A Quote by Jeff Lemire
When I write Superboy and other DC characters, it's about boiling them down to core concepts.
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The decision to work with Marvel for a while isn't any sort of denigration of DC. I had a fantastic time there, I was treated extremely well, I have strong positive feelings about all of my editors and the DC universe of characters, and I look forward to hopefully working with them at some point down the road.
My writing process often begins with a question. I write down ideas and let them stew for about a year. Then, when I sit down to write, I make a list of characters and try to see how they fit.
I'm boiling about the rainforests being chopped down to make disposable chopsticks. I'm boiling about the fact that we have palm oil put into every single one of our substances.
I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, 'Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?'
Every morning I'd have coffee with my wife and we would discuss ideas. Sixty percent of what I did for the stores was concepts. The other forty percent was correcting and cleaning up other concepts in house, or doing final art on my concepts. Most of my concepts were so finished they could turn them over to somebody else.
I don't really decide what the core of the story is before I write. I write to figure out what the story is. And I think the characters end up talking to you and telling you what they want to be doing and what is important to them. So in some ways, your job is to listen as much as it is to write.
I don't write about love because it makes for easy, passive heroes. I write about how love makes my characters more autonomous, more self-possessed, more opinionated and powerful. I write about characters who pursue relationships that make them the people they want to become. I write about love as a superpower.
What impresses me the most about DC characters is how long a lot of them have been around.
Build your schools around concepts, not academic subjects: core concepts such as awareness, honesty, responsibility, freedom and diversity in oneness. Teach your children these things and you will have taught them grandly.
I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.
Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.
I couldn't say no when I received that offer [to re-invent the DC characters]... How can any writer say no to the opportunity of redoing every one of DC's top superheroes?
I started reading DC stuff much later in my life. You realize that there's a huge difference between the Marvel universe and the DC universe and the characters that own it.
At the core, I try to write characters who are real people with real insecurities, fears, hopes, and dreams, which is why hopefully readers can identify with them.
When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about.
When you start writing, you have your characters on a metaphorical paved road, and as they go down it, all these other roads become available that they can go down. And a lot of writers have roadblocks in front of those roads: they won’t allow their characters to go down those roads... I’ve never put any roadblocks on any of these paths. My characters can go wherever they would naturally go, and I’ll follow them.
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