Process Blog Pt. 2: Scripting "The Gulf" (with a brief aside about contracts)

Alright! I hope you all have had a great week. I am sitting down to write this in a brief window between cleaning the place up and packing up all my books into my suitcase for TCAF. I'm flying out tonight and I really can't wait to be back in Toronto. I lived there for 5 years and moved in the first spring of the pandemic. It's a great city and I am excited to visit old haunts and see some familiar faces.

Last post, we left off with me receiving a formal offer for The Gulf in the summer of 2021. While I'd love to do a post talking about contract negotiations in more detail, I honestly wouldn't really know where to begin and it'd probably be pretty boring. Secondly, I can't discuss the specific details of my contracts. On top of that, I feel like there's some sort of liability in speaking too concretely about this sort of thing. Negotiating the contract for The Gulf took months and, in the end, I believe I manged to get something that works in my favor. However, I genuinely felt like I was losing my mind after spending weeks trying to parse the legalese of the document and it's the main reason I've begun to think an agent may be beneficial. Anyways - if you're ever in a position where you're unsure about something in a contract reach out to your peers (or even me). Other professionals are your best resource if you're trying to figure out what you can ask for $$$ or rights wise. Don't be afraid to say exactly what you want and don't want. The publisher is not innately entitled to all your rights just because they want to publish your book. What I mean by this is that a contract is a negotiation, so, of course, there has to be some reasonable middle ground, but they aren't owed everything they're going to have in there. You don't owe them merchandising, adaptation rights, or even "worldwide publishing rights". You owe them what you're comfortable with for the amount you're comfortable with parting them for. You're well within your reason to have them remove or narrow the scope of what they're asking for.

Anyways, after brutalizing my brain studying and negotiating the contract, my editor wanted to have a meeting to discuss the story. I was all nerves leading up to our first meeting. After spending all that time thinking about the ways a contract could screw myself over, I was really worried I had just committed to the whims of an editor too; would they remove the things I loved about this story? With The Gulf, I want to capture all the messiness of being 17 years old. I don't want to sand off rough edges or make characters likeable just to make something go down smoother. When I think of what my friends and I were like at 17, I am trying to write a story where the characters are 10 percent as horrible as that haha. At the outset of writing this story, I knew who the characters were, the instances they'd arrive in, and some of the jokes I wanted to include; I could see the ways a publisher could feel liable or a sensitivity reader could flag it. God - does this make me sound like an edgelord? I swear to god - this story is not that, I am just saying that there's a lot of content in The Gulf,  when aimed at a YA demographic, that I could see being censored quite heavily.

On top of worrying about the content being censored, there's something vulnerable about discussing storytelling with someone. I am probably overly self conscious but I don't really consider myself to be a writer. I'm comfortable calling myself a cartoonist but "writer" is too weighty or precise a title for comics. The process of creating comics must be intuitive or else it becomes dull to work on (and arguably, also, to read). Story-lines, character action, and gags emerge on the page, from the process of drawing, and are not something to be decided in a stories written form. The shape of the story comes from this loose process; tangents, blind alleys, and non-sequitur's included. I don't want to tell stories in a perfectly formulated structure; I think each of my stories calls for a different shape. As long as I access and work from something that feels honest I hope readers will be drawn along beside me. I try to write from a place where I am constantly considering my characters as vehicle for theme; by seeing scenes not in relationship to the plot but in value to them as individuals. A scene, to me, often feels like a question, and, at the end of it, the readers are given an answer that poses a new question. An overall shape emerges from these characters and that shape is the plot. All that said, The Gulf is definitely my most plot driven work when compared with A Gleaming and Blind Alley.

After weeks of fretting, the day of the meeting arrived. We spent three hours talking through my outline, I left the meeting energized. I was so fucking relieved too. It was such an invigorating feeling to hear that someone else had spent so much time thinking about every nook and cranny of my story. The conversation made me realize that what a good editor does is similar to what a valuable critique in art school was like; a viewer, looking at the work from outside of yourself, asking what you're trying to achieve, and trying to help you see that work as an objective thing. As an artist, the only way to get "better", both conceptually and technically, is to recognize your shortcomings. Because these "shortcomings" are things that exist within you they can be hard to see. To have your own eyes drawn to the areas in which the work does not do exactly what you think it does by objective eyes outside of you is one of the most valuable ways to grow as an artist. As you develop as an artist, it becomes easier to trust your own voice but I think it's always important to be receptive to the fact that, even if a story or piece of work exists so solidly inside of you, and you put it on a page, there are things you won't see and things that point in different directions to different people. An editor (or friend) can help you see that.

There was, of course, scenes or moments within my outline that my editor questioned the value of. Often times I felt I could defend them and point to why, even if not from a plot perspective, these moments were integral to the story. Other times, I couldn't and we would trim the story down. There were many points where I at first resisted only to later, while editing the script, realize that my editor was correct. There's such a strange tension between having confidence in your ability to tell a story and trying to trust and be a reasonable collaborator. You don't want to be someone who believes their story is incredible from the outset; I think you have to believe your work can always improve in order to do anything worth a damn. You simultaneously have to believe that your story is worth telling and you really have to know what it is you want to say. It's important to trust your instincts as a storyteller but often times, when told to change something, the natural response is for those same instincts to panic and resist.  For me, I think this is what makes this process take a long time. All said in done, I worked on fleshing out my script for 3 or 4 months. By the end of it, I think we had done three iterations of the script. That amount of "edits" may make it sound like the story has changed a lot in the process of writing and collaborating on it but the fact is the story has stayed essentially the same. Through this process, I feel the story became more itself; it felt like going from knowing and viewing my story from an old CRT monitor to a 4K Ultra HD television. Hearing perspectives on my characters, their actions, and how they were coming across allowed me to better know them and make them more clearly rendered on the page.

To reiterate, the writing process began with the pitch. The pitch had a page and a half long outline of the story. When I sent my fleshed out pitch, I included a scene by scene breakdown of the entire story. This outline is what I talked to my editor about in our first meeting and from it I made an edited, slightly more detailed script. My script was mainly dialogue and action with only rare instances with descriptions of panels. This whole process was daunting and I often resisted the urge to overly write and explain the story, down to every last detail, in the script. There was an amount of information within the script that would allow me to translate the story to the page visually. I wanted to keep the process intuitive; to have a script that was lacking visuals - something that I could write images from.