What's in a Format?

I've been experimenting with a new medium recently and it got me thinking about the differences in writing fiction in different formats.

On the one hand, there's many ways to tell a story as there are stories. But in general, we tend to hew to a few choice frameworks. I've written in three different forms now and the pros and cons of each are fascinating1.

The one everyone's most familiar with is prose narrative. Almost every novel and short story ever written is done in this format. The conventions are well known. Chapters of paragraphs, dialogue marked with quotations. It can be in virtually any tense or point of view². There are virtually no restrictions on length and stories can be as simple or complex as you care to make them.

I've been writing in narrative prose all my life, and I like to think I'm somewhat proficient with it. Of the three formats discussed here, it's really the only one well-suited for ebooks, at least without further adornment. Narrative prose is deceptively simple with its single column of plain text, and as Michael Hart's Project Gutenberg proves, it can work quite well in plain ASCII presentation. Within the simple constraints of one word after another, following the grammatical conventions of the language, narrative prose can create new worlds in the reader's mind. It can transport the reader to distant galaxies or to within the heart of a beloved character. The potential for the form is really quite wonderful.

Yet, of the three formats I'll cover here, it's my least favorite. For one thing, the strengths of prose lie in the internal, the minds of the characters, theme, ephemeral things that can be captured with words. I've seen beautiful and moving prose scenes that go one for pages that, while they illuminate something about the human condition (or at least the characters), nothing actually happens.

Call me a prole, call me common, but I'm a plot-oriented guy. I want stuff to happen. I want characters in motion, actively pursuing their goals while an antagonist (preferably an antagonist we can identify with, and maybe actually like) tries to stop them.

And while narrative prose can do drama just fine, thank you³, active, fast-moving plots don't play to the format's strength. Why do you think so many of the fast-moving books published today get made into movies?

Because movies are where fast-moving plots come home. I've been accused of being a "screenwriter trapped in a novelist's body." The reason for this is that my prose tends to read like a screenplay, all motion, description and dialogue. I rarely just poke around in my characters' heads. I don't have time, and neither to do they. They have stuff to do.

I love screenplays. I love movies, but sometimes I love reading the screenplays even more. When reading a screenplay, I'm the director, setting up the shots, deciding when to cut from one character to another in dialogue, and I have an unlimited effects budget. There's something clean about a screenplay that I don't get while reading a novel. To me,

Call me crazy, but that's the way I see it. Screenplays, when written well⁴, pop with dialogue and move like a house afire. Although I disagree with his stance on ebook bootlegging, I have to admit that Harlan Ellison's screenplay for Asimov's I, Robot is the best SF movie never made, and it deeply saddens me that the forthcoming movie didn't use it.

Which brings me to the big disadvantage of screenplays. They're not generally considered a finished work. Most people don't read a movie. They watch a movie, which means that a screenwriter needs to find (or in the case of Kevin Smith, be) a director, actors, cameramen, gaffers, grips, editors, producers... the list of people required to make a movie goes on and on. Then you have to get distributors in on the deal and get theaters to run the film, PR people to let the public know the film is out there... This is makings Jeff's head hurt...

Not to mention that if you create a new, original screenplay, you're almost guaranteed to be rewritten several times over before the film is actually shot, whole scenes deleted or inserted, favorite lines of dialogue changed, and then you have to deal with "auteur" directors who believe that the script is just a guideline on making "their" movie, something to be changed on a whim and let the actors ad-lib their own lines.

So much for the "clean" screenplay. By the time it's filmed, it's usually dragged through the gutter. By rats. With distemper. The only way out of that is to be a one-person film company, which only rarely works. Let's face it, if you're really talented as a writer, what are the chances you're also an equally talented director, producer, actor, etc.? Film is a collaborative medium, and that doesn't work for control freaks like yours truly⁵.

Recently, however, I rediscovered a medium that combines what I love most about prose and screenplays into one delightful form.

I know, when you say "comics" most people's eyes glaze over and they start flashing back to the truly terrible stuff they read as kids, things that made Ed Wood look like Orson Welles. Comics are frequently thought of as a juvenile medium, kid stuff that you're supposed to grow out of. But it doesn't have to be that way.

I heartily recommend Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics to anyone interested in the form, a long, square bound comic book that explains the artistic and historical underpinings of the medium. As McCloud explains it, comics are just a vessel, a medium on the same level as prose and movies. Just as novels or films can be about anything, any genre, any time, any place, so can comics. They don't have to be funny animals or muscle-bound cretins pounding the crap out of each other. The idea of stories told by a series of still pictures goes back as far as Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphics, it's a form with a long and distinguished history.

I'm teaching myself how to write comics by adapting two of my previously published works: In Shining Armor, a screenplay, and Between Heaven and Hell, a novel. It's an enlightening experience, and I haven't had this much fun writing in a long, long time.

Comics are written in a similar fashion to screenplays, a script done in present tense juxtaposing descriptions of what's going on with blocks of dialogue. Unlike screenplays, which have rigidly set rules of formatting, comics scripts have no established formatting rules other than they be readable. Since I'm already familiar with screenplays, I tend to format comics scripts as screenplays⁶ but they can also be written like stage plays or... Well, anything that gets the job done, really.

Where comics scripts differ from screenplays is in length and breakdown. Although you're writing a script, you have to keep in mind that you're actually telling a story in pictures with words superimposed. You can only fit so much onto a page, it's best to for page breaks and scene breaks to coincide and you generally only get twenty-two pages, no more and no less. I generally structure my scripts as twenty-two pages of two by three grids of square panels (for reasons I'll get to in a moment), totalling 132 panels per issue. Each issue should be a self-contained story -- although usually part of a larger story arc -- and I have to tell that story in 132 annotated pictures, not one more or less. It's an interesting challenge and completely different from novels or screenplays where you can make your stories pretty much any length you choose.

I thought it would be stifling to write to a specific page count, but it's oddly liberating. I can structure my stories tighter this way, eliminating much of the meandering and chaff that plagued my earlier works. I break out what has to happen in each issue, then break down how many six-panel pages each scene should take to tell. One scene may be three pages, another only one. Once I have all twenty-two pages filled, I start writing, one complete scene at a time. Breaking the story down into descrete, easily attainable blocks actually makes the writing much easier.

Of course, the downside to writing comics is similar to the downside to writing screenplays. Unlike prose, comics is a collaborative medium. You have to have a penciller, an inker (or "tracer"⁷), a letterer, possibly a colorist and you have to put it all together, print it and get a distributor to get it into comics stores.

I'm thinking there might be a different way. "Indie" comics are often in black and while, so a colorist may not be strictly necessary. Lettering can be done by computer now. And it just so happens that I'm a pretty good artist in my own right, so I might be able to do my own pencils and inks⁸.

And this is where the two by three grid of square panels comes in. After pencilling and inking, each panel would be scanned into my PC to do the lettering and final cleanup (and maybe coloring via PaintShop Pro). Square panels. PDAs with square screens. See where I'm going, here?

It would be pretty simple to resize all the panels to 300x300 pixels, put all the panels into an HTML document with page breaks between each one, and run that HTML document through iSiloX to make a single "one panel per page" comic book that can be read on any high resolution PDA.

Is there a market for self-published⁹ PDA comics? I'm tempted to find out. In the meantime -- writing's easy, but drawing 132 pictures for each issue is a lot of work -- let me know what you think.

¹At least to me.

²Although second person POV (You walk into the room and pick up the lamp, noting how your reflection shimmers on the polished gold...) is fairly rare outside of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books.

³King, Kellerman, Deaver, Turow, Grisham, just to mention some current writers that do it well.

⁴See screenplays by Sorkin, Goldman, Straczynski, Ellison

⁵This is not as much the case with television instead of film. In TV, the Executive Producer is usually also the head writer and he/she has final say on all aspects of the show, overruling the director. TV is a writer's medium, while film is a director's medium.

⁶Dialogue attribution centered, dialogue indented, description left justified.

⁷Raise your hand if you get the movie reference.

⁸Following in the footsteps of many writer/artists to work in comics over the years, including one of my personal faves, Frank Miller of "The Dark Knight Returns" fame.

⁹I should note that in comics, self publishing doesn't have the "vanity press" stigma that it has in book publishing. Many classics of the medium, like Dave Sim's "Cerberus" have been self published or published by a small independent lablel that only carries one title...

Writing On Your Palm

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What's in a Format?