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squonkhunter — Ceramic
Published: 2011-04-03 03:44:26 +0000 UTC; Views: 1336; Favourites: 19; Downloads: 4
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This is Ecrus from my web comic "HMS Crock Doctor" ([link] ). He was originally the villain for my story, and he still is now, but he has also evolved into a potent protagonist. All shall be explained later. He is still the brooding greaseball with vines erupting out of him (as pictured here: [link] ), but he is also something far more beautiful now than anything he ever was before.He's been trying to let me know this for quite some time.
Anyway, major breakthroughs with my story, and here's a little celebratory sketch I fixed up in photoshop.
2 April 2011
Sick version: [link]
Teasers on the story: [link]
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Comments: 23
Ooh I love it! This is one of my favourite drawings you've done - it's official.
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Ugh...maybe I'll redo it. I don't much like it anymore. But I put a lot of heart into it when I did do it, so I'm glad you like it.
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I don't even know why I like it so much. Not much help on the critiquing side of things, I'm afraid. Ugh, it's just great.
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Thank you very much. I liked it a lot when I drew it.
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I'm really happy to hear things are working out. Story breakthroughs are among the best things in the world.
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Yes, indeed. It was an...interesting evening. Very moving. It feels like he was the last piece to fall into place...I can REALLY start attacking my story, now. Oh boy, what's stopping me?!?
Oh...
School.
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I had a story breakthrough earlier in the year. Unfortunately, in my case, it wasn't really...moving. Quite graceless, actually, like standing in the middle of a river when the floodgate goes down. And instead of making attacking the story easier, it just made it more daunting.
I hear you on the whole school thing, though. Seems I never have time to do the things I really want to--writing, and reading my massive book list, mostly. I have a whole shelf of books I own but haven't read yet. It's like they're staring at me...
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ME TOO!!! I just bought three more the other day. So many amazing stories I don't really have time for...
One of the greatest ways to stimulate your brain is to read, so when I start feeling retarded and forget how to spell a few words, forget a bunch of synonyms/antonyms and such, I pick up a book. It actually helps quite a bit.
I didn't know you were writing a story! How's that going?
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My shelf of unread books has mainly been piling up because people keep giving me books as gifts (not that I mind). The fact that I still have unread gift-books from two years ago is just a testament to how little reading time I get (and how high up Wizard's First Rule is on my priority list).
The writing itself is going slow. I've got an all-star soul-killing class lineup this semester with Scottish Crime Fiction (generally speaking, I have to read an entire novel a week--and I'm a slow reader), Directing, and Intermediate Prose, along with working two part-time jobs and helping friends work on cosplay in the evenings. That, and I need to form new writing habits. I had a pretty good writing regimen in 2009, but...well, that was 2009. I meant to have my latest chapter finished before the semester started, but wound up running out of time, then aimed to finish it over break but that also fell through.
One of these days, though, I think I'm not going to be able to take it anymore and my brain will just vomit the rest of the chapter onto a page. An important character gets introduced before the chapter wraps up, and I've been waiting the past two years to bring him back into the story.
I say "back" because this is the second draft of an unfinished story; the first draft was just so bad I honestly couldn't keep writing it and had to scrap the whole thing and start over from a blank page. This new draft is also so different from the old version that I sometimes find myself floundering because I left such a shaky foundation in the first draft.
It also doesn't help that, overall, this story's in-depth outline is 20 pages long...and the part I'm currently writing is only on page four. And, counting the first draft, I've been working on this beast for six and a half years. At this point I'm pretty sure it's smarter than I am.
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Wow. You sound pretty busy.
Believe it or not, Ecrus had his own story for a while. He was a brooding, monotonous protagonist and I spent eight and a half years on A story, but five and a half on HIS. I have maybe over three hundred pages of notes and writings that have done nothing but keep me in practice, and keep him alive for HMS. I had actually at one point considered throwing him out, and that battle happened on paper for a school project of mine: [link] For a time I thought only the evil side of him had survived, which made him a formidable opponent to Remfield Tarkus, but just recently he has blossomed into what I had always been trying to achieve in five and a half years of his existence.
It was neat, that same night, I closed my eyes and talked to Ecrus, asked him what his past was. Previously up to this point he'd had no past; I couldn't even picture him as a child. He opened his mouth and it was like I was listening to a friend recount their experiences. I had no control over him whatsoever; he started telling me about his childhood, and for the first time since creating him, I could see him fully, as a kid, as a teenager, as a young adult. He finally became a person, and I loved him for it.
Anyway, I suppose what I'm saying is that writing is a very special thing. It's a bit like an outside influence, the story, and we are simply the vessels that translate it onto the page. These things are alive, and if it really wants to be written, it will come to you. If you slave and slave and slave away to try to make it happen, let it know that it needs to put its two cents in, too.
Perhaps you can work on it in the summer. I hope you can get more down, or at least more development. I used to fall into the nasty habit of editing as I went along. In order to edit, you have to have something to...you know...EDIT. Haha more of a chastisement to myself and less of a lecture to you. I hope some of this was helpful and you don't find me crazy for 'talking' to people who don't exist.
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Pfff, I'd never think another writer was crazy for their approach to writing. I used to "talk" to my characters quite a bit, until peer pressure from other writers and Diana Wynne Jones giving me a weird look when I mentioned that sort of thing to her made me kind of sterilize my act. (That, and over the years I just got more and more like one of my characters until there stopped being a need to differentiate between our worldviews.) I think it was for the better, but it also means a loss of a certain element of sentimentality, which I hope I'll be able to get back once I've proven to people that I'm not just another silly kid writing a going-nowhere story. Sort of a "you're not rich enough to dress so sloppy" mindset. One can only be a bunny-ears lawyer once people acknowledge how effective you are.
I have a delicate ego, what can I say. I'm the second-youngest out of a batch of nearly thirty cousins, so I have to fight for every scrap of cred I get within my family, and it bleeds out into the rest of my life.
That sounds like a really amazing experience, though, having Ecrus tell you his life story. The closest I've come to an experience like that was a couple years ago when I answered a writing prompt with one of the climactic scenes from the end of my story, then realized that, while it was a really powerful scene, it would not work. That single event contained in that scene would have ruined the tentative friendship I'd been nurturing between my main characters, and leave both the audience and myself with a bad taste in our mouths because, no matter how I played it, I could never make the characters forgive each other. Or even if they tried to, or wanted to, they would still never treat each other the same again. It was kind of a crashpoint for me; after I wrote it it was like I had intellectual fever-chills (the fever being pride at how well I'd written the scene, chills at the scene's content). Finally I realized I had to completely re-imagine the story's ending so that it didn't include that scene at all.
The thing with me is that every advancement I make in planning my story feels like a conscious, physical effort. I've never had a proper dream about my characters (though friends of mine have, and one of those even made it into the plot as a major part of the MC's backstory) and I rarely get large-scale brainwaves. At the start of the year, though, I kind of intentionally forced my brain into overdrive by massively re-reading all my story notes and prompts and things to try and give my mind enough stock to dream. I still didn't dream about the story, but as I sat up in bed just before turning in for the night, I had a massive brainwave that let me roughly outline how to turn my stand-alone novel into a trilogy, which fixed a lot of existing problems by giving me more space to develop the characters, but opened a series of new plot-holes as far as character motivation went. That night I tried to turn the lights out and go to sleep three times before the brainwave had actually finished, and then it kept me awake the next two nights, too. I hesitate to admit to the whole "trilogy" thing now, though, since people tend to give you a lot of dubious looks when you're ten chapters into a trilogy as opposed to ten chapters into a novel. It's all a matter of proportion, I guess. And, of course, if they're not writers they almost always think they could do it better and faster than you and wonder what's taking so long.
I love imagining my characters as kids, though. It's one of my favorite things about characters, knowing that they have stories from before the story itself. If you go back far enough, you can usually take your characters back to more innocent times. I like knowing that there was a point in my main character's life when it came as no surprise for him to laugh. (Plus the reader actually gets to "see" him as a young man, moreso than any of the other characters, because his personal story is expressed primarily through disjointed flashbacks. Unfortunately, I don't think I can justify any flashbacks from before the age of fifteen or so, but I think he must have been an adorably weird kid.)
I dearly hope I can write over the summer. I already know I'm going to have a ton of sewing projects (though apparently one of the commissions I was supposed to work on just got cancelled, so that frees me up a little). My issue with writing this past summer was that the factory kept hiring and then letting people go for week-and-a-half cycles, with no assurance that they'd have you back in another week-and-a-half, and the stress of job hunting in the off weeks kept me from writing. Then when I did have work, I was too dead from working night shift to focus on anything productive. I managed to write a bit when I finally got a steady, high-paying job for the last month of the summer, but instead of progressing in the novel I went back and re-wrote this smutty short story I'd been feeling kind of guilty about. And it turned out well, but the fact still stands that it was a pointless, smutty short story that I can never do anything with because the whole thing is my main characters completely subverting the story's canon. =_=
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Well, it's not necessarily that you can't do anything with that smutty short story. It doesn't have to be canon; it can be one of those, well, DVD extras except...in a book. I wouldn't know what to call that. Maybe just "extras".
A lot of times my story felt like a physical effort, too. It was a pain to be in, but I kept crawling back to it anyway. I relied too much on the fact that I had a message to convey. I was shoving my morals and worldviews into a novel (which was planned to be a nine novel series...talk about people looking at you funny), but you can't force those kinds of genuine things in there, simply because they are not mechanical. Remfield from my comic popped into existence one night, coincidentally on my birthday. Here's actually his introductory sketch: [link] Right off the bat, I knew he was a crazy guy with no eyes and goggles to hide them. He's made tremendous changes since then, but there he was! BAM! I started developing his story because I knew I wanted to do a web comic; that was one of my goals. I'd never done one before, but I'd done a comic strip for my school's newspaper and thought, "Well, how hard could it be?" So I went about developing characters and no story, allowing myself to literally let ANYTHING happen. I incorporated my friends and siblings for plot ideas, as well. Things got weird and fantastical, but completely liberating. Ecrus's story began to feel stifling in comparison.
Then I started actually caring for my comic. I had been writing it with my friend David T., who wrote pages 1-3, 5, and 8. He tripped up when I had to talk more about Papageno, since he's not into opera and didn't know how to write a German accent. Eventually he fell out, because he doesn't really like sci-fi, and it was unfair of me to throw my characters onto him and say, "Gimme a plot!" I have to admit, though, if he hadn't pushed me to GET THE FIRST ONE UP, I'd not have done it; I was too scared.
So I was left to develop the plot on my own. This is when I actually started to care for it. I also began to discuss things with my friend Haile, ( ) who has helped me TREMENDOUSLY. The story found a heart, has been developed 'til the end, and has characters with something Ecrus's story had been lacking: HEART. The morals emerged accidentally and genuinely.
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that another hindrance can be writing with a purpose. Stop that. Write for fun, and the morals and your inner message will emerge without you even trying, and in a way that cannot be replicated with intense technical attention to detail. Things like love and forgiveness, hate and revenge cannot be fit into a box, cannot be "created" through text. You may create characters and situations, but the emotion itself must be genuine, like acting. If these characters are alive (and that all depends on how much you give them), their interactions will almost seem spontaneous, and they may even surprise you.
And, very important, show them love. Your characters, I mean. Ecrus had been hard for me to reach because, as Haile pointed out, "You keep expecting so much from him, but you give him so little." Even the villains need love. If you're writing a sad story, there have to be moments of happiness in there, as well. No one wants to read a story with no light. Even Sweeney Todd had a bit of humor.
Sorry if I'm lecturing you...it's just that I remember what it's like to have a story that seems to be going nowhere, and those were just the things hindering me. Again, I hope this has helped a bit.
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Oh, I don't mind the lecture. It's nice just being able to talk writing with someone whose story I actually know a bit of, even if it's just the first few pages. Also a person who will admit to having had problems writing; so many other writers I interact with would like everyone to believe they've got it together 24/7.
Personally, I write because my characters' stories are mine to tell. For me it's not a matter of voicing my beliefs; I've never considered those to be particularly interesting (mine, I mean. Others' can be very interesting). Back in the story's early years I kind of tried, thinking that the only way to justify my story was to shoehorn in some unsubtle Christian themes. Eventually I realized this wasn't necessary; a story should be able to justify itself. If my story winds up "saying" something, I guess I'll see it when it's there.
What I really tend to focus on is the relationships between characters. For instance, I intentionally created a cast of supporting characters who all know at least one other character in the group in some way, then threw the main character, Vitae, in among them. He winds up being something of a fifth wheel for a while, until he starts either reaching out to the other characters, or they reach out to him. It's kind of fun to watch, really, because in this draft they all treat each other a lot differently than they did in the first one. Vitae and Sabine, a supporting narrator, hated each other when I first wrote about them. Now they actually have a budding platonic friendship that I'm kind of crazy about. I've also learned a lot of new things about my characters in this most recent draft. One character has trust issues I never knew about. Another idealizes the idea of siblings because he was an only child. Another has abandonment issues.
If you were to ask my friends, they'd probably tell you I'm unnecessarily mean to my characters, but that's never meant a lack of love for them (though I'll be the first to admit, until recently I never really liked Sabine, but that was just because I didn't know how to write girls). Most characters come to me pre-packaged with their injuries. Among the first things I learn about them are A) how to hurt them most and B) whether or not I will. Only one character in the main party doesn't suffer some kind of physical trauma over the course of the plot; this is because that sort of thing wouldn't affect her as much as it would other characters, so her damage is more on the emotional level. You could say I'm not much in the business of happy characters, either.
That said, it's not all black all the time. I may not be good at writing comedy or witty dialogue (though I wish I was), but I can give my characters lighthearted moments. I know what makes them glow.
It's funny that you should mention Remfield popping into existence on your birthday--my major brainwave at the start of this year happened on my birthday, too.
As for that smutty short story...haha, no, I'd never officially own up to it. Maybe someday, if I publish, I'll post it on aff.n under the screen name "princesskagome666" or some other silliness. The whole story was originally just an attempt to prove to myself that I could write a sex scene. 
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Haha NO writer has got it together 24/7. Even Stephen King has admitted running into problems.
Yeah, I used to try to root my story in Christian themes as well, but I ended up using that mostly as a crutch because I had no plot. I'd think, "Hmm...what does this character represent?" and less, "Who is this character as a person?" which only leads to your characters being empty and inhuman, and no one wants to read about those. But I assume you've learned this, seeing as you later strayed away from symbolism.
One of the advantages of writing a web comic is that you get immediate feedback. My family got tired of hearing my story constantly change, and I had a nasty habit of editing as I went, and continually going back and editing the beginning, and reediting the beginning, and reediting the beginning. The web comic has allowed me a mentality of "Aw shit, I should have changed that but people have already seen it...gotta work with it, I guess," and then it allows me to actually move forward (however painfully slow) rather than obsessing about what has already been written.
Well, as you said, unhappy characters are more interesting. It's good to know what will hurt your character most, and I've found that I am, at times, unnecessarily cruel to them, as well. This has been a problem from the start, except that in HMS Crock Doctor, I actually allow moments of happiness. In Ghosts and Remnants, Ecrus's novel series, I'd torture all my characters (poor Ecrus the most) but allow no relief from that darkness. Tragedy upon tragedy and faulty relationships ensued, and Ecrus became very empty. His name is an anagram of both "Curse" and "Cures," but only recently has he become the latter. It's a major relief, to understate it. It's like taking in the atmosphere after six stifling years in a coffin. God, but it was worth the wait.
You don't seem to be having that problem, though, as you said you know what makes them glow. That's a beautiful way of putting it.
Birthday brain waves?! IT MEANS SOMETHING...
Haha well if the smutty short story adds up to nothing in the end, it has at least allowed you practice, and every little bit counts.
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Oh man, for a while I had it even worse when it came to making soulless, empty characters. See, my mom used to buy me these Christian anti-occult books, The Forbidden Doors series. In one of them, which both claimed that UFOs were actually demons and that Dungeons and Dragons would ruin your moral fiber, the "mentor" character touted the idea that every time you make a character (in this case referring to RPG characters, but I took it to heart to mean ALL characters), that character becomes an avatar of your soul, and whatever crimes and bad deeds that character commits is a reflection on you and so on and so forth. And since back then I associated things as spiritually insignificant as smoking with evilness, it scared me away from ever letting my protagonists be anything more or less than morally shiny little gingerbread men.
It wasn't until much, much, much later (several failed novels later, in fact) that I realized that this wasn't the case and was finally able to let the reader see the sometimes darker, sometimes only unlikeable side of my characters. Turns out my one MC is an arrogant, intellectual-elitist prick; the other will sleep with anything willing, legal, human, and alive--and I love them for it.
One of the reasons I wish I'd developed a passion for art is because it's so much easier to get feedback, positive or negative. Even when I was churning out a chapter every month or two a couple years back, I still only ever got feedback from people who had to give it to me (my workshop class that semester) and the one friend I can depend on to act as an alpha reader (she sees the most absolute unpolished shit straight off the press, which is what makes her alpha instead of beta). All the other people who've asked to read my work either let it sit around on their desks and never get to it, then complain when I take it away (I don't believe in distributing digital copies), or read it and all the feedback I get is "More!" Which is kind of encouraging, I guess, but not exactly helpful. This is probably the reason why I turn into a cranky old hen after nine or ten chapters of this kind of thing and stop wanting to show it to anyone.
And I know what you mean about falling into the editing trap. I used to do that all the time, because someone had once told me that the first twenty pages of a novel is what gets it out of the slush pile and onto the editor's desk. Then I learned about agents and that getting in the slush pile in the first place is bad. And then, to make extra sure I'd never be tempted to edit the beginning, I split each chapter off into a new document. The only inconvenience is that it makes it hard to gauge my total wordcount, but at least I'm not constantly greeted by the same awful opening line day after day after day. I'm pretty sure the opening line from the first draft ("All was silent save for the sound of dripping water.") will haunt my dreams as long as I live. At this point, the most editing my chapters get is a twice-over: Once before I send it to my alpha reader, and once after I get her comments back. Anything else can wait for the next draft.
I think I know now why I'm not looking forward to the next stretch of chapters quite as much as I thought I would--it's a series of "one thing after another" chapters, where the main character has to deal with a lot of shit hitting a lot of fans. But, on the bright side, he does get to unwind after that. Piles of musty books and gallons of tea.
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Ah yeah, gotta have those caffeinated beverages. Coffee's my deity of choice for now. Do you mean your character winds down with musty books and gallons of tea or that you do? XD
"Ink oozed under his film of skin, ink blacker than the throats of the earth, while elsewhere in the cave the stalactites perspired." has haunted me continually. I had my friend read some of my writings and she said, "This is beautiful...the descriptions are gorgeous, and I'm getting a painting in my head, but nothing's happening. It feels empty; there's no heart." Yeah...so now I have a bunch of documents, some over one hundred pages long, full of beautiful, empty words. It's not that she's said it that I believe it, but I'd been looking at these texts for years wondering what was wrong with them. That's it: They were empty.
I then discovered I was working in the wrong medium. I'm a very visual person, so I'd see these characters conversing like actors in a film and I'd feel like I had to write down every movement they made, every eyelid's flutter, every finger that flies to the lips; I had to capture in a few words what I could only do with a picture.
So, fuck it! COMIC!!!
Haha...that's not necessarily the answer for everyone. My friend is also trying to write a novel but she's a very audio-oriented person, so I have a feeling she's going to work in animated films sometime in the future. The actual writing of the novel for her is physically straining and feels more like work, at times. The problem, sometimes, not always, could be that the story is being told in the wrong medium.
The shit hitting the fan moments are so great, though! I mean, it's probably emotionally trying at times, but isn't it exciting? Those are the moments readers look forward to and yet dread at the same time...the moments that completely emerge us in the story and kill the world outside. We're HERE, NOW, and holy shit what's going to happen?!
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Actually, Vitae and I both wind down with musty books and gallons of tea--or coffee.
I can be a really visual person at times, which is why it's so aggravating to be limited by my underdeveloped drawing abilities. Luckily I have an illustration major friend who has displayed an uncanny ability to read my mind--plus she's one of the few people who can make me stop taking my story so seriously. (The day she drew [link] I laughed until I hurt.)
Lord, do I ever love shit-hitting-the-fan moments. In fact, I tend to look forward to this next stretch of chapters every time I approach it in a draft (partly for sentimental reasons--it involves revisiting the first scene I ever wrote for the story). The reader learns so much about Vitae in these chapters; this is where the story really picks up, where he finally snaps out of the shock he's been in since his introduction and starts doing instead of just being done to. Well, and Nathan shows up, and there would be no story without Nathan. Nathan serves to balance Vitae in a way none of the other characters can. I'm still not entirely sure why that is, but it's always been hard for me to write one without the other.
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Cool! Haha nice drawings. I hope you have fun writing your next few chapters.
Mmmm...poetry. You are honey on my lips.
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