On The Road, Sat At Home - How The Writing's Changed...
I've had a few people ask me recently how I write, and resisting the urge to reply 'with crayons, a claw hammer and the screams of virgins', I actually had to think about this one - because as the years progress, I've changed the way I work on an almost yearly basis. I've gone forwards and backwards between technology and 'old school' techniques, and I realised that it might be a little fun to see how I've changed since the early days.
Now, first of all I have to state that work wise, structure wise, I'm pretty much the same now as I was back in, say 2005; I start with my ideas, I block them out and then I work into the script phase from the notes I've made. But back in 2005 I was more free flowing, I was usually only working on one project at a time and therefore I had nothing else to distract me. My mind was my whiteboard, I'd work out whole scenes in my head and then script them out almost verbatim. Often it worked, sometimes it was verbal diarrhoea - but with only one project on the go, I had time to copiously edit.
In the late nineties I scripted pretty much exclusively on Word. This was because the first thing that I used 'on the road' was a Psion 'Series 5' Organiser, a monochrome PDA that boasted six whole meg of memory, could upload to my PC and, with a lot of wires connected to my phone, dial up my 14.4k modem. On this little thing I wrote thousands, hundreds of thousands of words, even - and for several years I used this pretty much everywhere that I went. I learned how to two-thumb type with a vengeance and could almost beat my usual typing speed. I have to say that this little beauty was probably my favourite piece of kit ever and I continued to use it well into the early part of last decade, when I moved on.
Moving on entailed buying an iPaq PDA and a bluetooth keyboard. Again I could write my pieces on it, I could open up wherever I was and simply start scripting and for a large chunk of 2002-2006 I would work on it while out on the open air, but at this point I started to have problems. The first of these was that I'd started to script at this point using Final Draft, and the iPaq didn't sync with that. So if I scripted on this, I was scripting in Word, taking it and importing it into Final Draft when I was on my PC and then having to go through it, line by line to change the characteristics. Sometimes this took longer than if I was actually writing it, and it was something that had to change.
And change it did, because at this time my style and planning structure was also changing. By now I was working in a 'three act' structure. The first act was to block out how I saw the 'beats' of the story. I'd work out roughly what needed to go into an issue, usually almost to a page by page outline, something that I'd learned was incredibly useful while working on Doctor Who for Doctor Who Monthly in 2006 - by planning out each page, even to the simplest level of a single sentence, i.e. 'Doctor and Rose fight the Dragon', I'd be able to work out how many pages would in total be needed in the story I had in my head and therefore whether a) I'd need to lose some pages or (more usually) b) I'd see where I had gaps I could either flesh out or add more to. This has been accomplished in several ways over the years - when I had the iPaq I would use the 'Excel' function and write out 22 bullet lines for the comic, each one with a bullet point for the page. Nowadays I'll use a whiteboard or a moleskin book to write in, but the situation's the same.
An additional part of my process is my 'character' cards. I need to know what's happened to each character in my story. By writing this down on a card I can quickly scan it to garner an idea of what frame of mind that character is actually in at any point of the arc. If they're happy go lucky and you spend a year screwing them about, they're going to change. The cards remind me of where they should be doing this.
Act two was where I would visualise the story. In the beginning it would be purely in my head, I would shut my eyes and visualise the page, panel by panel. I've read enough comics in my time to know how a page looks, and I will usually block out in my head a good three, four page scene before moving to the script page. these days however I use the moleskin too, sketching out little stick-men page designs so I can see how it looks. This isn't because I'm losing my memory or anything, it's simply because I'm now juggling several projects at once and the visualisations of one page might be forgotten before I can script it down if another page gets thought of beforehand. I've lost too many good ideas that way.
Act three is of course the script. In the beginning I wrote 'cold' - that is, I'd have the idea in my head, and I'd pretty much script out on the fly. Some of my stories like Midnight Kiss for example were written this way, and when I wrote issue #1, I didn't have a clue (bar a vague over-arc idea) of how issue #5 was going to end. And then by issue #3 I realised I had to know, as the book went from eighteen issues to six and then to five, and I needed to know how to make all my clever little plot points fit.
I learned a lot in 2006 - between Midnight Kiss and Doctor Who, I realised the joy of putting random plot threads into early issues that could then be pulled back later and that, when reading with hindsight made me look very clever and well planned, but at the time were simply things thrown into the mix to see what happened.
(Funny enough I recently re-read Russell T Davies and Ben Cook's brilliant book The Writer's Tale, where I saw that RTD did the very same thing with a lot of his scripts, creating on the fly with no clue bar a broad outline as to where he was going.)
Now to me, and something I still do to this day - Act three isn't just the script. It has two little sub acts in its claws. The first is the scripting - as I said earlier, I write in Final Draft. I'll finish the story and then go through it again, highlighting dialogue that needs to be emphasised, that sort of thing. I'll then save it as an rtf file (as Final Draft doesn't save as a .doc file - or at least I haven't found it), close it down and then reopen it in Word.
This is my 'final edit' stage. I go through it with a fine tooth comb here, check for grammar / spelling issues that I might have missed and, more importantly to me, place a page break at the start of every new comic page. I'll also ensure that no panel description crosses a page. Once this is all done, I'll save the file as a .doc and then it's good to go.
Now, as you can see I need a PC for the final act, and so for years anything I did on the road was purely to be later used, rather than a finished product. Eventually I bought a laptop, but it was large and heavy and it was a nightmare to use. I had it with me for all of San Diego 2007 in a rucksack and the damned thing almost chewed through my shoulder.
Following Warren Ellis' advice I started to use my phones more, as each one developed more and more into the PDA I once used and loved. I had a Palm Treo for a while, and managed to write a fair few thousand words on it. I then moved to a HTC TyTn II, with pop out keyboard. I wrote so much on this that I even broke the keyboard twice. You see, as a writer, I can write anywhere. And often I need to write somewhere that isn't my desk, as I find that sometimes the very act of being at this desk that I write at right now is something that can sometimes creatively strangle me. Also, I might be at a meeting, the train journey there is an hour, there's another hour of lost time hanging around before and after, and then back home - that's three hours of wasted time taken out of my day, not including the meeting. But with a mobile PDA to write on, you can utilise that. Again, I've written thousands of words on trains and buses and in publisher receptions on such devices.
The problem still however was that although it was easy to write my novels like this, scripts still didn't come across well. I still had to re-edit them on the PC and I might as well have been writing longhand in several cases. So, in 2008 I bought an Eee PC. Which did everything I needed it to, I could write on the road, on a train, wherever I wanted. It had a five, six hour battery life. But it was still bulky. If I pulled it out on a tube train, it attracted attention, which still wasn't helpful. But it was a godsend for my convention travelling and I recently upgraded it to a better Eee PC, the 1005HA with larger memory and a longer battery life
And then came the iPhone. I know that there are a lot of iPhone haters out there, and I used to be one but when I got mine, I instantly realised the writing benefits. Turned on it's side, the keyboard was as easy to use as the TyTN, even my good old faithful Psion, and my typing speed was fast. At first it was the same as ever, writing text and then emailing so I could import later, but as the iPhone progressed, so did the apps. Because (as I've already stated) I like to work outside often, go to a pub or cafe and sit there for an afternoon, especially in the summer, I use DropBox to hold my files. For those who don't use it? Consider it. Antony Johnston, writer extraordinaire and celebrity chum turned me onto it. It syncs everything you're doing onto all your computers - I edit a piece on my PC? The moment I close the document, it syncs to DropBox. I open my laptop? It updates everything on that. I don't even have to be online, as long as when I finish I let the laptop sync my changes.
Anyway, as I said earlier, I'd started to use the iPhone. And while searching about I found an app for DropBox and, more importantly an app called QuickOffice that allowed me to write as I always did, but the gave me the option to save from my iPhone to my DropBox account, which although easier still gave me issues on scripting. A couple of weeks ago however I found an app called ScriptWrite that not only allows you to write a screenplay (and therefore a comic script) but can be opened as a formatted txt file in Final Draft. And, the next update, available this month gives you the option to actually save as a Final Draft file. If they add "save to DropBox," I'm sorted.
So as you can see, my scripting has progressed down a variety of routes over the years - but what about the other parts? Well, since I moved to Wanstead, I have an office of sorts, and I now have two large whiteboards on the wall where I scribble my ideas out, work out links and progress a story along. Currently I have a board designated solely for Doctor Who: Final Sacrifice, the final Tenth Doctor arc for IDW, while the other board is filled with ideas for the first Eleventh Doctor story, hotel confirmations and 'To Do's' on other stories. In a month a whole new project will be on there. It's already taking shape in notes.
In the old days I would use my phone as a notebook, but it was always a lengthy business - now I have a moleskin notebook that I take everywhere with me and I use this to scrawl ideas or observations in. I've also found that I'll start blocking out comics in this too now, as the 23 lines in the moleskin I have fits the 22 pages needed for a comic. And I can sketch out how I want it to look as I go along.
So currently, what do I use when I write? Well. I start with ideas that go into my moleskin, any time, any place. From there I take the notes and put them onto the whiteboard, playing around with scenes. Often I'll use post it notes here, each one a scene, so I can see in the 'timeline' how the story will look. Once I have the scenes blocked, I then move to a line by line page breakdown, more often than not this is now done in the moleskin.
Then, I'll work out the pages. I still do a lot of this in my mind, so it's still a loose creation here. Once I'm ready to script I'll start on my PC in Final Draft. I always do. Then, as I go along I'll use either my iPhone, my Eee PC or the desktop PC itself to continue, always syncing, always keeping to the latest draft. I finish in Final Draft, do a second pass, emphasising certain words in dialogue and, when I'm happy with it I save as an rtf file, opening in Word and do final edits before saving as a .doc. I'll then open up gmail and send it to my editor.
Of course, when they send it back hating it and demanding a full re-write, that's when the fun begins...