More of That Girl

Lord knows why, but one of the first things I did with Spryte after I left Disney was to sit down and write a chapter of a young adult novel.  Did I have visions of creating the next Harry Potter?  No, being that calculating rarely works out.  I just wanted to tell her story and came up with this scene from her past. I never edited or polished it but just click on it anyway (it's only two pages). Download Chapter 1

About four years later I did that same scene in comic form. 

 

 
 For the moment, let's ignore the primitive quality of my prose attempt and my lousy inks on the comic page (I'm having a hard time not using photoshop right now to correct the nose in the last panel) and instead talk about my attraction to the three mediums that I explored with Spryte, animation, prose and comic.  

The thing they all have in common, and what I've made a career of, is storytelling.  I'm a storyteller.  I remember sitting on a curb at twilight with my childhood buddy, Kent Smith, and spinning a story from thin air about giant bats invading Priscilla Lane and carrying off our friends.  I improvised campfire tales of Wolf Winds and a hunter who was transformed into a bear from rough outlines and half remembered short stories when I was a counselor at Woodcraft Ranger Camp in Lake Arrowhead.  At Disney I switched to story from animation because I spent more time coming up with new animation tests than actually animating them.  People might not like a given story I'm telling but it doesn't mean I didn't have fun telling it.

First, prose, the oldest medium of the three and the one I've done the least work in.  Writing treatments and full outlines don't count because telling a story in prose is more than recounting a succession of events with odd bits of dialogue thrown in.  Well written prose can focus a reader's brain to an extent that he's oblivious to the world around him.  All five of his senses are somehow engaged in the pages of the book.  The reader may not only be transported into the adventure but even into the brain of the protagonist, hearing his thoughts and emotions.  

This is usually done by including detail: the frayed edges on a dress plucked from a thrift store rack, the mental thread a character strings between a doll and his mother's laugh or the coppery scent of the blood spreading from under a closed door.  My attraction to prose is that it allows a one man band to play a symphony; the author is in complete control of what ends up on the page with absolutely no budget restraints.  Sure an editor may give notes or gentle guidance but at the end of the day the decision is that of the person writing in the notebook or tapping on her laptop. I also enjoy the literary cheats of prose.  For instance, I love how Carbunkle's voice sounds "like gravel going down a drain" as long I don't have to find an actor with that sound.

 So maybe I should return to that chapter above and have Spryte catch a whiff of Grandma's perfume when she huddles under the quilt.  That could trigger memories that give the little girl enough strength to lower the covers and see what happened.  The more I think about it, the more I feel that I could learnt to enjoy that... but I don't now.  I don't want to spend the time describing the way Uncle Greg blended an assortment of feathers to create the perfect fly fishing lure.  Not when I can show it.  And that is why I work with pictures.  

More to come...

Comments

[manoj a menon]

tad..
the more you post...the more it sync so well with my contemporary learning.
remember? you adviced me to start working on my own stuff..
i am ...infact i was....
but then what kept me away was the age old question..
" i can narrate the story to myself and anybody around but how do i 'write' the whole stuff"
where to start from...?"
above all.." how do i write stuff to make it appealing to the reader..without loosing the feel of what i have to tell"

your article points to the right direction..
infact to tell you the truth.. i didnt lik the first hellboy book ( john byrne) one as much as the other ones where the writing came directly from mike..
i guess it makes all the difference to have the creator write the story ...and then have an editor give his/ her opinion to it..
as you said, the one man symphony doesn more magic..

keep writing tad...
very inspiring and thank you for all your insights.

manoj.