Friday, July 28, 2006

Writing is Hard: Blowing up the Death Star

It's our fault. Our technology warped nature and created the beasts. We showed the planet that we hated it, and it found a way to hate us back. For the last fifty years the human race have been helpless before the monsters. We've run; we've hidden; we've cowered; we've died. But half a century is long enough. Humanity has developed a weapon that can fight back.

I'm working on a comic with Jason (Empty Chamber) Copland called Forces of Nature. It's about giant robots fighting giant monsters, sort of a cross between Transformers and Godzilla with a healthy helping of Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. The logo above is what happens when I try to convert a TIF into a JPG, which I have to do for some reason to get it to show up in Blogger. I don't hate those colors, but they're not "official." Then again, I suppose it's early enough in the life of this thing that nothing's official. The Florida State fan in me sort of likes this version. If you want to see the way it was designed though, click on the logo and it'll take you to the huge, original file.

That was an ugly digression. What I was going to say about Forces of Nature is that it's not just a book about giant monsters and giant robots beating the crap out of each other. That would get old and I wouldn't want to read it, much less write it. So, when Jason and I started really talking about making this book happen, I backed as far away from twenty-two pages of slugfest as I could. I spent my time thinking about the setting and the characters and how it was all going to develop. That's good, but I went too far and my first script lacked the excitement you'd expect from a book about monsters and robots wailing on each other.

Fortunately, we have an editor who knows what he's doing. Jason Rodriguez also edits the excellent, critically-acclaimed, Harvey Award nominated comic Elk's Run. The first thing he did when we brought him into Forces of Nature was to inject some serious thrills into the book again. We haven't lost any of the character development or the cool setting, but the first scene went from a lackluster fight between a giant monster and six airplanes to a glorious battle with thirty planes weaving and diving around each other as they try to bring the beast down.

Rodriguez also helped with the ending. My original ending was appropriate for the growth of the main character, but it was sort of like ending Star Wars with Luke's decision to follow Obi Wan to Alderaan. It's a major step for Luke and a complete story in its way, but would anyone really have been interested in The Empire Strikes Back if the first movie had ended there? You need to blow up the Death Star at the end to make it exciting. And that's what Rodriguez did. He reminded me that I needed to blow up the Death Star.

It doesn't seem that profound now, but it was a big revelation for me. I've spent the last couple of years thinking about and working on the craft of writing; making sure that there's a real story in the story and not just mindless plot. But damn it, you have to have some fun too. The balance between those two is where I need to be.

2 comments:

ADL said...

Woo hoo! Go, FoN, go!

Jason Copland said...

What ADL said!

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