Skeletor!

Let's set the scene for today's topic. You sit in your creative space, surrounded by your hanging plants, with your favorite working music on. In your hand you hold your cheap disposable pen of choice and in front of you are several pages of blank, white, scrap paper. You stare at the blank sheets of paper and you think, I have no idea what to write. That's ok. You never really start by just writing. If you did your story, and all the art surrounding it, would lack form, like some kind of gelatinous amoeboid. Instead of just throwing ourselves headlong into this endeavor we are going to step back and craft our story purposefully, like a designer might make a set of clothes or an architect might design a skyscraper. And while those analogies are fine, for the purposes of this post we are going to run with the analogy of the skeleton. Why?

Because skeletons are cool.

The outline of a story is like a skeleton. The bits and pieces of plot and character come together to support the story like so many vertebrae. Starting with an outline gives you the advantage of having some concept of how the story will end while you are still working on the beginning of it. This is a very real benefit, believe me. The outline doesn't have to be much. An inciting incident and a vague layout of the rising action are a good start. From there it is good to just let your thoughts take form on paper. Lest my meaning be lost on you I will repeat that last part again, on paper. The temptation is to think a good deal faster than you write, and as a result your thoughts out pace your hands until your hands are so far behind that you stop using them. Before long you are just start daydreaming about a story that you will write some day, instead of writing a story right now. Having your thoughts collected on paper gives them focus, helps you go back to an idea to develop it, and gives you the materials you need to start putting the pieces together. All these scribblings are important. Like bone marrow.

These scribblings can be anything that helps you flesh out the world on paper. Words, pictures, doodles, whatever works is what counts. All of this should ultimately culminate into a central body of work with some thoughts falling more to the center, like ribs maybe, and others falling outside the developing focus of the story, like things that are not bones. Don't feel bad about throwing away the bits of brainstorming that don't work. Right now you are focusing on an outline. With a white sheet of paper in front of you your possibilities are infinite. Infinite is a lot. Narrowing the focus is important when you are developing your plot, and when the tidbits start running away from you so does the story.

Once you have the beginnings of an outline you have the bones all in a pile and you just need to start putting them together in the right places. Sometimes you will put the bones in the wrong places. When you do your story will turn into a circus freak of a being that people will peer through a tent flap to laugh at. So, you could say putting things together the right way is important. Often you may need to bring your story in to the chiropractor.

I have a way that I resolve this problem, and it works well for me. My focus, when it comes to telling stories, is a visual one. As a result I focus on graphic novels. You know, comics. My primary interest, when it comes to comics, is the printed page, arranged into volumes, either issues or books or strips. Whatever. With any of the above choices you have definitive start and stop points throughout the story that the plot needs to be molded around. If you work on a regularly scheduled strip it is important to keep in mind the start and stop of the work week, or whatever it is you schedule your posts around. Books have a longer cycle to work with, but even then if you have a sequence of books you need to plan the story around those divisions. Right now though, we'll work with issues. I try and think about how many issues will be in a book (and in theory how many books in a story) and then I try and wrap my mind around what needs to happen in that issue. To do that I start with the end and try and connect the dots with the beginning that I've decided on. Other people, whom rumor has it are smarter than me, call this process "reverse induction."

To do this I start with a piece of paper and then I break the story down into a number of chapters, based on what needs to happen. Then I assign each chapter its own issue, which I give a working title of some sort to help me remember what will happen in it. This all gets sketched out on paper like a tree diagram, or a bone chart for a skeleton. Then, I break each of those issues down into pages, and then what needs to happen on each page or group of pages. This leaves me with lots of sheets of paper with notes scribbled all over them, and they won't make much sense to anyone except their author. But they do mean something to me. I can read them, and that's what is important. At the end of it all you should have a rough skeletal structure that you can flesh out as you go to form the body of the story. And when all is said and done the final product will look great and you can hide the skeleton away in a closet where it will rot and fester. Later it will be found by the maid. She screams as it topples down upon her, crumbling into dust as it descends.

There are a good deal of other steps involved in this process, but at the risk of running on too long for one post I will break here for today. Next time I'll get into some of the art behind all of this writing by getting into the importance of thumb nailing. I really should get to the art stuff. After all I did state quite clearly that I am not a writer.