Words Are Pictures 1.4 Creativity in Seasons: Use What Survives
If you’ve been doing your homework from last week then you have a good number of pages finished, a good number of ideas that are taking shape. Chances are you have found yourself on the edge of a cliff of reason. You can’t see how it all fits, you can’t quite put it together. You want to quit and start some thing else.
Don’t do it.
You’ve been working everyday. You want to throw away that script. You want to throw away those pages. You want to start again.
Don’t do it.
Do ten more pages. Really. Ten. Then and only then , take away the ones that don’t work. Until then you don’t have enough to really decide. I have right now, on my desk, five dead projects. They died hard. But when they passed on they left me with a creative inheritance. They left me with the pages for three different projects which are now moving forward under their own steam. Creativity can come in seasons. Sometimes it grows up big and green and full of life. With me if I don’t harvest quickly, the winter comes and the leaves die. So I shake the tree, the dead stuff falls off and I start again.
Writers have the luxury of cutting a sentence and rewriting it at a whim. In comics it’s harder to just re-draw an entire page. But you should. Every time I hear a story about Mike Mignola starting a story over I cringe, knowing that the worst of his discarded pages are still greater then my chosen pages. But we all make the work we can make. You might not be Paul Pope with that brush, but then really, neither was he in those first few THB volumes.
The point here is that until you make a whole bundle of pages you won’t know what works and what doesn’t. You can’t show people the stories in you head. You have to get them out of your head and learn from them.
So keep writing, keep drawing, keep creating.
Three pages that I cut from the third volume of The Imagination Manifesto: Tomorrow Society (which were just no good in the context of the TS tale) have grown into a new tale which has been tentatively named Humor Gallows and the War on Dragons. (Which got a green light from a publisher, which I didn’t accept ((yet)) because I’d have to give up creative control. That will be another post I promise)
So get to it. Make those pages. Next week we’ll talk about what to do with them.
Your Homework.
Keep at it. Make a stack of work. Don’t give up. Don’t start over. Sustain that momentum.
Then find a copy of the new Tom Waits Album and listen too it while you read Soulwind by Scott Morse.
Check out previous WAP Installments
WAP – 1.3: Even One Word Is Progress
WAP – 1.4 Creativity in Seasons: Use What Survives
