A Quote by Chris Wooding
I like writing comic pages, discovering the rhythm of the panels, learning how much you can and can't express. It's good to stretch myself as a writer instead of always doing prose work; I write screenplays for the same reason.
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You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.
I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.
I was a very young girl and I got into fashion very much by accident, wanting to be independent. What was wonderful was that while I was learning and discovering - learning about the work, discovering myself as a woman - I was allowing other women to feel the same way.
When I'm writing, I try not to think things like, 'Gosh, I have to finish writing this book.' Books are very long and it's easy to get discouraged. Instead I think to myself, 'Wow, I have this great story idea, and today I'm going to write two pages of it. That's all - just two pages.'
I think the first thing - if you want to be a writer - the first thing you need to do is write. Which sounds like an obvious piece of advice. But so many people have this feeling they want to be a writer and they love to read but they don't actually write very much. The main part of being a writer, though, is being profoundly alone for hours on end, uninterrupted by email or friends or children or romantic partners and really sinking into the work and writing. That's how I write. That's how writing gets done.
The one difference between comics and, say, cinema or prose, is that you've only got so many pages, and publishers will work to a set page count. So you have to work out how many pages you actually have and how much to allow for each story.
I paint very messy. I throw paint around. So when I let myself do the same sort of thing with my writing, and I would just write and write and write and revise, that's when I found my rhythm in writing.
I think a lot of people are very good, but I don't think anybody could do my rhythm. I was thinking, "If you want my rhythm" - and when I was writing, I was writing them for myself - "why am I watching another actor doing what I should be doing?" It was just a really unpleasant experience.
Writing is a black-box proposition. You see actors; you can see what they're doing. You can watch the director on set doing his work. But when a studio says to a writer, 'Give us some pages,' he just goes off and comes back. It's just pages, and suddenly, there's some writing on them.
Imagine, 24 pages of superhero adventures produced by the same writer and artist every month!! How did they do it? (What? By being professional about it? But that's too much like work!)
There's a perception that good writing is writing which runs smoothly. But smooth-running prose can work against what you're trying to express in a novel.
I love actors. Part of that is my theater background and being a writer who cares about performance. Actors have usually chosen their profession because they have a dream of doing it and they want to express something about the world. That's the same thing that I have with writing. Most of the good actors get into it for those reason, rather than for reasons of fame or fortune, or anything like that, and that's where I'm coming from, as a storyteller.
Simon's walls were covered in what looked like pages ripped from a comic book, but when I squinted, I realized they were hand drawn. Some were black-and-white, but most were in full color, everything from character sketches to splash panels to full pages, done in a style that wasn't quite manga, wasn't quite comic book.
Learn how to program and play lots of games. If you find yourself capable of writing a game, someday you'll be capable of writing a really good game. My dad's a writer, and when you ask him how to learn to write, he says, "write." So basically, do it and keep doing it until you get good.
A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
I always think that the writer is doing the vast majority of the director's work, in a sense. If you're a writer who is also going to direct, you're doing all your preparation: You're already visualizing everything, you're imagining how the lines are going to be read, you see the blocking in your head, and you know the rhythm and the pacing.
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