Diablo
Creative block is a funny thing; the more you try to create something while suffering from it, the more difficult it becomes to actually do something. Before you know it, your whole attitude and demeanor, has spiralled down into something not very pleasant at all. Even the way you deal with people and situations in your everday life is affected by the general malaise (I refuse to call it depression) that sets in. It’s a damn frustrating thing and not something I care to deal with too often. It’s something that insinuates itself into your life and drops in every now and then like that nightmare neighbour, who you’re too considerate to tell to go to hell when they overstay their welcome. The good news is, there IS a comic this week and Oddly Aroused DOES continue and Sonya Crimson perseveres…for those who might have thought differently 😉 Please enjoy the story and if you’re out there, let me know what you think. Take care and see you next week – Jim Collins
Every new idea seems contrived and unfunny at the time, the artwork doesn’t look good enough, the work is just a bore, do I really have to do this – answer is yes, cause the damn thing still has to go to (online/to the printer) on time. I have had a number of those over the years, but it always comes loose and starts flowing again eventually.
(Fact is, I’ve just had one. I’m behind schedule because I indulged in a one-week vacation from my strip, which ended up being nearly a full month. I pulled myself back on track a couple of weeks ago.)
Pretty much the same thing here. I decided to take a week, which turned into almost a month (with a pinup thrown in there somewhere). I hate doing that and it doesn’t happen too often, but it’s easy to let that get ahead of you. I think it stems from questioning yourself, is this good enough?, does it move the story forward?, will people like it or think it’s crap? I can usually rally and get something up online, but I think as human beings, we just need that break every now and then. We should just go with it and not read too much into it, I guess.
I’m curious though, khelatar, how you pull yourself out of it, or do you just let it run it’s course? I had a bunch of false starts where I would sit down to work on something and just had nothing. I have a general sense of where the comic is going, but nothing set in stone that I’m following. That seems to keep things fresh and flexible, but it’s also more difficult in it’s own way.
I have a heap of old unused or half-finished ideas lying around, so I grabbed a few, convinced myself they were good enough for raw material, and started touching up on plot details. I discarded some, but after a while I could see some real improvements and got my spirits back.
Course, one major difference here is that BB has no ongoing plot or internal continuity – what happens in a strip, usually stays in that strip. I’ve done other comics in the past with actual stories. As I recall if I got stuck I threw in some “filler” (a side scene, or some panels of non-crucial dialogue) while I was figuring out where to go next.
One rule I did follow in those cases was to NOT try snap out of it by “making things more interesting” and add reveals or other important plot elements that I wasn’t really on top of. (The love interest has an affair, the comic relief is really an undercover secret agent, someone kills the arch-villain all of a sudden.) That kind of stuff just makes it harder to clean up afterwards.
I admire creators who can come up with a different joke with every strip. That seems infinitely more difficult to me than writing a continuing story. That’s why I decided not to do the “joke-a-day” strip and tried to incorporate both styles into Oddly Aroused; telling a continuing story while keeping the tone humorous and lite (hopefully so). It eliminates having to come up with a joke every time which I find difficult.
A well known Pulp writers method (I forget who at the moment, maybe Chandler) when things started to get stale in his stories was to have a bad guy break through the door holding a gun (or variations thereof) and then have the protagonist work his way out of the situation. That’s an interesting challenge to do that and make it work within the context of the story. But I can also see how that could write yourself into a corner.