little deeper. The producers, afraid of a backlash from several different quarters, including the increasingly paranoid-of-communism Federal government, appealed to the author of the original stories, James A. Michener, to try and get him to persuade them to cut the song. Not only did Michener take the pair’s side, he agreed with it. Years later he explained: “The authors replied stubbornly (to the requests) that this number represented why they had wanted to do this play, and that even if it meant the failure of the production, it was going to stay in.”

Fast forward twenty-odd years to the freewheeling 1970’s: when I was old enough to enjoy musicals, when I could sit through The Sound of Music and Oklahoma! without squirming, I saw South Pacific on TV. And right after the hilarity of watching a butch Seabee in a coconut bra and grass skirt get laughed off a stage, Mom poked me in the shoulder and said, “I want you to listen to this.”

I remember later on, in 1981, having this song pounding in my head when my oh-so-progressive, white liberal Democratic California high school elected a black homecoming king and a white homecoming queen and hordes of parents flipped their freaking wigs and it got real ugly… for everyone except us kids, because hell, we elected him! I still remember his name: Willie Stubblefield. I cannot remember the queen’s name for the life of me, or even the prom king or queen. Why else would I remember him other than the controversy? In a perfect world, frankly, I wouldn’t have remembered his name, either.

#

To quote from an old Bill Cosby routine, “I told you that story to tell you this one…”

When the Hollywood Reporter announced last year the casting choices for the four leads in the “Avatar: The Last Airbender” movie (now called just “The Last Airbender”, due to James Cameron calling dibs on the “Avatar” part for something completely different), it caused nary a ripple in the mainstream media. So many properties are getting turned over into movies, if it wasn’t for the fact that M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and several not as good movies I’m willing to overlook simply because of the first two) had taken the project for himself and put his name on it. There had been a nationwide casting call to get unknowns to lead the cast, echoing the spirit of the casting of the Harry Potter films. Fans were hopeful that Hollywood might, just might, Get It Right.

And Hollywood came up with four white teenagers. Read it here.

(for the benefit of those who don’t know: “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, which will hereafter be referred to as ATLA, because you try typing that out over and over again and see why, is an American made cartoon series from Nickelodeon, which features characters and landscapes and architectural and costume designs so deeply and richly influenced by Asian, Southeast Asian and Inuit culture that it is inextricable from the story. For visual examples of this, please see here and here . Then we’ll continue.)

After a grueling nationwide casting call, the lead character, a young boy whose character design is styled in the Tibetan monk-Dalai Lama tradition is being played by a martial arts-wielding kid from Texas with the decidedly western name of Noah Ringer. (side note: that name is suspicious to me. Knowing M. Night Shyamalan’s penchant for twists, it’s more than possible, since there are no authenticated pictures of what the young man looks like, that “Noah Ringer” is in fact a fake name —as a “ringer” is slang for a stand-in that is actually more than advertised—and Shyamalan may have pulled a total fast one. That is, if I were writing the movie of this movie, that’s how it would be. Alas, I have little hope that this is the case. Although if it is the case, you heard it here first! )

The other three kids, the brother and sister friends of the protagonist-hero and their rival-slash-enemy, were chosen from kids who actually have acted professionally before. One of them is a teenybopping pop star (who has since been replaced—ahem, I mean, who has since bowed out due to the euphemism-laden scheduling conflict excuse—by Dev Patel, one of the stars of Slumdog Millionaire, which would have been a great thing except they have now replaced the white villain with a dark villain, making the dynamic now White Kids save the world from Dark Evil. Way to change the dynamic for the worse, there!). Another one of them is a member of the cast of “Twilight,” which ironically is a story featuring very very white, albeit undead, heroes and possibly the worst stereotype of Native Americans since “F-Troop” (that’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it). And who by the way has made some pretty stupid comments about how he just needs to shave the sides of his head and “get a tan” to play his character before his publicist told him to STFU. And I’ve never heard of the girl but apparently she’s been in a movie or two herself. At least so far she hasn’t said anything stupid.

So what’s the problem? What’s wrong with how they cast the ATLA movie? Plenty. From the commentary to the casting notice I found this one entry summed it all up nicely, point and counterpoint:

“It’s only a movie”
Well, it’s a movie targeting children.
With the current white-washed cast,
it will perpetuate that White actors/actresses
can act Asian better than Asian actors/actresses.
Out of all the 14 millions Asian-Americans and 3 Million Native-Americans,
all they could find is 3 white kids to play the heroes and a Indian-British kid to play the villain?
“It’s only a cartoon”
Well, if you are a child in the minority then you would know how inspiring and empowering it was
to experience a refreshing departure from a predominantly white media.
White people have the privilege to not care.
It’s no big deal to them.
“It’s only a movie.”
?”It’s only a cartoon.”
Well, if you were offended by Jackson Rathbone’s comment,
“…I am definitely going to need a tan…”
Then you don’t have the privilege to not care.

Please note that there has been a complete and telling absence of comment regarding this movie and the casting from the original creators of the television series, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Koneitzko, but that is hardly surprising. Unless you’re Alan Moore—and he has just cause to rail against his own works in movies, what with the track record so far—very very few writers will bash the movie versions of their books before they come out. At most they will have their names taken off the credits, which is telling in itself. The only really big kerfluffle that springs to mind was when Anne Rice balked at Tom Cruise playing Lestat in “Interview With The Vampire” and she railed and wailed against it while it was in production and then when the movie came out she declared it the bestest thing evar. Which is her prerogative, but still.

However, the reason why they haven’t commented on the casting of their movie may be a lot closer to this:

(In which Ursula K. LeGuin explains why she didn’t bash the SciFi movie version of her beautiful and fantastic Earthsea books while it was in production, until the producers tried to put words into her mouth suggesting that she approved of the whitewashing of her dark-skinned protagonist and she could no longer keep silent. This is a cautionary tale; for those who would see their books transformed into movies and for would-be writers, know this: JK Rowling’s experience at keeping creative control is the extreme exception. This will not happen to you.)

And the best explanation, ever, of why the casting of white protagonists in place of originally nonwhite characters is a bad thing, when people look and say all of those things above, that it’s only a story, that why can’t the characters be white, that it’s reverse racism to say otherwise, can be found here.

#

So what does this have to do with the price of tea on Bali Ha’i, I hear you ask. It’s this:

Children imprint on what they see. When nonwhite children see only white kids saving the world, they come to believe or expect that this means that no one else can, including themselves. The flip side of this is that if white kids also only see white kids saving the world, they too come to believe that they’re the only ones who can be heroes, excluding all others.

When I was growing up in the 70’s, it wasn’t just white kids only saving the world, it was white boys only. The girls I had to look up to were Dorothy, and Alice, and the Disney princess of your choice, all passive, needing to be rescued, gloriously light skinned and light haired. I wanted to be the hero of my own adventures, so badly I usually ended up just pretending to be a boy to avoid the whole question. It took a lot of searching to discover that yes, girls can be heroes while still being girls. But I never would have discovered that just by watching the movies that told me otherwise.

Dear Hollywood (and the ATLA producers in particular): To say that they cast the best possible actors regardless of color is at best ingenuous and at worst DO YOU THINK WE’RE STUPID?!? Do you not know how important it is for children to see themselves mirrored on a screen so they can say, “I can be a hero too,” or do you only stick to the mantra “only white kids sell movie tickets. No one will take their kids to see a nonwhite cast of kids star in an action flick”? No need to answer. Your choices answer for you.

But, peel yourselves away from your bottom line and look at what you’re doing. Take a good, hot, steamy look. You had the most beautiful opportunity to present a product that would be true to the intent, and to the audience, and you chickened out. You pulled a Joe Cable on this project. Rather than face the ridicule and social stigma of bringing a Tonkinese girl home with you from the war, you went off on a dangerous mission because running away from the problem is somehow easier than facing it.

And if you’ve seen South Pacific you know how that turned out for Cable.

And if you’ve seen South Pacific you also know what happened to the Frenchman and his kids. And you have some hope.

That is the choice you had, dear Hollywood producers, and with ATLA you borked it big time. Production is already starting in Greenland. However, I refuse to believe it’s too late. To quote a book by Barry B. Longyear: “Anytime before you pass through the gates of hell, you can change your luck.”

If this movie fails at the box office you will blame the economy, the original story, the production, anyone and everyone; you will EAT YOUR OWN before you will admit that you were wrong.

And if it does blockbuster box office, then thank you for perpetuating the wrong, for taking the safe road, and making it that much harder for the next project with a nonwhite protagonist to get made true to its story.

Which oh by the way is exactly the opposite message of ATLA in the first place. Aang ran away from his responsibilities as the next Avatar because it frightened him to do the right thing, and look what that did. It took three seasons and a war to fix that, inasmuch as it could be fixed.

Dear Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, executive producers of the ATLA movie: There is still time to fix this. There are many who will boycott this movie simply on these terms, but we would rather see it fixed. It’s so much easier, and less costly, to do it right than it is to do it over. But you have to be the change you want to see, and be the lesson you want to teach.

It’s your choice to make the movie you want to make. Sure. And when the movie’s done and in the theaters, then it’s our choice.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

Arlene C. Harris started reading at age 3 and writing at age 5, and shows no signs of slowing. She is a former Grand Prize winner of L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future award; her story, “His Best Weapon,” was written as an editorial response to the insistence of the Star Trek franchise that there is no place for gays in their perfect future.

Blog post by Arlene C. Harris and copyright 2009, Arlene C. Harris. Used with permission.

Two very important things.

James Owen posted this from Frederick Pohl:

The times when a writer isn’t writing are called “writer’s slump.” Everybody has it, at least now and then. Nobody, or nobody I know, is wholly successful at dealing with it. I don’t know how to deal with it any more than anyone else., but what I do know is a way to postpone its happening, pretty well, most of the time, in a fashion that works, more or less, for me. What I do is set myself a daily quota of four pages. No more, no less; and I write those pages every day, no matter where I am, no matter how long it takes, if I die for it. Sometimes it takes forty-five minutes. Sometimes it takes eighteen hours. Sometimes I am reasonably satisfied with the words that go onto the paper, and quite a lot of the time I loathe them.

And Neil Gaiman posted something today that turned me into a blubbery wad of goo.

I decided to go back to art school a couple of years ago, and have some personal time. I have not had a vacation since I was 15-years-old, except for one week off in 2001. But there were clucks of disapproval when I took a year to get back to the place where making art is a delight instead of a burden.

And with that, go read:

Some writers need a while to charge their batteries, and then write their books very rapidly. Some writers write a page or so every day, rain or shine. Some writers run out of steam, and need to do whatever it is they happen to do until they’re ready to write again. Sometimes writers haven’t quite got the next book in a series ready in their heads, but they have something else all ready instead, so they write the thing that’s ready to go, prompting cries of outrage from people who want to know why the author could possibly write Book X while the fans were waiting for Book Y.

c

[WARNING: Some comics, film and book plot spoilers ahead!]

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

Stephen King

A few weeks ago at Australia’s Supanova (Brisbane) pop culture convention, I had the privilege of meeting US comics creator Jhonen Vasquez whose satirical work Johnny the Homicidal Maniac I greatly admire. Despite the fact that I’m not usually drawn to creative properties with the words “homicidal” or “maniac” in the title or indeed ones that hint at or overtly promise great acts of depravity, my business partner and artist Jozef Szekeres persuaded me to read it and I’m very grateful to him for doing so. Vasquez’s portrait of insanity in the form of a deranged serial killer was not only convincing but, in my estimation, was a multi-layered and brilliantly executed tour-de-force. Johnny is not quite my idea of the quintessential anti-hero, as his methods of dispatching victims would make even Dexter cringe. Yet in his quieter insular moments Johnny possesses a modicum of self-awareness and displays moments of a kind of distorted sweetness as he strives to find the meaning of life and ultimately find out who he is.

In the ten minutes I spent gushing to Vasquez about the impact of the work on me, I asked him a question I’d been wondering while reading the series: “Did you do a lot of research on profiling and the psychology of serial killers or is this all you?” Vasquez paused for a moment and with a glint in his eye, which could have been interpreted in any number of ways, confessed, “It all came from me.”

Vasquez’s revealing admission got me thinking again about something I’ve been grappling with for a long time – when my personal internal and seemingly benign archetypes include the healer and the seeker amongst others and when the genres I traditionally work in are fantasy or visionary (metaphysical) fiction, how do I step outside of my emotional comfort zone and into the darker side of myself in order to channel it into creative works?

Outside of resorting to chemical means such as drugs and alcohol and the subsequent cliché scenario of spiralling down into a psychologically disturbed oblivion brought on by childhood trauma, I’ve identified seven practical keys that have helped me create some of the darker characters and moments in my own fiction work and that of the upcoming Elf~Fin: Hyfus & Tilaweed comics series. These keys could prove useful for both comics writers and artists to harvest the darkness within and ultimately redirect it into their storytelling.

Before we examine them, it’s important to discern the necessity of introducing darkness into your stories. The actual argument in favour of it is threefold:

– Without going into abject darkness how can a character experience the light in forms such as love, joy and redemption, which invariably accompanies traditional happy-ending plots?
– Without understanding the evil lengths an antagonist and his/her allies will go to in order to fulfil their objectives, how can we create obstacles and conflict for the protagonist’s journey?
– And without these stark contrasts, how can we get readers/viewers to identify with the lead character/s and in the process give readers a visceral experience that evokes a large range of feelings and emotions (which is one of my success measurement tools about whether or not a work translates into a rich reading or filmic experience)?

The reality is that outside of creating a fiction work for pure entertainment value, many of us choose to step into the darkness in our stories in order to challenge a society in denial and to expose controversial themes that in the past were commonly excised from our attention. The objective here is to introduce these issues not for titillation sake but to shine a spotlight on humanity’s evil-mongers and hopefully provide solutions and hope to the lost and forlorn spirits out there who relate to the characters and situations. Audiences and readers have also reached new levels of sophistication, and black-and-white portraits of good and evil just don’t cut it any more. Characters actually need to be multi-faceted. Some of the best examples of deep and complex characters I’ve come across in the last few years are on the television series Lost and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In comics and graphic novels, the aforementioned JtHM, as well as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (the serial killer convention was quite extraordinary!)

But getting back to the seven practical keys that can help you access multiple parts of yourself…

(1) Personal Experience

Dredging up traumatic or dysfunctional personal experiences and using them as the foundation for story and/or art is the most obvious key. Australian comics creators Christian Read and Paul Abstruse’s graphic novel WitchKing is a case in point. It’s a veritable blood bath. I cringed over entire sequences while reading it. Having said that, it’s also a stellar piece of writing and is quite brilliantly illustrated. At its very core it’s a story about chronic bullying and the aftermath – that is, what happens when a victim fights back against his perpetrators. When I talked recently to Paul Abstruse (whose body of illustrated comics work is characterised by dark themes) about how he approached the script he said he is usually attracted to the murkier stuff because it often parallels his own difficult upbringing. He related to the WitchKing material so much so that in his own eyes he became the embodiment of a tortured artist who descended into his own personal hell in order to channel those experiences onto the canvas. While working on the art, he specifically remembers recalling instances of his own anger, shame, and resentment, which echoed aspects of the script and, in turn, helped him endow the artwork with a powerful energy.

Similarly, Colleen Doran’s graphic novel A Distant Soil (Volume II): The Ascendant offers up what I consider is the most shocking and confronting scene in the entire four volumes. It comes in the form of a ritual known as “The Choosing”. The Ovanon, she writes about, don’t believe children have souls until they go through a ceremony, whereupon adults in the upper echelons of the society’s hierarchy capriciously decide who is worthy of a soul and who is not. Children become disposable objects and in some cases are offered up for sexual gratification and profound physical and emotional abuse.

Colleen didn’t directly experience the horror of this first hand, but during her childhood she witnessed several incidents that left an indelible impression on her psyche and gave her the starting point to explore these ideas in her story. At a very young age Colleen recognised that children – the most helpless and vulnerable people in our society – were not valued as fully fledged human beings and often underwent a kind of devaluation process. This even happened in the court system. Punishment meted out to the transgressors of physical and emotional abuse against children was less than that given to offenders who had abused adults. Children who could not articulate their pain and who had undergone horrific trauma were relegated to the roles of second-class citizens with no rights. In particular, Colleen witnessed an incident where a little girl who had been starved and tortured was wrested out of her abusive family situation only to be returned to the same family after she had sufficiently recovered. The family then picked up their bags and moved – never to be seen or heard of again – and Colleen has always wondered what happened to that little girl. Justice in this case was not served, and merely served to reinforce in young Colleen’s eyes that there seemed to be an habitual violation of children’s essential humanity.

Your emotional reactions to traumatic events (or even seemingly minor injustices) are all fodder for your stories and characters. And for those of you who feel vulnerable and anxious about exposing too much – just remember that characters are actually composites/collages/patchwork quilts (all these synonyms and more). Writers rarely duplicate the living exactly, but usually borrow facets or idiosyncrasies of themselves and others, then add part research and then part imagination and sew all these pieces together like Doctor Frankenstein sews together body parts from various corpses to create his monster.

Using personal experience can ultimately be therapeutic and cathartic – the act of reconstituting your own demons and darkness and channelling them into your characters can be liberating and healing.

(2) Introspection and Self Analysis

This key is closely linked to personal experience (mentioned above) but differs in the method – it’s a conscious and active process of getting to know yourself and releasing blocks that may impede or in fact shut down your creative facilities. This process often requires an element of detachment where you become an observer of your inner and outer life as it unfolds. You ultimately become a student of yourself.

In the first instance, I encourage writers to experience various therapies to release negative repressed emotions that may be causing creative blocks, do psych tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which identifies whether you’re an extrovert or introvert, are thinking or feeling oriented, intuitive or sensing, and perceiving or judging. Understand your archetypes (read Caroline Myss’s book Sacred Contracts for a comprehensive list) – these include advocate, warrior, rescuer, trickster and victim. Embrace the feminine and masculine traits you possess inside and identify how they manifest in your life. Examine your developmental journey through various ages. Strip away your barriers and lean into your authentic self so you can endow your characters with emotional honesty. If/when you experience emotions such as jealousy, obsession, rage, and resentment as a reaction to triggering incidents, ask yourself how you can translate them into words and pictures. Then ask yourself how characters could exhibit some of your personal characteristics, as well as traits that are alien to you, in various conflicts.

Many creatives also talk about possessing a kind of split personality (not in the true sense of a Dissociative Identity Disorder but a disconnection nevertheless) – that is, they may find themselves participating in real life scenarios but also be observing (as if they’re outside themselves) at the same time. This observer part of them captures and imprints all the detail of the unfolding scene in their memory, and then, with a twist of the imagination, may play out that scene into several different takes with different resolutions.

For example, a writer friend once told me that he cannot have an argument with his wife without his mind offering up several different simultaneously-dramatised scenarios about how the argument will unfold – in one she slams the door and drives away and the opposite end of the spectrum is that they tear off their clothes and make love on the floor there and then.

Maybe we all need a dose of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now to keep us in the moment, but the simple truth is that this ability serves our profession and our creativity.

(3) Create Boundaries – Honour Yourself and Your Readers

Differentiate between who the character is and how they act and who you are and how you act, but also be aware of crossing any boundaries that may undermine, conflict or betray your personal values and your essential self. This is not about pro- or self-censorship: it’s about making conscious choices and having a vision and a message of what you want to say about yourself and your stories in the world. If you want to experiment with genre and story and darkness then that’s great – it will be a personal challenge and a process of self-discovery. However, if it means betraying a personal core truth or belief system then be aware of the implications for yourself and for your audience in the short and long term.

A few years ago I attended a publishing conference in the USA, where one of the key speakers was Eric DelaBarre, a screenwriter who worked on the television crime series Law and Order. He mentioned that whenever he attended parties, he forgot to have a good time. Rather, he began scouting locations and looking for possible weapons he could use to create violent murder scenes in his upcoming television work. His entire outlook was focused on energising darkness. One day he snapped to attention and decided that this was not the projection of himself that he wanted to stream into the world. Instead he decided to honour his spiritual self and then he did what many Hollywood insiders would consider to be the unthinkable – he left his television job and began working on adapting popular spiritual books for the screen.

I’m curious about exploring different genres and so I may enter some darker territory in my future writing, but I personally draw the line at depicting acts of extreme and savage cruelty and perversion towards children and animals because these things strike at and damage a very deep psychic core within me – neither do I want to inflict these images on other people. Once these scenarios are imbedded in the memory they cannot be removed, although we can use the conscious act of suppression to push these thoughts away and to avoid them. My particular stance could be a function of age, gender, spirituality or something else but the upshot is that I have a great love and affinity for animals and children and I have no wish to depict their suffering in reality, in the realms of my imagination, or in fictional worlds. The only rare time I have killed animals in comics fiction is as food sources (mostly fish), although a bear featured on one occasion in the second issue of the original WaveDancers, which still makes me feel uncomfortable when I think about it. My co-creators Jozef Szekeres and Bruce Love debated the subject with me for a long time. In the end in order for me to make peace with it and have some level of acceptance, we transmuted the tragedy of the death into a comedy scene whereby the protagonist and his companion are full of bravado, out of their natural element (water) and on land with just a small hunting knife between them, completely drunk on berry juice and where they have no comprehension about how much damage a full grown bear could do to them if they got on the wrong side of its teeth and claws. The bear’s death ends up being an absolute fluke.

I was to find out later on while attending a scriptwriting workshop that deaths which occur in comedies or comedic scenes are much more readily accepted by readers/audiences than those which occur in dramas because ultimately we don’t believe that the character was in pain or suffered [see (5) Understanding the Conventions of Genres]. An example of this is the ironic running gag of the three dogs accidentally getting killed by an animal lover in A Fish Called Wanda. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the film’s pre-production history, the original print of the movie, which was shown to test audiences, featured lots of blood and guts in it when each of the dogs was squashed and killed. The audience was absolutely appalled and quite hostile. When the director removed the gore, the violence was rendered more of a cartoon violence and the deaths raised a laugh, simply because there was no outward representation of the unfortunate dogs’ suffering.

Finally, as a reader or viewer, how do I personally deal with abject violence on the page or screen? Well here are two cases in point.

I was a long-term devotee of Stephen King and consumed his earlier works with great abandon but he lost me in It, which was, in my view, a story of extreme and unnecessary brutality. Two scenes became branded in my mind as horrible in the extreme. The first was about a sociopath who puts a puppy into an empty fridge just to watch it slowly die. The second was what I consider to be the completely unwarranted and gratuitous scene of the prepubescent character girl “bonding” with the boys in the Losers Club in the sewers in a bid to conquer the monster. Brilliant storyteller that King is, I thought he had gone too far for my liking and that he had lost his way. I switched off him for a long time and never quite made my way back to being a true devotee.

[As a slight aside, I’ve always wondered whether King’s descent into his own personal hell of self-confessed addiction to alcohol and drugs coincided with writing It. His short story Stand by Me was influenced by what happened to him when he was a kid – he apparently witnessed one of his friends being killed by a train on the railway tracks close to home. He returned to his family in shock and with no conscious memory of the incident. But my goodness, where did the evil personified and perpetrated by the monster manifesting itself as Pennywise the Clown come from? Whatever one makes of it, these examples seem to be the embodiment of (1) Personal Experience.]

I now handle reading excessively dark and violent material in three ways. I either stop watching or reading, or, skip the scene in question, or, consume the whole but in short slow bursts so that my senses do not become over saturated. My most recent experience of skipping scenes came from the first book in a fantasy trilogy – where the royal children of a harem (including babies and toddlers) are despatched by the most gruesome means, and a lengthy and detailed description of castration when an innocent boy on the threshold of adolescence is turned into a eunuch. I just couldn’t handle it. I got the gist of what was to happen and then just turned the pages to the next section or chapter. I’m not detracting from the literary worthiness of the story which in fact was a terrific read, and neither am I judging the author (in fact the opposite, I have great respect for her ability to be clearheaded enough to research and write these scenes and am curious about her process) but as a reader it was just too distressing for me to go any further than I did. Avoidance – in this regard– was my defence mechanism of choice.

All I’m saying is, as a comics creator be true to the story and the character but also don’t forget to be true to yourself in the process, be aware of your branding in the commercial publishing world and be aware of the niche market you’re writing for.

(4) Acting Training

While I was growing up I desperately wanted to act in the primary school “musicale” (as it was known), but was always cast in a narrator role. In high school we didn’t have a drama department so I didn’t get any opportunities there either. By the time I made it to university I was positively jumping out of my skin to fulfil this dream and so I deliberately enrolled in a theatre strand in my Professional Writing Degree, as well as joining a musical-theatre group. However, when it came to actually performing solo, I found that I became incredibly self-conscious. I realised that to act I would need to strip back all my protective layers and confront everything that lay within – the good, the bad, the ugly and the feelings at the base of the matter. To deal with the fear I enrolled myself in a one year, part-time acting course at the Q-Theatre in Sydney, which was run by the famous and now deceased Australian director Richard Brooks. In the first class he told us that no matter what we thought of ourselves, that under the right circumstances and with the right stimuli, we are all capable of great evil.

The acting course itself gave me brilliant insights later on into writing characters and plotting actions through the panels on pages. It helped me understand how to access darkness via several mechanisms. You can find your way into character by utilising the classical English theatre tradition – that is, from the physical (external) into the psychological (internal). For example, if you make small adjustments to your body such as turning in one foot so that you limp, or drooping your head, or pitching your voice differently, you will feel differently inside yourself. Similarly, if you use costuming or makeup accoutrements you can access different facets of your personality that are in sympathy with this outerwear. Stanislavski’s naturalistic system was an extension of this – he believed you could explore character and action both from the “outside in” as well as from the “inside out”. And then you have American Method acting, which at its most simplistic is when an actor focuses primarily on the psychological (thoughts and emotions and the drawing up of their own sense and emotional memories), which in turn affects their physical portrayal of the character.

Comics are a visual medium and character acting is crucial for reader identification. Understanding facial expression, body language, the tempo and energy of each character, and how they might talk, can actually help you act out scenes between characters before committing them to paper or digital format. Understanding stagecraft such as the importance of hierarchy and levels, as well as lighting, can help you with character placement in panels and choosing colour palettes and make specific choices about how to render the dark characters and scenes as opposed to your lighter moments.

(5) Understand the Conventions of Your Genre

Understanding the various conventions of different genres can help creators make decisions about the who’s, what’s, where’s, why’s, and how’s of introducing darkness into story. Similarly, your target market will define that too. For example, you wouldn’t introduce a violent chainsaw massacre scene into a children’s comic book series about a magic unicorn, aimed at eight to twelve year olds.

Each genre whether it’s romance, thriller, science fiction or fantasy or others has its own set of conventions. In mystery stories, for example, the reader/audience finds out information at the same time as the characters do. In suspense, however, in order to elevate the tension, the audience is given more information than the character (for example, the ticking bomb under the table) before the characters discover it for themselves.

Furthermore, in thrillers (which encompass detective, action/adventure, horror, suspense/thriller and film noir in the movies) you tell your stories from the protagonist’s (victim’s) point of view and you feature a larger than life antagonist (whether it be man, beast, monster or some supernatural entity) who/which needs to be more powerful than the hero. The challenge for the latter (in the tradition of Survivor) is to outwit, outplay and outlast the villain in order to stay alive.

Understand the rules of your main genre and then you can bring in aspects of your minor genres into the mix. The over-riding rule is not to cheat your reader/audience.

(6) Research

No matter what genre you work in, you can cut through the clichés and add authenticity and plausibility to your stories and characters by researching. For example, in Elf~Fin, Jozef Szekeres and I need to do research into a particular kind of social group and sub-culture (we’re not giving away any plot points at the moment – you’ll have to wait at least till the second issue in the series comes out). We watched lots of documentaries and television talk shows, read books and articles, and consulted lots of online material. This knowledge gave us some understanding of how the group dynamics might work in our world, helped us formulate the villains in particular, and helped us get down into the nitty-gritty detail of how evil might interact with good.

Don’t make assumptions about what you know – check the small stuff. Readers are pretty cluey and have a great eye for detail and gaffes. In fantasy you have a little leeway because your world will be built around magic but if you’re writing about an evil doctor living on a space station you need to make sure your medical procedures and your knowledge of gravity are pretty spot on. The strongest argument in favour of research is that it may give you a fresh way to look at your material so that you can reinvent what has come before and give your story a new angle or flavour. Stephenie Meyer’s vampires from Twilight are a prime example. The traditional vampire who shrinks at the sight of a crucifix or holy water just doesn’t make the grade any more. So if you’re going to write about vampires, research the mythology and then give it your own twist.

(7) Understand Your Subconscious-mind

Think of your memory as a deposit, storage and elimination (retrieval) system similar to the digestive system. Think of your subconscious creative mind as a master chef – drop your raw ingredients into a cooking pot, let the ingredients simmer and stew, and then voila, serve up the finished dish which has been transformed into something new with all its unique fusion of flavours and textures.

You actually need to feed your subconscious mind with lots of raw ingredients. This comes in the form of reading, your adventures and experiences, reading, testing your personal boundaries, watching movies and television, and did I say reading lots and lots of books, comics, newspapers, magazine articles, whatever. All these things are your raw ingredients.

You also need to distinguish between the functions of the conscious (logical, rational, mental) mind and the subconscious (feeling, creative, irrational) mind. Many writers and artists complain about creative blocks but that’s nothing more than over-thinking and consciously trying too hard. For the best ideas to spill forth from the subconscious you need to relax and let yourself enter alpha brain wave activity activated through self-hypnosis or meditation. To my way of thinking, the alpha state is nothing more than the realm between being fully awake and being asleep where the gateway between the conscious and the subconscious minds is more readily open. You experience a hypnotic state naturally in the morning when you’re waking up and at night when you’re slipping into sleep and when you’re daydreaming, which is why it’s good to have a notepad and pen or a recorder near your bed.

Making friends and trusting your subconscious mind can help you with creative problem solving, giving old ideas new perspectives, giving you pieces of dialogue, accessing powerful images that you can hang your story on – you merely input the data you need by asking your mind to help you out and then by leaving it alone to complete its task. Also, the subconscious mind does not work in a linear fashion so be prepared for information to burst forth that might be relevant for a future scene two issues from now, and then be prepared to capture that idea quickly.

Not long ago a Sydney artist expressed an interest in creating a horror short story with me. I was intrigued but had no real understanding of the conventions of the genre and felt very uneasy because it was completely out of my comfort zone. I asked the artist for a list of images that she’d eventually like to incorporate into a story and she gave me about six of them. I had absolutely no inkling of where to start my story but shortly after, I had a powerful dream, which gave me some random images and unconnected sequences, which upon awakening gave me an amazing staring point for the story. Within a few hours I had the entire story in my head, as well as the title – The House of the Smiling Dead. It didn’t take long to capture it and to script it and I also ended up incorporating one of the images the artist had given me on her list into an appropriate spot. The artist moved interstate soon after so alas, I only ended up getting one page of completed artwork but hopefully this will be remedied soon with a new artist and hopefully you’ll get a chance to read it because ultimately I surprised myself and was really proud of the finished script. What I took away was a realisation that if tested, I could dredge up some dark material from within myself to channel into stories even when I had no idea where it came from.

The subconscious mind will give you pivotal information while you are dreaming and when your conscious mind is relaxed and you’re on a kind of automatic pilot. This may happen in the shower, while you’re doing laps or walking on the treadmill at the gym, when you’re dozing and all kinds of places. What you can actually do is ask your mind to come up with information you need – program it with questions so it can spit out an answer. This can take a few minutes or upward of a few days because there is an internal processing that happens inside the recesses of your mind. You just need to trust.

The other key is to express appreciation in the form of a “thinking” thank you towards your deep inner self. In so doing you’re rallying several parts of your mind to complete the job at hand and solidify a kind of creative partnership to make the act of creation natural and easy.

There are lots of CDs and self-hypnosis courses you can do to help you learn to achieve this. Start off with the professional hypnotherapy or meditation associations in your country to ensure you access accredited practitioners and programs.

These seven keys can help you to unlock and access the darkness of your imagination and your soul with the express intent to recreate it into characters and story. In the final analysis, I believe that arbitrary acts of violence for violence sake, which do not enhance or advance the story, are meaningless (comedies being the exception as they’re often filled with for-laugh scenes only). Violence and darkness should, in principle, have a context and relate to characters’ motivations and serve the story or explore an idea the creator is fascinated with or driven to write about or draw, otherwise they’re pointless.

Ultimately, no matter how much darkness you channel into your stories it’s important for you to fall in love with your own characters – both hero and villain alike. There comes a time in that act of creation and characterisation where you find your momentum and you consciously stop driving the action because the characters become so real that they take on a life-force and energy of their own – they take over the dialogue and take their (and your) story to its natural conclusion, along twists and turns and pathways into dark corners and deep crevice that you wouldn’t have anticipated from the outset. As a creator, that’s a good place to be.

Julie Ditrich is a director of Black Mermaid Productions and co-creator with artist Jozef Szekeres of the upcoming Elf~Fin: Hyfus & Tilaweed fantasy comic book series.

Black Mermaid Website
Black Mermaid Blog

This article is copyright 2009 by Julie Ditrich. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

With the arrival of the new STAR TREK movie, the natures of the various
characters of the STAR TREK universe have become ripe for new discussions.
Fans of NEXT GENERATION have often bicker with fans of the Original
Series as to whether Kirk or Picard is the better Captain. There are fans
who prefer DEEP SPACE 9 over VOYAGER. There are even (though I’m not sure why) fans of ENTERPRISE.

I’m not trying to set up an argument about which series is better,
particularly not between the Original Series and NEXT GENERATION. And I
am certainly not out to say that of the two series a person should prefer
one series over the other.

But….

On the most basic level, Kirk has become a mythic figure while Picard
remains just the Leader-Hero of a series of stories.

Let’s start with the points where Kirk and Picard are similar. Both are
Starship Captains (Kirk’s later rank of Admiral is beside the point), who
command considerable respect from their crews. They are both highly
competent at their jobs. These qualitites make them both worthy of our
attention as the heroes of their cycles of stories.

So what makes the difference? Kirk is brash, roguish, not by-the-book; he
is passionate, unconventional and egotistical. Picard is controlled,
precise, knows protocol backward and forward; he is committed, but
emotionally reserved, and although he has a strong ego, he is not the
egotist Kirk is. Is there enough in those characteristics to justify my
saying Kirk is mythic and Picard is not?

There are several archetypes which can bulk up a character to mythic
stature. Because the archetypes are present in even ordinary characters,
it is not the simple presence of a type which make one mythic. It is the
particular mix of types and the importance of the character in the story.

For starters then, we can agree that both Kirk and Picard are important
for their stories. They are, basically, the archetype of the Hero, the
central character. That of itself will not elevate either to the level of
mythic figure. They are both also leaders, what I have labeled as Rulers
(in my book THE SCRIBBLER’S GUIDE TO THE LAND OF MYTH). As Rulers, they frequently make judgements of their followers and of others they encounter, making
decisions about what should happen. Again, these are qualities found in
many core characters and are not quite enough to boost either into the
realm of mythic figures.

It is the next level of characteristics that starts putting distance
between the characters. In addition to the ruler, one of a secondary set
of character archetypes I developed is the one I call the Transformer.
The Transformer is one who makes things change, often by his actions, but
also simply by being who he is in a particular setting. Things change
around a Transformer, simply because he is there, whether by his actions
or not.

This is where Kirk starts to edge out Picard. Yes, there are stories
where Picard works a change in circumstances, but it is usually not
because he wants to change things or even because he is merely present.
Picard often starts from a position of attempting to preserve the status
quo. In part, because the writers wanted to take a different approach
with NEXT GENERATION, Picard frequently tries to abide by the Federation
Prime Directive (of non-interference with other cultures). Kirk, on the
other hand, is a natural walking disruptive force. His entrance to a
scene changes the balance immediately. Things happen around him, becausehe is there. If Picard walks into a scene something might happen, but there is no certainty. If Kirk walks into a scene something definitely will happen.

Still, is that enough to elevate Kirk to mythic stature? Perhaps not.

There is, however, one final element that completes the tipping of the scale.

Of the seven traditional character archetypes (Hero, Mentor, Threshold
Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow and Trickster), it is the Trickster
who frequently acts as the Culture Hero in a society. Although the
Trickster is often the smaller creature who has to find ways of besting
larger adversaries, it is just those qualities that help Mythic Tricksters
establish their cultures. For instance, the Polynesian Trickster Maui
drew islands up out of the ocean floor for humans to live on, and he
slowed down the sun so humans would have more time to do things. Of
course, not all Tricksters come with the positive baggage of being a
Culture Hero. Loki, of Norse mythology, is a malignant force, always
trying to undercut the gods of Asgard. He is destructive and malevolent.

This is where Kirk leaves Picard in the dust. Picard is the chess player,
each move calculated and according to prescribed rules. Kirk is the poker
player, who will outbluff his opponent even while holding a losing hand.
The “only cadet to beat the Kobayashi Maru scenario.” The one who can be
beaten down but not defeated. He will always look for the better
alternative, even if it is not obvious. It comes down to the question of
“Which one would you chose to save the world?” Many want to say Picard,
because he is indeed a sterling character and worthy of admiration. But,
if it is necessary to throw off convention to “save the day,” if it is
necessary to leap blindly to get to the goal first, who do you look to?
For one of these two, those sorts of actions are at the very core of his
being and for the other it is not. In the race to save the crew, the
world, the universe, it is James Tiberius Kirk for the win.

And that is what makes Kirk mythic.

Sarah’s previous guest blog entitled “Says the Screenwriter, Writing a Graphic Novel is Easy!” can be found here.

About Sarah:

Born to the rolling landscape of Michigan, I got
transplanted to the flat coastal plains of Houston, Texas when I was 16.
Retreating from the world (at least as much as an extrovert is capable of
that), I began working on my writing during endless hours. Artwork
continued to be an important recreation. Along the way, I earned a
Bachelor’s and Master’s in English, and became a medieval scholar.
However, Academia was not my cup of tea, so I eventually moved on to the entertainment business (and the mountains of Los Angeles). After 18 years of doing fact-checking for Jeopardy!, I’m now back to immersing myself in my own writing. And even the recreational artwork is coming back.

Entire contents of this post copyright 2009 by Sarah Beach. Used with permission.