sworkerpt wrote:
And in terms of webcomics, SOI is one of the best out there. The plot is addicting! Have you ever thought about writing in addition to drawing?
Um, well, seeing as the only reason I actually draw the comic is because no one else would, I guess you could say so . . .
To be honest, I don't and really have never had any real interest in drawing for a living. It's an okay hobby, but it's not easy for me, and I've got massive gaps in my technical ability. The only reason you see my art in SoI is because I didn't think the story would work in anything but comic format and I couldn't find an artist (and I'm also a massive control-freak, which means my choices would have been kind of limited anyway). 95% of the stuff I've ever written and plotted has been prose, and even though I'm still far from Pulitzer-quality I'm WAY more advanced in writing than I am in art, which you can definitely tell from the first . . . uh . . . 200+ strips . . . and remember, I
am a Creative Writing major. *G* I've actually been published in a minor fanzine and spent . . . oh, two or three years pulling a biweekly deadline on an e-zine while doing a serial fantasy story, but that was pretty juvenile stuff that I did under pseudonyms, and I don't feel like sharing. Trust me, you aren't missing anything. Bleh.
I admit I'm always a little bemused when someone asks this question . . . and no, sworkerpt, I'm not singling you out because you're far from the first.
It's just that writing, like any other skill, isn't something you don't just sit down and DO one day -- or at least, not with an astounding amount of proficiency. Even highly intelligent people with great ideas and great characters can fall prey to glitches in "invisible" things like structure and pacing, which is why it's pretty much guaranteed that the first thing you ever write will never be published. In fact, if you get anywhere NEAR published without churning out at LEAST two thousand pages of unbearable tripe first, then I officially hate you.
Writing is kind of like cooking: even if you start with a talent for the fundamentals, half the meal is the presentation. Most writers spend their entire lives learning how to make the meat of their story look as good as possible, and never stop learning. I definitely would not have been able to write SoI without a solid background in prose first -- not because I think the strip is a work of unbearable beauty or anything, but simply because it would be an absolute trainwreck if not for the four dozen or so projects the proceeded it, whose mistakes I've since learned from and fixed here.
Being a writer, I'm obviously terribly biased in this respect . . . probably especially since I've had a lot of training in literary deconstruction as well as doing my own stuff on a regular basis. This hardly makes me superior -- actually, I think it makes me a massive snob more than anything -- but I do have a different perspective on some things. (For instance, it's pretty obvious to me that the literary critics who believe Shakespeare's works were actually some kind of secret round-robin held by the playwrights of the age couldn't be fiction-writers themselves, since any fiction writer -- or hell, most non-fiction writers -- would
know that there are just some stylistic and tonal consistancies that more than one person just CANNOT duplicate for so long. Writing-styles are like signatures: different for every individual. To me, it's inconceivable that, say, Herman Melville could have been the ghost-writer for half of Ernest Hemmingway's stories; that sort of thing is plausible only if you have no freaking idea what you're talking about. . . . But I digress.)
. . . wow, I veered way off-topic again. Sorry, re: my habit of latching on to an only tangentally-related subject and using it as an excuse to climb on a soapbox.
In case you're wondering, this is also while I'll go on "I'm not an artist-artist" rambles every now and then . . . though I share some technical knowledge, I've got a writer's mindset. I guess I get slightly titchy about it sometimes because most people's initial comments are about the drawn aspects of the strip, which is understandable since that's the most prominent aspect of a comic but is still very odd to me as I'm not used to anything taking the focus away from my writing. I am quite the spoiled brat.
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