Creative Strategies to Fend Off Misery and Stagnation

This is PART FIVE of a series of posts about preparing for DELILAH DIRK BOOK FOUR, a new graphic novel.

The last time I made a graphic novel was Delilah Dirk and the Pillars of Hercules. I like that book. I’m proud of how it turned out. I look at it now, years later, and I see little forgotten elements that make me happy. But I can’t repeat the process I used to make that book, because that process made me hate making comic books. Delilah Dirk 3 burned me out, and I didn’t like I how I felt when I finished. When I sent off the final files, I didn’t feel accomplished, I felt unburdened, like I had got a chore out of the way. For the year or so afterward, I bent myself over a children’s book project and a prose novel project, just so I wouldn’t have to look at panels and word balloons. I needed new challenges.

DD3 was difficult, but not challenging. I wasn’t learning much. I wasn’t picking up any new metaphorical dance moves.

This might have been by necessity. I remember feeling a lot of deadline pressure, and so was doing my best to balance good-looking pages with a need to get them in on time. It feels silly to complain about having to hit a deadline—part of being a creative professional means learning how rare a relaxed schedule is, and you are more often than not having to do the best you can within ungenerous time constraints. Yet, Delilah Dirk feels different to me. These books are personal projects, not work-for-hire. If there was any sort of arena where one ought to have the room to develop some new dance moves, I thought this would be it.

Instead, faced with the threat of needing (and wanting) to make DD3 quickly, I leaned on the process that got me through DD1 and DD2, which I described earlier. It’s a safe, reliable process, but I worry that it saps life from the end product. With that in mind, and considering the goals for DD4 that I described in the previous instalment, how should I approach a fourth Delilah Dirk book so that it is creatively satisfying?

Some solutions seem simple. I want to ensure the book doesn’t look too dissimilar to previous books in the series. As long as I don’t, say, make the entire book using collage art, that’s a feature I will probably get for free, since the book will be made by my hand. My concern is that the book will be too similar (and thus not an interesting challenge) rather than unrecognizable.

I also want the book to feature more “breathing room.” It shouldn’t be too hard to find spots for this. The hard part will be sticking to my guns. Once I discover that these elements increase the page count, I’ll need to be confident enough to lobby (to myself) for their inclusion. These scenes or sequences will need to be worth their space in the book, which is a writing challenge. They’ll need to be delightful, or unexpected, or poignant, or funny, or hopefully a combination of all those things. The work will be in finding ways to tie them thematically to the story, and perhaps in doing so I’ll be able to make them instrumental, and their frivolity will fade away.

It’s easy to see how the iterative process could be a problem: by retreading the same story territory over and over, of course the material might start to feel stale. At the end of the rough pass, the book is—in my eyes—complete. For me, the fun part is over. The rest is just rendering and “pencil miles.” To its credit, there’s a meditative aspect to the line-art process, but the colouring stage is just difficult and time consuming.

I wonder if part of reason the colouring process is so unpleasant is because I’ve until-now been bad at planning for lighting and colour during the early stages of work. As a result, when it comes time to colour a page, I’m having to invent lighting treatments and colour plans to layer on top of the line art. The alternative would be to consider the line art and lighting/colour as one integrated step, like a painter would. A painter does not lay down line art and then fill it in with colour, like a colouring book. She considers all visual elements as indivisible from the whole. This should be easy, since I am insisting on doing all the work myself. How does that manifest practically, though? Perhaps instead of thumbing or roughing the pages out as stick figures and line drawings, it would be beneficial to begin with values (shades of black and white). Perhaps I could rough out a page in values, first, and add the details after. I think some painters begin this way, calling it “blocking-in.” Worth a shot.

Similarly, I need to move away from asking my pencils to replicate the look of inked comic book art. I need to let my pencils do what pencils do best, which is to offer shades of grey and let the paper texture come through. I wonder how much time I would need to devote to experimentation.

I also wonder how far I can get away from the iterative process. I suspect the last two steps—line art and colouring—might need to stay as they are, since that part of the process is what makes the books look the way they do, and I want to keep a certain amount of consistency. But how many of the previous steps could I cut out? I already have a story outline that I’m happy with, so I know the important points I want to hit and the elements I want to include. Could I skip the step where I write it all out in detail as a manuscript? Could I skip the thumbnail step? Perhaps, instead of writing a detailed manuscript, I could identify scenes or sequences to create, estimate how many pages I ought to spend on each, and then go straight to roughing those pages out, writing dialogue and narration as I go.

Perhaps I can trick myself into incorporating more liveliness by allowing myself to accept more extensive revisions throughout the process. This has been undesirable simply because it’s more work. Revising requires hard decisions and strict discipline, neither of which are enjoyable. For DD1, I roughed out two separate versions of Chapter Four just so I could send them to trusted readers and ask them to help me pick a version. But perhaps that’s what this process needs: I need to tell myself that there will be extensive revision down the road, and that’s okay, and the book will be better for it. Perhaps it will encourage me to be less precious with the pages, which may benefit the work in ways that will be intangible to readers, but will improve the overall feel of the book.

I’d like to do less with the story, too. I have a bad habit of trying to be too clever. As an author, hoo boy, it’s hard not to feel that sort of pride you get from thinking you’ve built an ingenious contraption out of interconnected ideas and words. And yet, as a reader, I do not value it. I prefer a good pianist over someone who’s ensconced themselves in an elaborate one-man-band outfit

How would that manifest in a Delilah Dirk story? First, I’m starting with a storyline that is straightforward. This is not a complex web of interconnected timelines and motivations. The bulk of the storyline is “get from A to B before the antagonist.” My goal is to try to not do too much, thinking that if I can keep the spine of the story simple, I can hang flavourful tangents off it, like plantings along a garden path. Then, embracing my spirit of revision, at the end I can stand back and say, “it would look better if we took out all the boxwoods,” and ideally we end up with a story that is elegant and unfussy, but without losing flavour or complexity.

Some of these options are scary, and feel uncertain. I don’t remember DD1 feeling scary or uncertain. I remember feeling like I was just trying to make it as funny, truthful, and exciting as possible. I was not worried about whether people would like it or whether it would be successful. But then, at the time, I wasn’t asking Delilah’s adventures to keep the lights on in my house. Now I am, and that’s a lot of pressure to put on a little colourful cartoon character drawn in ink on paper. So how can I afford to make DD4?