APE IN A CAPE: A Hopefully Helpful Thread

APE IN A CAPE: A Hopefully Helpful Thread:

memnochzero:

gailsimone:

I had a Hollywood friend ask me this morning about how to format a comic book script. That's a big question. I'm going to answer it, and I thought it might be helpful to some of you who are aspiring to write comics yourself (the short answer is, everyone does it differently. The long answer is,…

Thank you for taking the time to do this, Gail!

One thing I really enjoy about your work is that every character you write has a unique voice and they all stand out (Secret Six has been my favorite book the last few years, alongside Kirkman's The Walking Dead). In the world of comics, or fiction in general I think that's probably one of the most important things, as it separates the generic from the exceptional.

Just a bit of a set up, I'm working on a comic on my own (writing and art) and I'd like it to have first person narration from the lead protagonist. Normally this wouldn't be a problem for me, but the protagonist is female, and most POV characters I've written have been dudes. Being a dude myself, I have this fear I won't be able to nail the character's voice.

My question is how do you know when you've hit that "ah ha!" moment with the character and it stops just being words on a page and turns into a person?

Myself being a male writer writing a female character in the first person, what would you suggest I do to make the character stand out and read three dimensional instead of merely words on a page (or worse, a dude writing an awful female character)?

Thanks again! 

Okay, this is a great question that I get a lot.

I'm going to say something a little weird here. But it feels to me like a lot of writers have concentrated on plotting or on some other function of form, that they have neglected to make the characters compelling.  Some of the most successful writers of all time really never give you a sense of what a character is feeling…Michael Chrichton, comes to mind, Isaac Asimov, lots of people. You can succeed without this skill, but I always feel it leaves a work cold, if you can't feel some of what a character feels.

So I have a few tips…this topic is too big for a short post, but here's some stuff to consider.

First, fucking PLAY ACT. Seriously. I find that guys sometimes have a hard time writing females because they are afraid to really imagine what a woman feels. Now, there are a ton of gender issues here, and I don't mean to make the discussion binary, but answering the question, how does a GUY (the poster) write a FEMALE (the character), we are sort of in that position. So consider this advice to be about everyone on the gender spectrum who ISN'T the group you belong to.

Play act. Imagine. I mean it, if you write a woman walking into a room, mentally play that out. Don't be the man observing the woman, BE THE WOMAN. How does she enter the room, how do people in the room respond to her?

We live in a diverse world. If we only write characters like ourselves, fiction is doomed.  Don't be the observer, be the character. Then give that character a voice.

If you try to do it the other way around, you will not get the same result. When I write the Penguin, I am not Black Canary, observing him, I AM THE GODDAMN PENGUIN. I know his resentment, I know his avarice, his bitterness, I know the soft part of his soul. And when I write him, I write him as smart and dangerous and funny and angry, not as a punching bag.

In this, I can't stress enough how helpful acting classes or books on acting can be. Many of the best writers I know have drama backgrounds. Think of the character, be that character.

That's tough enough. But there's a second part to this, which is getting the READERS to care enough to keep reading your character.  To do that, they have to empathize in some way. How do you get a male readership to read a female character? To feel for her, in a way other than as a spectator?

There are lots of tricks. One I use a lot is sense memory.

Show the character EXPERIENCING things, physical things, that the reader knows and can relate to. I have characters eating cake, or walking in a cold stream, or smelling a burning fire close by.  These elements grab the reader almost involuntarily into the character.  Almost all of us have eaten cake or walked in a cold stream. We feel that, we remember it. Suddenly, we are eating what the character is eating, walking where the character is walking, instead of just reading about it.

Second, think of real world effects of the actions of your characters. How many times has a character in a comic gotten the crap kicked out of them and they don't even mention that it hurt?  With Black Canary, I made sure that the reader FELT when she got hit, that she felt a socket pop, or if it's raining, she got water in her boots. This works emotionally, too…Huntress and Black Canary feel comfortable in their costumes at night in an alley, but weird when they are in a bright hospital where they are observed by normal citizens.

Try to think of the consequences of the actions in the story. Those humanizing moments will do WONDERS for getting people to empathize.

I hope this helps…it's a big topic!