I’m reading Scott McCloud’s Making Comics, an interesting romp through the process of creating sequential art and their stories. McCloud makes many compelling points in a very accessible and captivating way, along with a dash of self-aware, self-deprecating humor. In a few sections, he very accurately says that the tips he gives in that section are applicable across all range of story-telling mediums, from film to prose, but I would go so far to argue that most of the content in his book are useful for story tellers, even if they don’t express their tales in a graphical medium like comics or film.

Prose authors could do with a dash of mental imagery and possibly other imagery. Myself, I ask people who can draw better than I to create character sketches, my wife being one important resource on that front. I can get in a rut in the way I think about characters that flattens them like an out of control steamroller. It presses down their textures and renders them lifeless and thin. Seeing someone else’s depiction helps me climb inside the mind of my reader a little bit more, and that can never hurt, and seeing what an artist comes up with from my description helps me to refine my own text.

Neil Gaiman, boo sir, boo. You’ve had that among all the characters of Sandman. You’re a bastard, there I said it. A talented bastard, sure, but you can take those black tshirts of yours and fuckin’, fuckin’, uh, fuckin’ take ‘em to the cleaners. Do some laundry. Yeah. I sure told him.