Sing All The Hard Times Of Old England

As the rain beats down on the Thames Delta, bringing life to our parched lands, I acknowledge here the coming of The Old King, surely presaging a return to The Old Ways and the Wicker Man striding once more across our summer isle.

There was going to be news in this space, but the yanqui "Labor Day" fucked me over again. I am also still writing the PROJECT WRITTLE 2 outline, which got so bloated and muddled that I lost my way in the middle of it and started again with a simple beat outline. A beat outline is simply breaking down the plot in short single sentences. The most minimalist way of describing a story. Like distilling two or three chapters of MOBY DICK into "Ishmael goes to the pub and meets Queequeg, harpooner and cannibal island royalty, who he has to share a room with." Just horribly basic shit you'd never show to anyone else. Sometimes the map of a territory has to be turned into a Tube map so you can find your way through it.

Let's talk about writing a bit. Specifically, writing action scenes, because it's something I've had to devote some time to this week.

Here's a piece of sctipt:

And here is the scene that contains this piece:

Everything down to the piece of Trevor's cloak that got turned into stone falling off is in the script. I wrote this before we had a director. In later seasons, I could just say "give me 90 seconds of these two fighting, there's this bit in the middle and it ends like this" if I felt like it, just so the animators could have some fun. But, up front, it had to be clear action writing.

Environment and beats. There are lots of elements to a successful action sequence, but these are the two I look for first. Action sequences are people moving in a volume of space that is already occupied by stuff. This will determine how they move and what they can use. And by "beats" I mean complete linear clarity. One thing happens after another, and that has to be very clear to the reader or viewer, because things happen fast in a fight and you don't want the viewer to be wondering what just happened. Keep it clear.

I usually use a scene from TRANSPORTER 2, of all things, to illustrate this, but here's a breakdown from the final setpiece of the LONE RANGER movie. That sounds insane, right? But take a look at this breakdown when you have time. I'd ask you to also pay special attention to Johnny Depp, who uses everything he's learned about silent movie acting:

Every action beat he enacts is based on looking, then seeing, then using.

This breakdown is useful because it focuses on clarity. Connect up the environment the action takes place in. Break down every cut. Each tiny slice needs to have an action or a reaction in it. And yes, per the script clip above, you can, as a writer, do that from your end. If you're working in a collaborative medium, it will of course evolve from discussion with your collaborators. But starting from a place of understanding how an action scene works will bring more value to your collaboration. Make it clear, make it move, make it aware of its space.

And, just for the hell of it, here's that TRANSPORTER 2 sequence again. Check it for awareness and use of environment, and for use of look, see, act.

POLL

So help me out here.

People have been telling me for years that I should do a paid newsletter, and I've always waved them off. I believe that Orbital Operations should remain free and fundamentally unchanged in its mix of various useless ramblings. But the voices have started up again recently, and so, to shut them up clarify my thinking, I'm asking you to answer a question.

On the understanding that OO itself would remain unchanged and free, and that we're talking about a second, paid newsletter here — and please only answer if you think you'd be interested in paying a fiver a month for a second stream of bullshit from me --

That should solve this pretty quickly. Thanks for playing.

Longtime readers know that I've thought about this a few times in the past. I could never settle on a format or bring myself to pull the trigger. This poll would give me permission to either discard the idea forever or, potentially, actually give it some serious thought. We'll see what you think.

Serialised fiction is a serious option: I'm always generating more ideas than I can use, phone novels and email serialisation are valid, tested forms, and the medium is suited to prose..

I was thinking along these lines earlier in the week. I spent a while away from comics to write GUN MACHINE and some other bits, and when I came back to comics, I was struck by how little information a page of comics contains compared to a page of comics. Twenty pages of prose contains a good deal more material — textual material, sure, but also what you might call events or at least information - than twenty pages of most comics. This is, of course, largely down to comics being about the confluence of text and art, and how we sit with art and spend time with it. You may well spend more time looking at a Bryan Hitch splash or an Afua Richardson image or the intricacies of a Geof Darrow or Colleen Doran than you do with a page of a book.

But the digital space does open up options for hybrid approaches. You'll pay four dollars for a monthly 20-page comic. Would you spend two dollars for a monthly prose serial equivalent to twenty pages of material? I don't know. But it's an interesting question. I'm curious about the sort of hybrid serialisation that can be achieved digitally - a prose series serialised via a webpage like a comic but twice as dense as a comics episode. I am making a note to look into previous experiments of this kind. Maybe it'll be a throwback to the way FSG and I did NORMAL as a serial first. (Hi, Sean!) And, hell, FREAKANGELS was weekly.

Note also this recent news article at Publishing Perpectives:

You can tell autumn's coming. I'm getting my strength back.

Apropos of nothing - I went to Study Group Comics today for the first time in ages, and they've stopped publishing new comics, but they have started podcasting. It was always a dream of mine to publish on Study Group, but Zack Soto's probably forgotten more about comics than most of the rest of us ever knew, so, if more of that gets out into the world. the world will be all the better for it.

CURRENTLY LISTENING

SPEKTRMODULE

I actually wasn't intending to do music this week, but there's a new Sarah Davachi record, and if you're part of the church of Immense Enveloping Drone Music, you're going to want to give this a listen. Some of it was made with a carillon, which is a keyboard connected to huge bronze bells. Some of it has drones so deep it's like Sunn 0))) recording using only classical instruments. There's something over eighty minutes of music here, and you can listen to the whole thing twice for free at Bandcamp. A fine way to enter autumn.

GOT MORE TIME?

KEEP READING

Disappearing Boxes: Comics And The Permanent Edition

My Own Timeline In Black And White: Eddie Campbell’s THE YEARS HAVE PANTS

Comics Train: 1

And I'm out. The next few weeks should be bigger and better. I'm dying to tell you about some of my plans for the future, and am just waiting on permission to do so, so please stick around so I can bore you to death with them. In the meantime, please look after yourself, do something nice for yourself, fend off the toxic, embrace the new and hold on tight.

W