Below are the 9 most recent journal entries recorded in williehewes' LiveJournal:

Wednesday, October 11th, 2006
7:52 pm	What does it mean...? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 7th, 2006
9:25 am	Pacing and Page-turning; Part 3 OK, one more time, then I'll shut up for a while. This is again a big wall of text, I hope the effort of reading it will be worthwhile. Serial storytelling: peaks and troughts Some stories are purely episodic, like Star Trek the next generation or the Simpsons. You can miss an episode of Star Trek without losing track of what's going on because between the episodes, things return to normal and all the characters reset to default. There is some slow development over the course of the series and the occasional character who dies, but that's about it. You can watch the episodes out of order and not be confused. Some comics are like that as well, but as you may have guessed, I much prefer comics that run from beginning to middle to end in an overarching plot. Stories like that have their inevitable peaks and troughts, especially if they go on for a long time. For such stories it can be hard to hold on to that page-turning quality between episodes or chapters. Let's say the antichrist story is an epic story with sidequests, sub-bosses, lots of minor characters, etc. After a preamble, some history and setting exposition and a long buildup, our Dante-esque "hero" faces off against Moloch, the general of hell's army. Moloch explains why the forces of heaven have been chasing protagonist's tail for the last three chapters: he will soon open the hellgate and unleash the unstoppable forces of darkness, bringing hell to earth. Unfortunately, Antichrist doesn't take this as expected: he doesn't care for the forces of heaven, but this Moloch guy doesn't seem to be much better. He refuses to do what he needs to. After a battle, Antichrist escapes from Moloch. I've described the scene in some detail to make clear where we are. If you picture a story as a graph, it should look a bit like a mountain range. You build tension for a while, peak, then let it down, build again, have a little twist, let it down, while overall you're building up towards the highest peak: the showdown (with satan, for instance). The escape from Moloch is a plunge into one of the valleys. The hero runs away free, he's taken his decision, everyone celebrates. The reader can put your comic down at this point to have some lunch. There's a certain risk here, in that the reader might not find time to pick your comic back up that afternoon. Maybe he's busy this week. Maybe he has other webcomics to catch up with. Especially if your comic is published slowly at a page a week, or if your reader will have to pay for the next bit of story because it's the next issue or volume, it's important that you've got enough hooks in him to drag him into the next episode, or you'll lose him. Or her. Serial Storytelling: keeping the momentum There are many reasons your reader might decide to return and read the rest of your story. Most obvious one is quality. If the comic's been good, fast paced, exciting and well drawn so far, he will want to read more of it. But this isn't much stronger than the motivation to pick up another series by the same woman that did "Block 6". As you may know, readers often don't do this. If you've got an ongoing story, there are many ways to strengthen this drive to pick up the next volume. Foreshadowing means you give readers a hint of the events that will happen later on. It can be as subtle as a visual theme that points towards the resolution or as blatant as a prophesy. Skillful creators use a range of foreshadowing techniques to tie their plots together. In my antichrist epic there could be a "demon heart" theme hidden in the backgrounds as a foreshadowing of the final scene where the protagonist cuts his own heart out. Or, in the faceoff with Moloch, Moloch could indicate that opening the hellgate is the antichrist's inescapable destiny, and laugh at him as he escapes. This would at least signal that the story isn't finished yet, and that there's something bigger and better to come. Probably the most effective way to keep your reader coming back for more is to start building up to the next peak before you let down the last. If your protagonist is fighting the main bad guy's minions, that's not too hard; it's clear he's going to fight the bad guy next. But if you've built up to a big flashy encounter, like this Moloch scene, and there's nothing bigger standing immediately behind him (the protagonist needs to learn more about himself and go after a McGuffin before he can try to take on Satan) it can be hard not to let down the tension completely. Probably the least you can do is simply indicate where the story is going next. Maybe antichrist's mentor has not told him everything he should have. "What!? Uncle Ben never told me this! He lied to me!" Apart from providing a nice angst moment, this shows where antichrist will run once he escapes from Moloch: he's going to have words with Ben. How will this go? There you go — hook. While thinking of plotting and pacing it's worth looking at things like this: Does the story tension sag in the middle? Is there a dead point anywhere? Am I giving the readers enough information about where I'm going next, but not so much it becomes too predictable? Are my twists explicable with hindsight, even if you did not see them coming? Is there enough indication of the nature of the overarching plot to pull people from one episode to the next? It can be very difficult to answer these questions, but I think it's very much worth it to ask them. I reiterate this isn't the only way to write comics. But I do think you need to think about these things if you want to have a tightly plotted, fast paced page-turner, unless you really luck out (*cough*Deathnote*cough*). Although these principles are most easily explained in terms of Protagonist, Antagonist, sub-bosses and the big showdown, they can also apply to other genres. Romance stories often have a similar build tension — let go — build tension — let go structure, like so: He smiled at me! — oh, but he's had such a difficult past — he kissed me! — but maybe he doesn't love me after all etc. Even stories that are mostly about the exploration and development of a single character, or about a philosophical concept explored through a number of characters, have key scenes where the important stuff happens with bridging scenes in between. Knowing what your key scenes are and how to build up to them is key to good pacing and that page-turner feel. I think. Right, I hope you enjoyed this little series; I think I'm done for now. :D Thanks for reading and for your comments. ______________________ Footnotes: the girl who did Block 6 is called Queenie Chan, who is currently publishing a miniseries called The Dreaming with Tokyopop. I've talked about her before, but since then I've read the first volume of The Dreaming and it's seriously good. If you like horror, check it out. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 29th, 2006
8:54 pm	Pacing and Page-turning; Part 2 Hi, welcome back. Part 1 is here, if you haven't read it yet. Thanks to all for the feedback, I'm glad you found it useful (if you did). This part looks at the same thing, pacing, but from a different angle. Story Pulse - alternating action and exposition If you've got a story to tell, and you've done some general planning out of what happens, it could help to look at the scenes, events etc. in terms of action versus exposition. Action doesn't just mean fistfights and carchases. Just having two people sitting in a cafeteria talking can be action, if their discussion is a crucial turning point in the story. Exposition to a lot of people is kind of a dirty word, but almost all stories need to have at least some of it. There will be moments where you have to explain something, the nature of the demonic power, the childhood event that made your protagonist such a nice guy, maybe just a bit of motivation that's not clear from the events itself. The kind of exposition that tends to get people's hackles up is the kind that is narrated by the author without involving the characters in any way. That's not the only way to do exposition, and in my experience, it's rare in comics. I think it can be useful in terms of pacing to think of each scene as being either action or exposition. This can be misleading because there are grey areas, and there's more to a story that just this, but as a tool for constructing a fast moving plot I think it works. Just keep in mind it's just a tool, not some kind of absolute. A scene counts as Action if stuff happens and the plot moves forward. Seen through an Action lens, a comic is a series of events that lead to a conclusion. To stay with my example of Death Note; Light finding the notebook, the first time he uses it, L "appearing" at the interpol meeting, Lind L Taylor on TV, the first time L and Light meet, these are the action scenes. A comic that consists entirely of action scenes can feel empty and pointless: why is all this stuff happening? Why do the characters do what they're doing? Exposition is needed to make it mean something. A scene counts as Exposition if the events or dialogue in it don't move the plot forward, but serve to explain it, or explain more about the characters or the setting. Death Note happens to be pretty heavy on exposition. From the very first scene, in which the dice playing Shinigami talk about Ryuk and his weird ways, the many discussions between Light and Ryuk, between L and the police, the times that either Light or L think about their next move, all that is exposition (in this binary view of things, anyway). Because it's a complex plot, it needs a lot of exposition, and manages to fit it all in without reducing the pace much. So there's nothing wrong with exposition. Of course, too much of it can make a comic feel boring and distant; like there's too much telling what's going on and nothing to actually grip the reader by the collar and drag her into the story. So basically, you need a bit of both. If you look at your detailed plot outline, and separate it out into scenes or even pages, you can mark each of them as either action, or exposition. Once you've done that, you can try to alternate action scenes with exposition scenes so you get a rhythmic advancement of plot, a kind of step forward, step to the right, step forward, step to the left thing. Or at least, avoid sticking too many exposition scenes in the same place. The risk of losing readers is highest if you spend a long time on exploring character's backgrounds, motivations and subplots without actually advancing the main plot. For the same reason, keep the pagecount on exposition sections down, if you can. Just don't make it too dense. You could go through some comics you like, split them into scenes and mark them Action or Exposition, see how they run. If you do, tell me what you found, I'm interested in the experiment and will be doing some myself. I firmly believe in analysing the greats and learning from them. Right, that's about enough for part 2. Man, I sure talk a lot. Again, I hope you found it useful in some way, or that it will inspire you to think about things like these. Do let me know what you think, if you do think. Thanks! Next week the final part; about mountain ranges, tension graphs and keeping the momentum between chapters or episodes. Also: more about the antichrist! (I'm almost starting to like that silly imaginary hero...) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 23rd, 2006
11:35 am	Pacing and Page-turning; Part 1 Page-turner: the advantages of high speed storytelling Let me start by saying not all comics need to have breakneck pacing in order to be good. Actually, I really enjoy slow moving stories with a sense of stillness, like "Goodbye Chunky Rice" for instance. But I'm beginning to suspect that's even harder to do than pacing something with a lot of action or drama, so I'll leave that for someone else to explore. The term "page-turner" is generally applied to thriller or crime novels. The idea is that once you start, you have to keep reading because it's so exciting you need to know what happens next. The ultimate page-turner in comics, for me, is Death Note, or at least the first two or three volumes of Death Note. The nail biting, coke-withdrawal, Aaargh-I-must-read-more-of-this quality of the early chapters is in my opinion a big part of what got so many people into the series. And once you're reading the series, you kind of need to keep buying it, even if the drivers in the car chase suddenly slam the breaks and go for a stroll through the mall together. (Metaphorically speaking, that's what happens in Death Note. Yes, really. =.=') Anyway, page-turners are good to read and sell well. Part of what gives a comic this pageturning quality is high speed pacing. Unfortunately, many if not most narrative web comics are paced really, really slowly. Yes, that includes my own. So I've thought a great deal about how to accelerate the story, and stories in general. This is what I've come up with. More Important Means More Pages Sounds a bit obvious maybe, but you'd be surprised how often you end up spending pages and pages on something that is essentially an aside or a bridge between two more important scenes, and spend only half that many pages on the scene that's the actual meat of the story. That means you're not just wasting your own time on drawing something that's actually not that interesting, you're also wasting the time of the reader. Locate your crucial scenes, and decide on how many pages they should roughly be before you start writing it out. If a scene is not that important, keep the page count down. Way down if you want fast pacing. Look over what you've written before you start drawing, and make sure the number of pages you spend on a scene or chapter is justified. Important and unimportant doesn't align neatly with action and exposition as defined above. Some exposition is very important, and if so, it's justified to spend a large number of pages on it. Exposition also does not have to be boring; you can have flashbacks, dream sequences, heated discussion and even battles going on as part of it. If by now you're thinking: "But it's all important! I don't have any filler!" you are in one of two positions. Either you've already done this, subconsciously, and trimmed everything to exactly as many pages as it should have, or you don't have a clear enough picture of what's important and what isn't. To test this, try summarising your story (or story arc if it's a series) in one or two lines. That should not be something like Young man finds out he's the antichrist and that demons are trying to return to earth through him. That's not a plot summary, it's a setup. That could go absolutely anywhere. A plot summary includes the ending. An unwilling antichrist takes up arms against hell and stops their plans by cutting out the demon from himself. That's a plot summary. To tell this story in a strictly minimal way, you need only a few elements: The antichrist, who should be a fully developed character, the forces of hell, preferably commanded by a fully developed antagonist, a build-up to the final battle, the showdown with its twist: the protagonist turns on himself. Now you have a sounding stone: anything that is part of those points is important. Anything that isn't, isn't. So cut it completely, or spend only a few pages on it. Sometimes you have to be cruel to write something really good. This little antichrist plot could be anything from a thirty page short to a ten volume epic. That doesn't matter, as long as you spend more pages on sections that develop the plot, characters and central conflict than on scenes that are "colour" or "background", but aren't part of the main themes. A comic that at one point does this wrong (to my mind) is Fruits Basket, which, just as you're about to learn who the scary bad guy actually is, wanders off course and does a lot of background and side stories about secondary characters (the main character's female friends). Don't get me wrong, it's a great series and I love it, but that part made me want to yell at the author: stop stalling, tell me about Akito! Speeding up the pacing of your comic, unfortunately, means cutting it down to size, and that hurts. Hopefully, judging scenes in terms of Important or Unimportant will help you decide which parts can be cut, altered, or fused into another scene. Right, that's it for part 1, I'd be very happy to hear what you think or if you disagree on any point. Next week in part 2, a little more about keeping a rhythm to your story and preventing dead zones. My site: http://www.williehewes.co.uk Footnotes: Goodbye Chunky Rice is a sweet but sad picturebook about two friends who say goodbye. It is excellent in its simple elegance. Death Note is a detective/horror series from Japan about a notebook that makes people die. It is deservedly popular, well, for the most part. I think the earliest parts were the best by far. My silly antichrist plot is something I made up as I wrote this. It will probably remind you of quite a few similar plots; that was intentional. I'm not planning to do anything with this story, you're welcome to use it if you wish. Fruits Basket is a manga series about a girl who comes to live with a strange family whose members are posessed by animal spirits. It's heartwarming and very readable, but does run to an awfully large number of volumes. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006
8:11 pm	How Not to Write a Graphic Novel I've finally finalised the rough scripts for Amaranth. I'm nearing the resolution, and I'm pretty sure I'll stick to what I have on paper now. Looking back to when I started, I have to admit it's a completely different story from the one I originally conceived. This is not a good thing. There are loose ends and scenes which, looking at the whole, don't really serve their purpose. Now that I know where I'm going I thought it might be useful to muse on where I went wrong. Perhaps someone else could learn of my mistakes. My first mistake was a very common one: I tried something that was way too big. Influenced by webcomics, which tend to be ongoing narratives, I planned out the start of a story that wasn't just open-ended, but actively called for continuation. I didn't realise just how much time drawing a comic takes, and didn't think that in the three years I'd be working on it, I might have a better idea. Or, you know, just get a little tired of it. The original 'ending' was not a resolution, but the start: Amaranth chooses to be with the demons (this is after 200 pages of story). The problem was that I couldn't help but imagine what would happen afterwards, which would take at least another 100 pages to explore, and what happens after that? I set myself up to either draw the same series for the rest of my life, or leave it unfinished at some point. Not good. What I should have done, even if I was going to go for something big, was at least decide on the ending. Yes, you can always pick up the characters again to do some more with them, but don't build up to your sequel or you will be forced to do one. And you know, by that time, maybe you don't want to. Finish your story, then see where else you might want to go. Apart from never-ending, Amaranth was also very wobbly, thematically. I had the flower fairies that were also demons. I thought that was a cool concept and still do, it's one of the central ideas. But I also had a metaphorical comment on commercialism, and 'the ignorant masses.' All that's left of that is Ivy's rant in the Mall, but it was a huge thing, it was something that was threatening the demon courts and entirely tied up in their nature. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with Amaranth's identity crisis, which is the central driving conflict. There was also an allegorical dimension to the demons. Ivy keeps saying: It's a metaphor, because the entire demon thing was a metaphor. Each of the demon courts stood for one of the things that is Wrong With the World. Uh, yeah. Actually, it pained me to drop that idea, but again, it had nothing to do with the main character. After I'd focused on her for however many pages, it would have felt forced and a bit bizarre to suddenly slip that idea in. When it came down to it, I couldn't find room for it. I ended up cutting not just the idea, but all the scenes that were tied up in it, including some I'd already worked out to a lot of detail, and really kind of liked. The same happened eventually to His Shadow, the demon Lords' Lord, who was tied up in that metaphor. He had the coolest scene, but I've cut it now because it just would not make any sense to include it. Not everyone builds their stories around thematic elements, a lot of people simply focus on the action and characters, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if you do have Big Ideas to talk about through your story, you need to make sure they all fit together. That was my mistake, I had all these interesting ideas about the demons (that is, my setting) but they didn't really relate to Amaranth, my main character, so I couldn't explore them through her. It hurts to cut scenes you love. So take precautions and limit your Big Ideas to those the story can actually handle. Lastly, I trusted that I'd be able to figure out the story as I went along. And as it turned out I did, but because I wasn't sure where I was going, I built up to events and revelations that in the end, never happened. This leaves the early issues with a lot of loose ends I'll never be able to fix. If I'd had more detail in the story when I started to draw, rather than leaving the big bit in the middle blank with a few loose ideas floating in it, I could have avoided that. For now, I want to concentrate on drawing shorter stories (as well as finishing Amaranth). But when I do try to tackle something big again, I'll make sure to plan it out to at least scene-level detail before I start, so I don't have to cover over early mistakes in an ugly way. All this aside, I'd like to stress that I do believe my effort on Amaranth will have been worthwhile. It has loose ends and is not as tightly plotted as I'd like — I prefer my plots skintight — but I do not in any way consider it a failure. I made mistakes while writing it, but I believe the end result will be worthy. All I have to do is sit down and actually draw it. Amaranth Website (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 19th, 2006
8:00 pm	Queenie Chan: yay for short comics! Yep, about time I did another little review. Queenie Chan is an Australian artist who draws manga comics. Her series 'The Dreaming' is published by Tokyopop, but her website has a lot of interesting little stories available for free. What is it? Queenie Chan's site has the usual bio stuff, some thoughtful essays/rants and a collection of short or unfinished comics. Most of these lean towards the romance or horror genres. They are all preceded by a little intro detailing when it was drawn and what the context for the story was. Looking through them in order, you can trace Queenie Chan's development as an artist and a storyteller, which I think is interesting. Why should I care? Because many of them are really cool! I especially enjoyed A Girl Called Marian, which ends by stating 'end prologue', but I don't think it needs to be the prologue to anything. It's a story that runs over a long time-period, told through specific scenes spliced together slightly out of order, leaving us to piece together the whole of the tragedy (and, damn, is it tragic). I think it works really well, and I like the western setting. It's not just western manga, it's a western manga! How cool is that? I also liked Greenhouse, a perfect example of a ten page comic which is complete and wholly satisfying. Yeah, it's a pretty basic girl meets boy thing, but it's really cute and the lack of words gives it a sweet, whimsical feel. Finally I wanted to highlight A Short Ghost Story, a horror story set in the girl's toilets by a playing field. It's kind of ring-esque, heavy on the eerie, unsettling atmosphere while not much really happens in panel, and I think it works very well. It somehow feels longer than it really is, which is a neat trick in itself. And the best thing is, these stories are finished. Yay! No need to wait for updates ever! The site has lots more, including some early parts for projects that aren't finished (I'm really digging Building 6) and also some very interesting observations on her livejournal. Visit QueenieChan.com and find out yourself. (This is a crosspost from my Blogger Blog (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 23rd, 2006
8:16 pm	Why Regular Updates are Bad for Webcomics This is a little rant about webcomics, popularity and storytelling. Or perhaps more of a lamentation than a rant. I'll start with some background. It's a truth universally acknowledged that webcomics gain more hits on update days; when there is a new page/strip up. A related fact is that updating your webcomic regularly is the key to gaining any audience, let alone a large one. This is because of the nature of the internet and the way webcomics are listed and promoted, and it leads to a well-ingrained factiod: the only way people are going to notice and read your comic is by updating constantly, and regularly. This is just how webcomics work. This is fair enough in the case of gag-strips that are basically digital newspaper funnies; you read it on the day it's published, get a little laugh (or not) and the next day you start from scratch. You can start reading the strip at any point, and you'll be up to speed on the characters and situation soon enough. Strips that don't have new funnies on a regular basis aren't as interesting, and drop down the popularity list. Nothing wrong with that. But it's a bit of a problem when it comes to other types of webcomics; the ones that tell a story, and that need to read from the beginning or you won't get it. Imagine watching your favourite film 5 minutes at a time. I'd drive you nuts, right? Yet that is exactly how comics on the web are published; one page a week. Recently, I was surprised to hear that a lot of people actually read webcomics that way, as well, rather than waiting a few months before checking back. I know I can't read a story at a page a week, but that's how they're published because it's the only way to get a decent audience. The updating mechanic is even more disastrous for stories that are actually finished, because they don't update at all. I think short comics can be very funny, moving, interesting and just all-around brilliant, but on the web they're hard to find. I think part of the reason is that these comics get overlooked because they don't update. In webcomic terms "stopped updating" means "died" means "not worth checking out", even if the reason they stopped updating is that the story's finished! And the upshot of all that is that in webcomics world, the vast majority of storylines is and remains unfinished. You read it from the start, you're really enjoying it, and then you're caught up and you'll have to wait however many months, or even years before you can read the ending. :' ( Nobody likes unfinished stories, but all the most popular webcomics are unfinished, simply because regular updates is what makes you pupular. Tragic, huh? How do we find those hidden gems, the comics that are good and dead? How do you promote something that is ten pages long? If you have any suggestions, please post them, I'd love to have some on my Links Page I don't really have the answer, but I think it's worth pointing to this little glimmer of hope: Full Story is a blog-style listing of finished webcomics, some short stories, some finished series. There's some good stuff there, even though it's just one person choosing and listing the comics. I think we could do with something like this on a larger scale. OnlineComics.net now has a "completed" category under "format", which is a good start, but tellingly, the most popular ones were still published as long running page-at-a-time webcomics. Maybe short stories should band together under one banner, and release each individual story a page at a time as if they were updates to the same comic. Obviously that would only work if the comics all had a common artist or thematic element, but it could be an idea. Maybe there's another answer I don't know about. I'm open to suggestions, because, having worked on two short comics now, I'm starting to develop a taste for it. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 19th, 2006
8:26 pm	... (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 2nd, 2006
6:06 pm	Now also on Livejournal! Yes, I caved and got myself a livejournal account. And why not. Please be my friend, I don't have many yet. :( Or, better yet, visit my page to read my blog, comics and other stuff. Thanks for dropping by! Willie Current Mood: confused (2 Comments |Comment on this)