Ambient Rhythm is updated on Tuesday and Friday
Over the past few years, I've come across some excellent and amusing essays/rants/blogs on how to write well. Most of them seem to be aimed at novelists, but there's no reason their points shouldn't apply to comics, and I do find them interesting when considering my own stuff and the way I write and plan stories. Here's three of them:
This is a rant by David Mamet, and is actually about screenwriting, but it seems to apply just as well to comics (also a visual medium), and also to novels. I don't agree with everything he says, but most of it makes a lot of sense to me :)
This, as the title implies, is a comprehensive and totally universal listing of every problem a story has ever had. It really is. It's also a very funny read, albeit a worrying one. I keep wondering how many of these problems I end up incorporating into a story. Point 14, about characters not being people, really made me think.
The Well-Tempered Plot Device is an essay by Nick Lowe, who writes the film review column for Interzone, among other things. Here, he takes apart the standard fantasy/science-fiction plot and its well-worn, familiar furniture, and shows just how bad the writing can get and still be acceptable to readers (!)
Maybe it's just me, and I do like to think over my stories (well, some of them), but I really enjoy reading stuff like that. It's interesting to think about why things work, or don't work, and to realise which buttons writers can push so successfully :)
- Sun Kitten, 28th September '10
Over the past few years, I've come across some excellent and amusing essays/rants/blogs on how to write well. Most of them seem to be aimed at novelists, but there's no reason their points shouldn't apply to comics, and I do find them interesting when considering my own stuff and the way I write and plan stories. Here's three of them:
This is a rant by David Mamet, and is actually about screenwriting, but it seems to apply just as well to comics (also a visual medium), and also to novels. I don't agree with everything he says, but most of it makes a lot of sense to me :)
This, as the title implies, is a comprehensive and totally universal listing of every problem a story has ever had. It really is. It's also a very funny read, albeit a worrying one. I keep wondering how many of these problems I end up incorporating into a story. Point 14, about characters not being people, really made me think.
The Well-Tempered Plot Device is an essay by Nick Lowe, who writes the film review column for Interzone, among other things. Here, he takes apart the standard fantasy/science-fiction plot and its well-worn, familiar furniture, and shows just how bad the writing can get and still be acceptable to readers (!)
Maybe it's just me, and I do like to think over my stories (well, some of them), but I really enjoy reading stuff like that. It's interesting to think about why things work, or don't work, and to realise which buttons writers can push so successfully :)
- Sun Kitten, 28th September '10
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