Hey, folks.
Here's the deal.
I've been working on this beast since I decided to go back to college. Initially, it was a kernel of an idea, spawned as I sat and watched Hurricane Katrina roll over a large swath of the Gulf Coast. Initially, my outrage was great, mostly because of the response, but also because of the way the media was covering it. The reportage seemed more interested in photo ops and celebrities who may very well have been trying to do good than the actual humanity of the event. People were dying, but Sean Penn has a bass boat; here: let's all stand around him and just not help. The smaller story here, if I were imagining a humane, and possibly sane world, would begin the moment the camera crew dropped their gear in the waist-deep soup and joined in the search.
The larger story, though, would end up taking form as a meditation on why people insist on returning after a disaster. This is not a judgment, merely an observation. I know that for my own part, I would have just kept moving. Once bitten, twice shy enough to get the hell out of Dodge. But there had to be a reason, or, lacking that, some intangible emotion that would take a look at a storm of that magnitude, the damage it inflicted, and shrug it off. No big deal. We'll rebuild. This is nothing new.
This evolved into an even deeper meditation on the concept of a "home". Does a "home" have to have a fixed address? A structure? Roots? Et cetera. More on that in the actual book.
So, after trying a half-dozen times to get all this down in prose, I kept stalling out. See, I had these characters in this massive setting, and I was able to go anywhere with them, do anything with them, hell, I could get into their heads whenever I wanted to, but I didn't know why. I had this world, but no history.
I put the project aside (back then, I was still referring to this project with the FLOTILLA title), and let it stew for a while. The comic book thing happened (as implied by the earlier posts, as well as this very website), and I got to take a look at the whole thing with a fresh brain.
As it stands, I could probably just crack a whip on Kevin and tell him to scribble up the rest of the pages, but something in the story still wasn't sitting well with me. I reread the script a few times, kept getting the same feeling, and realized that I was still having the same problem. The characters were operating in a bubble. This world, without some semblance of a history, is producing characters who are merely causal agents. They do stuff, but not because they want to. I needed them to react to things almost out of instinct, and I needed it to seem natural.
So, I've been writing that history. It is in prose, moves across huge swaths of time in few words, and lacks any of the detail that the actual script and final art will possess. At some point, I may make it public, just for archival reasons, but for now, this shit is TOP-SECRET.
As a bonus, as I was writing it, it felt proper. Necessary. Required.
Now, I imagine that there are some wordsmiths out there who have the capacity to hold their entire contextual pre-story in their heads as they bang their projects out. I'm not one of those. My RAM gets wiped every four hours, I would imagine. But for the rest of us, I cannot stress how useful it is to just take a step back, and think about how things got to be this way.
Sure, start the story where it starts, but after you nail that heat, go back and see how you arrived there.
Posts
