Chapter Two Flatting, and thinking about "The Twenty-Year Project"

[ Above: This is generally what my flatted pages look like. The colours here may only be loosely correlated with the final colours. ]

Flatting continues in its usual manner. If you’re unfamiliar with the process, think of it like working on one of those “adult colouring books” that were so popular not too long ago. It’s like spending whole days doing that. The end goal is that when I return to each page, ready to actually colour it, I can, say, splash colour all over a character without worrying about getting any of it on the background.

It’s a bit of a chore, but it’s got to be done. It offers too much efficiency and flexibility to be passed over. 

SHETLAND STORIES AND FIDDLE TUNES

Friend Richard brought this to my attention a little while back: a number of short fiddle tunes interspersed with stories of fishing and boats and the sea and the men who did the one with the other. I enjoyed the stories but frankly, with that accent, he could have been reading a grocery list and I’d be happy to hear it.

THE TWENTY-YEAR PROJECT

That same friend Richard also shared this tweet from Victoria Ying, asking, “Imagine devoting your whole creative life to one story and one world like long running manga series ala One Piece. Which book or story of yours do you think you could spend 20 years writing?”

I keep thinking about this tweet, perhaps because it offers a good lens for looking at a fundamental approach for doing this sort of work. Maybe you’ve got your own 20-year odyssey to embark upon, or maybe you’re half way through a year-long project and feeling like you’ll never see the end. Let’s explore some aspects of this thing.

That sounds like hell might be a good first reaction, but it wasn’t mine. I thought, “I bet I’ve been working on DD for twenty years.” If I’m still working on DD in 2026, that will be technically true. But then I remembered: I’ve taken other work. I worked on SLEEPY, I took some time to write a novel, I worked on BUBBLE, I’ve taken on some animation work, each of which were a good change of pace. So I can’t claim to have spent all my time at one desk working on one continuous project. When I think about a 20-year project and say, “that sounds perfectly fine,” my track record clearly shows I’d like some variety. 

[Above: drawings from 2006.]

Success might be related to the nature of your ideas. I suppose if I started a project and my only idea for it was, “pirates are cool,” then it’s easy to imagine how twenty years of focusing on that idea might start to drag. If your idea is, “I sure would like to see some ship-to-ship sea combat,” I bet you can make a good sea battle, but after a while you might start to wonder “why?” And at any rate, it shouldn’t take twenty years to demonstrate “pirates are cool.”


On the other hand, if you said, “I want to talk about friendship,” perhaps there’s more meat on that bone. If you say, “I want to talk about leadership and property,” that’s something that could buoy you for the length of a project.

Maybe you don’t spend 20 years thinking about one idea. Maybe part of it, you’re thinking about friendship, then you move onto a different theme. Regardless, with the pressure of retaining your interest re-trained on the themes and ideas of the story, now you’re not just sitting on plastic chairs in an empty room with Feared Pirate Captain Blackbeard, hoping he’ll entertain you. Now you two have something to talk about. Maybe along the way he’ll show you some ship-to-ship combat.

Maybe characters and settings are interchangeable. You can hear this when people say things like “the author used Batman to tell a story about the crisis of recycled waste shipping.” You can see this when a TV show has a “monster of the week” episode. Scully and Mulder meet a child vampire and so, in the context of the familiar characters of X-FILES, we get to talk about ideas of immortality. Since Scully and Mulder are character foils, it's even easier to fully explore the idea than it would be otherwise. So, with enough creativity, you can do anything you want with the same set of characters for 20 years.

Constraints are important. Constraints help the fires of creativity burn hotter (rolls eyes). It’s counterintuitive, but I believe when you start adding constraints, you make it easier to come up with interesting and surprising story solutions. Saying, “I am going to tell another story with these characters,” is one kind of constraint. If I decide, “I am doing another DD story,” it slices away whole entire possibility spaces, which makes it easier to make choices. Setting a story with DD, for example, I know I do not have cell phones and I do not have modern medicine. So all my fascinating WebMD plot ideas get shovelled into a “for later” folder.

Besides, ideally you’re supposed to be interesting. In principle, your (and when I say “your,” I’m actually talking to myself, like, “you, Tony,” but we can universalize this if we want) job is to be interesting. Your work is to notice the wonder of the world—from the arc of the stars above our heads to the flutter of a ladybug’s wings, from the struggle of life and death to the agony of having accidentally deleted that beloved Eurovision recording—and represent that to your audience. You should be able to take an idea like “pirates are cool” and find new and novel ways to spin that into twenty years worth of work. Probably by exploring all the ideas that branch from the root of, “pirates are cool.” And maybe you bring those ideas to your work, or maybe those ideas come from somewhere else, because…

Your best results might not happen if you try to force ideas onto your work. I just recently saw this tweet from Austin Kleon, “I find it extremely weird that people still think that writing is about having an idea in your head and then getting it down on paper, as if the whole thing were transcribing your shitty thoughts.”

Sounds a bit harsh, but those who have been reading here for a while know how much I love George Saunders’ A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN. One of his notions about writing is that you put down some writing, then read it, see what it says, and move on from there. You write and you respond to your writing as you are going. To me, that sounds very much like encouraging the ideas emerge from the work as you go and very little like "transcribing your shitty thoughts."

I am contradicting myself. Or am I? Where I end up is: when I think about doing something for twenty years, surface-level, it is scary. But when I look more closely, I see a world of possibility and nuance. I can try to impose ideas on the work, or I can discover them, or I can do both. (I am doing both, working on PDAP/DD4.) The notion, “working with the same characters for twenty years,” has such a stink of being locked into something, but I dislike that assessment, even though I have a clear practice of changing up my projects every now and then. Nevertheless, I want to believe that every suite of characters offers a universe of possible stories limited only by imagination, and any idea you want to explore can be explored using essentially any character, I think. 

[ Above: drawings from spring of 2022. ]

Sheesh, there are so many directions to spin off on this topic, probably because it’s so fundamental: what stories should I tell and which characters should I use to tell them? I will stop rambling now.

If you have thoughts, please share them below. Are there any long-running series that you particularly loved? (Hornblower is one of mine, and Discworld is a whole other conversation unto itself.) Are there any single stories that you wish you had continued for twenty years?

THE GREEN BARS GROW

You (by which I mean "I") love to see it.

Don't worry, DD4 will not take twenty years. I promise.

Be lovely to each other,

TC