electronic notebook

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Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was.
James Ellroy on Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I read it and start applying it wider. Rest here. (via kierongillen)

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the work.

mattfractionblog:

i get to a point in my work where i’ve done as much as i can in my notebook — a defense against doing everything in one place with the same tool with the exact same muscles — and have to finally start typing. i’ve thought about whatever the issue is forever, and i’ve bashed it out over a span of…

(Source: mattfractionblog)

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A trick I picked up from reading Frank Miller scripts from when I believe you were editing him, was: He tended to always start his panel caps sometimes with a general noun and a verb. “He weeps,” and then there’d be whatever else. And a couple of collaborators of mine have always said that the first sentence of my script is for them, and everything else that comes after is for me. Which is true, that’s very much how I try to write. The first line is just to get the physical action down, and then I’ll kind of drift off into whatever else I see in my head and they can take it or leave it.

Matt Fraction.

I really like the idea of that approach to panel description in a script — get the basic info down and then lay in some optional extra detail and beats.

The quote is taken from one of my favourite interviews, a bumper conversation between Fraction and Denny O’Neil as part of The Comic Journal’s 300th issue.

Go read it.

(via processjunkie)

While working on KABUKI, and lettering it myself, often there is a lot of problem solving in terms of how to artfully integrate the caption boxes into the art.  So I tend to move the cut out paper captions around the page to consider options.

One time I found that when I put the first person thought captions in exactly the opposite order that I had written them… that they not only fit the page more aesthetically… but the wording was more powerful with the sentence in exactly the opposite order.  This lettering trick influenced my writing approach from then on… as I would then remember to try rewriting the paragraph in exact opposite sentence order, and often it was an improvement.  And often it helps you learn what sentences to cut.  When lettering my own script I tend to cut half of it anyway… and the lettering process helps me boil down the language into a tighter language and order of language… that I then try to be considerate of in the writing stage as well.  

A similar thing happened when I did my first book in color, my first painted story.  Drawn in pencil first, I felt the pages worked. But when I added color, often one page next to the other page didn’t look as good as I thought they would.  So then I would take that page and put it next to other pages, and it would look much better next to other pages.  So then I rearranged the order of the pages, and changed panels and writing accordingly.  I found that it not only made some pages shine more contrasted to other pages next to them, but that the story could often be told in a more powerful way in that new order.  It was a lot of problem solving and finessing to make it work.  But from then on… every time I’ve done a book in color, painting my own work… I’ve had to change the order of at least some pages every time to improve the flow and contrast of the story mechanisms.

This part is often my favorite part of the process.  After all the pages are finished (or I believe them to be finished) it is like the raw footage of filming scenes for a film.  Then I get into the editing process and change the order of the pages, then change the order of the panels, change the order of entire scenes…  and rewrite accordingly to accommodate that.  

(via drdavidmrmack)

(via bendiswordsforpictures)