Copernican Revolutions

I've been putting of posting this week not (only) because I'm lazy, but mainly because I haven't been drawing much; I've been writing. Writing is a horrible experience, unless you enjoy pacing, sitting at a computer, talking to yourself, and thinking of what eventually becomes pointless ideas, for hours, and in the end have only a sentence to show for it.

One of the best helps I've ever gotten is Robert McKee's book "Story," which is one of the Bibles of screenwriting, and a very good tool for writing fiction in general. What helped me a lot this time around was his setup of character depth and how characters affect one another.

First of all, character depth is not a handful of character attributes that might be oddly put together. And it's not a character being committed to one idea far over all others. A character becomes interesting when he or she has inner conflict of ideals. If a man claims to be brave, but in a crisis is cowardly, then you're onto something. If a woman is known by all others as being useless and uninteresting, but her closest friends see that she has an amazing talent that can easily take her to the top of the world, then you've got the beginnings of a story.

Going off of this, a well-constructed story has characters that bring out specific qualities in the protagonist. Around certain characters, a person is happy and attractive, but around one very important secondary character, they become depressed and repulsive. In this approach, a writer designs characters around the protagonist like a miniature solar system. It can be said that a minor character's job is to force the protagonist to reveal a contradictory quality about themselves.

For the story I'm working on, I have a character who originally created a business because it's his passion. But a national company's competition makes money scarce, and he meets a publicist. This publicist is all about marketing and building hype, and the character gets so caught up with the newfound fame ("finally, recognition for what I do!"), that he doesn't have time to do the work that he originally loved. That's the basis, and there's a lot of development that I've done with it, but I'm not sharing it because then you won't read the comic!!!!