I'm the writer of "Witch Doctor" (Skybound Entertainment/Image Comics), Hellraiser, Doctor Who, Disney Kingdoms: Seekers of the Weird, and a WHOLE LOT OF STUFF that you haven't seen yet!
“Into The Spider-Verse” And The Importance Of Diversity... So White Dudes Have Non-White Dude Role Models!
When I grew up, all my role-models looked like me. They were white. They were male. They were cis. And on top of that, they were straight (or at least, they were presumed to be!).
Saw Into The Spider-Verse last night. It’s a PHENOMENAL movie. I mean, look at this shit:
Walking home afterwards, I pulled my hood down against the drizzle. And then, the soundtrack playing in my ears, I pulled it down... a little lower. Because I was imagining that I wasn't walking down the shining street. I was web-slinging.
I was Miles Morales. I was the Amazing Spider-Man.
I think it’s VITALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT for people who aren’t in power-holding demographics to see themselves represented on screen, on TV, in books, in comics. Everywhere But *on top* of that? I think it’s super important and worthwhile to expand the minds and lives of young straight cis white males — like me, when I was growing up — by giving them Reys, Finns, 13th Doctors, and Miles Morales... es. I think encouraging whitecishetboys to see themselves in people who aren't exactly like them is hugely useful, and could potentially have blanket benefits throughout society in future decades.
I firmly believe that increased media representation of groups that’ve traditionally been disenfranchised by straight cis white males helps EVERYBODY out.
And I firmly believe that Blackalicious’ “Chemical Calisthenics” should’ve been on the official soundtrack album. It was so good in the movie!
Hey folks! My next convention is in Dallas, Texas from September 21-23. It’s a science fiction/fantasy convention named FenCon. I’m excited — it’ll be only the second prose-focused con that I’ve participated in professionally!
Here’s my schedule for the show.
Saturday, September 22
11-11:30 AM: Autographing in the Dealer’s Room
Sunday, September 23
11 AM-Noon (Trinity VII Room)
The Mythology and Psychology of Characterization
Mythology gives us character archetypes that resonate with readers because they consciously or subconsciously recognize them from works throughout recorded history. Psychology gives us other ways of understanding character types we see in real people, what decisions people make and why they make them.
3-4 PM (Trinity VII Room)
Perils of Writing in More Than One Genre
How do you do it? Write a great vampire book, then switch gears and write a steampunk novel. Then do a short story for an urban anthology collection. Do your genres ever cross the streams?
Where do ideas come from? (Answer: A specific, repeatable process.)
Stumbled on something that may benefit some of the people who follow my work and would like to start writing their own stories: A five-step breakdown on the process behind the creation of a new idea. It was proposed by an advertising guy named James Webb Young back in 1939, and it definitely rings true to me — although I think one of the steps is optional, and not as universally relevant as Young thinks. It's pretty basic — but if you're having trouble generating ideas, sticking to this specific process may help you.
Here's a breakdown of the process on Brain Pickings. I figured I'd go into the basics here, too. Young's position is:
Every "new idea" is just made out of pieces of two or more existing ideas, joined together in a "new” way.
"The capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships"
Here's the five steps he lists for creating any new idea:
Gather "raw materials."
Raw materials, in this case, are existing ideas and pieces of information. Young advocates gathering both raw materials that are specific to the actual topic of the intended new idea, and materials of a general nature from all aspects of life.
"Digest" the material.
The point here is to strip the "raw materials" down to their conceptual building blocks, and look for relationships between them. You're treating each existing idea and piece of information like the piece of a jigsaw puzzle, with the goal of figuring out ways in which they could fit together.
Unconscious processing.
This is the stage that I find optional. Generating some new ideas requires it — but other ideas don't. In this stage, you make "no effort of a direct nature" towards generating your new idea. You do something else. And you wait for your unconscious mind to figure things out for you, without your consciousness meddling. (I personally recommend taking a shower. It's a tried and true idea-generation practice among creatives!)
The A-Ha Moment
The new idea comes to you!
Idea meets reality
Show your new idea to other people that you trust, and use their reactions to help you refine it. (One good sign that Young mentions is if people spontaneously start extrapolating on your idea themselves. If your new idea gives other people new ideas, Young says you're on the right track!)
I doubt any of that is a revelation to those of us who've been working in the creative trenches for a while. But even so, I personally found it really helpful to see the process of idea generation laid out this clearly and simply.
So, what do you think? Is the method of idea generating outlined by Young as universal as he thinks? Is understanding the process useful to you in following the process? Is knowledge power?
I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.
Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”
“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”
“No artist is pleased.”
“But then there is no satisfaction?”
“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
—Agnes de Mille, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham
1. Ideas I have while I'm falling asleep are usually worthless. In the light of day, they just show how far gone towards sleep I actually was. But today I had one that's worth posting, at least for the entertainment value. It can be summed up as: "American Elder Gods." Basically, Lovecraft gets the American Gods treatment: All his monsters have fallen on hard times, and are having to find new ways to blend into modern society.
2. Wonderland in "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" was inspired by playing card games. Looking Glass-Land in "Alice's Adventures Through The Looking Glass" was inspired by chess. In both stories, Alice wakes up at the end, and it was (apparently) all a dream. This makes me think of a modern Alice, who dozes off after playing video games and "visits" dream-world versions of the games she was playing. Mario-style side-scrollers with power-ups and Warp Zones seem like a nice, surreal setting for a fantasy dreamland. And since this is sort of an example of the Tetris Effect (which "occurs when people devote so much time and attention to an activity that it begins to pattern their thoughts, mental images, and dreams"), having a Tetris-based dreamworld with a Soviet propaganda aesthetic would be fun (though rather on the nose).
* PLEASE NOTE that I generally only post story ideas that I'm *not* planning on pursuing! I'm unlikely to actually do anything with these ideas... so if you're interested in using variations on them yourself, please let me know! :)
Hey folks! So, some comics writers have been posting about their script writing processes. I've been finding it an interesting look into other peoples' creative processes. So I figured I'd join in!
Laying out my creative process serves a second purpose, too. I have a tendency to... well... forget how to write scripts. It happens every so often. I'll get partway through the process of writing a script, run into trouble... and then realize that I've blanked on the Best Practices For Brandon Seifert Scripts that I've learned through trial and error. So having a written breakdown of the best method I've found for me to write my scripts will be useful for me too. So I can go back and reference it sometimes, and make sure I'm actually following it.
Okay. So, this is the most effective way I've found for the kind of scripts I write, and for the kind of brain I have.
1. Come up with a story idea.
For me, this is the easy part. My brain is overflowing with ideas. (Oh god. So many ideas. Somebody make them slow down!!)
2. Brainstorm the living shit out of it.
Once I've got the story idea, I unload my brain on the page about it. I write down potential plot points, ideas, questions to answer, things I might research relating to it. Pieces of dialogue. Sequences of panels. Entire pages, or sometimes entire scenes, that appear in my head without me having to work them through. Anything and everything I can come up with based on an idea, I write down. Plenty of this won't make it into the finished comic. But I write it all down anyway.
3. Make outlines. Make too many outlines.
Once the ideas aren't coming quite as frantically, I take the plot points I ended up with, organize them, throw out the ones that don't seem to fit, and see what I have. From there, I build an outline. Or rather, I build several outlines.
My first outline is the one with the plot points that I brainstormed. It's a list of sentences, paragraphs and sentence fragments, arranged in the order that I think they'll occur in. (I do my writing in Scrivener, and all these pieces are individual text files. That way I can easily drag and drop them into different orders, delete some of them, and add new ones.) I flesh this out, adding more plot points until the story starts taking shape.
Meanwhile, I'm also writing outlines in my notebook. (Writing things out longhand is very important for my creative process. I find that writing something on paper, with a pen, frees up my brain a little. Since my final drafts are never written in pen ink, anything I write on a page automatically becomes a rough draft. So there's zero need to get it "right" the first time. Next time you're in the middle of a story and you have writer's block, I totally recommend trying it!) There's a couple different plot structures I find it useful to play with. One is Blake Snyder's "Save The Cat!" formula (which is VERY formulaic but can be a useful starting point). Another is Nigel Watts' Eight Point Plot structure. I often use one or both of these as a starting point. Basically as a writing exercise. I see if my plot points fit into these structures. If they don't, I see how they COULD fit... and then I either make changes based on that, or I don't. Anyway, this stuff goes in my notebook rather than on my laptop. (I don’t know why I do it that way. I just do.)
Think I'm done outlining? Think again! Next, I usually do a prose version of the outline I've decided on. I write out what I think happens in the story — the broad strokes, at least — in simple-but-complete sentences and paragraphs. Once the prose version reaches about a page long, I generally have enough material to start actually writing the issue.
...So then I start the issue. Right? NOPE! MOAR OUTLINES!
Well, one last outline. My last one is a page breakdown. It's a Google Doc with lines numbered 1-20. Each line represents a page of story in the final comic. I write in a really brief summary of what happens on each page. Usually starting with the page-turns. (I think of comics mostly in terms of two-page "units," a page-turn and a facing-page.) I take the material I've produced in my already-too-many outlines and plug it in here.
4. Place my brainstormed writing-bits in a script template.
In Scrivener, I have a 20-page script template full of placeholders for panels and dialogue. Page-turns have three panels in the template because page-turns often have big reveal panels and lower overall panel counts. Facing pages have five panels. Each panel has a dialogue placeholder in it. (My scripts don't exclusively have three panels on page-turns and five on facing pages! It's just a good reminder for me that I'll likely need around that many panels or more on that page.)
Remember all that brainstorming I did? Which involved "pieces of dialogue," "sequences of panels," "entire pages," and "sometimes entire scenes?" Now I take that stuff and begin dropping it into the script template in the approximate place that I think it'll go. When I'm done with that, I've got a script template that's partially populated by actual script! That way, I never actually have a "blank page" in front of me when it comes time to do the actual scripting. There's always something in there!
5. Expand what I’ve got.
That reveal panel, that I wrote for the page-turn on Page 4? Well, there's got to be set-up for it in the last panel of Page 3. So I make a note of that in the placeholder panel that's already there. Got three panels for Page 11, and then a beat I need to figure before I set-up the reveal on Page 12? Time to figure out that beat! Basically, the rest of my scripting process involves filling in those partially-populated pages, and then filling in the gaps between those pages.
There's two main ways that I write pages: Action-first, or dialogue-first.
Action-First: I figure out what happens (action-wise) in each panel in a sequence. And then I figure out exactly what the characters are saying.
Dialogue-First: I write out all the dialogue that a dialogue-based scene may involve. Then I cut it up where it’s easily cut, condense it, stick it in placeholder panels. And then figure out who’s in each panel, and what they’re doing.
Of the two, “Action-First” is much easier for me to do... with action-based scenes. It’s usually impossible for me to do for dialogue-oriented scenes... but for some reason I always forget the method of Dialogue-First when I initially attempt scenes like that!
6. Write the pages in whatever order works for me — starting with the easy pages.
I do this because they’re easy, so I might as well get them out of the way! My finished-page count quickly soars. Man, this is easy! I’m on top of the world!
7. ...Realize that I left the hard pages for last.
The further I get into the script, the harder things get. The slower things get. The more demoralized I get. I did it again. I saved the hard pages for last. I did the easy pages, and they went fast, and I got an unrealistic idea of how long the script would take. Deadlines loom.
8. Write the hard pages anyway.
Oh. That wasn’t so bad.
9. Revise and polish the whole thing.
10. Send it in, with a feeling of relief and accomplishment.
After this, theres stuff like getting notes and doing additional drafts based on them (and based on any weaknesses that I manage to identify after the fact). But this is how the primary phase of my scripting process goes.
The important thing here is: This is what I’ve found works for me. You need to find what works for you. Maybe it’s something like my method. Maybe it’s wildly, massively different. The thing about writing is, everybody’s process is different. And:
The only “right” way to write is: Whatever way works.
