Grant Morisson Gets a 5 - A Lesson on How Not to Write [ Posted on September 04, 2008 @ 8:23 pm ] luvien So, while scanning through scans_daily, my only vice these past few months thanks to work, I see this scan uploaded with two of my favorite characters. I stop, hit the link, wait for it to load, and read. Those were days and nights of cattle prods, of fishnet and ultraviolet light, of porno candyfloss spike with strychnine. I wince but read on. ...the Batman says, slowing his breathing to trigger Delta-wave activity before entering Nirvikalpa Samadhi, the supreme meditative state. That was a punch in the gut. Unecessary shit. Rebirth. Snake scales, red and black. Blood on the tuxedo. What is this poser shit? I wrote like this in high school. Not that many people write this style because it's hard to maintain. I had to stop at this next one one and write this post as a reminder to myself. The perfect Romantic murder weapon is born - a death rosary. She goes gooey when she thinks of his ghastly mask of hate. Grant Morisson gets a 5. He wouldn't last one minute if i were teaching Creative Writing. Excuse me? Ghastly mask of hate? What kind of descriptive phrase is that? Do you see ghastly? What does it look like? Does the description move the story along? Since when did Harley Quinn think like that? Harley Quinn is crazy, but she isn't a psychopath with an outright love of wanton destruction, violence and... desolation and whatever horrible adjectives Mr. Morisson knows. Let me explain. Comic book writing is not the same as novel writing, or short story writing, or poetry. You're playing with text and images, and Batman #663 had more text than image, leading some people to call it a novella, or a fanfic. Fanfic kinda hits the spot. It's like they got a kid, bright-eyed at learning the word enigma, thinking himself a genius for learning the word necrophilia, to write a comic that has been around since before I was born. Comic book writing juggles words and colors to form a story in the mind. Writing in general is juggling words and the mind. What fits, what words make what images form in the mind, what sounds tug at nerves. Story pacing. Movement. Color. That's what people should think about. What is this death rosary? Does it do anything? What is this stupid over-abstraction? Writing is all about verbs. Adjectives are born from them. When you see a girl screaming her head off at a boy, that's an action. What forms in your mind is the adjective - scandalosa, bitch, walang hiya, whatever. And her motivation, and what happens after, may form an interesting story. But writing should never start with an adjective. It's not persuasive. It doesn't move the story. And comic writing is generally not forced full of description precisely because a picture tells a thousand words. That's one of its strengths. Ugh. Oh well, it's a valuable lesson on what not to do. If you want to see the post, it should be available in scans daily. Look for the Batman tag. Read (1) Post Comment

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