Q&A 18: Eavesdropping, Robert Cop, longform GNs, writing roadblocks (Patreon)

Emil asks:"Do you eavesdrop a remarkable amount? Your ear for dialog is remarkable, especially for how kids speak with each other, and I've always been curious where that originates."

This one is funny, because I don't eavesdrop as a matter of course - quite the opposite. Most of the time when I am on (for example) a train, the last thing I want is to hear what other people are talking about. I sit with my headphones on, and if I'm writing, I play rain noise to cut out voices altogether.

But I do like talking to people, and how people talk to each other. People give away an awful lot about themselves without realising that they're doing it. But I think I've absorbed most of it by osmosis. It's not a conscious thing. Most of the solid gold bon mots I've overheard were hilarious but useless in any kind of narrative context. One day I was on the train and there were two young women, perhaps in their early twenties, sitting next to each other in the seats in front of me. One of them showed the other a picture of her customary breakfast on her phone. The other said "what's that? Soup?"

Marc Arsenault writes:"I want to see a Robert Cop collection! Warts (and notes and doodles) and all! Robert Cop!"

For readers too young to remember Robert Cop, it was a comic I made because I had bought the URL "robertcop.com". I did not make many, and the titular character never appeared in the actual strips. All my enthusiasm for the project was drained by someone or other sending me the following picture on Twitter 1-3 times a week:

I let the domain name expire.

Jeffrey Boyle enquires:"Do you have a pie-in-the-sky, time/money are no object dream story you would love to tell? I have been astonished at your constancy and consistency over these many years and I have wondered if you ever hoped for a couple of years to conceptualize and create something that would just be delivered in one doorstop-sized collection."

This is a good question. I've always been intimidated by the idea of writing and drawing a big old graphic novel. I think my agent would have been delighted if I had come up with the idea for one. Some of my favourite comics in recent years have been these kinds of things - Penelope Bagieu's California Dreamin', for example, or Intense by Sole Otero. Obviously I've written long serial narratives that run to many hundreds of pages, but I've never approached the standalone longform GN, partly because the prospect of writing for a really long time, then doing a long rough version, then going through a lot of edits, then spending more than a year drawing it, sounds very detrimental to my general wellbeing. I'm not cut out to be a creative lighthouse keeper.

But assuming that I had to do this in order to appease some sort of vengeful god, or due to an enforced and prolonged period of bed rest, I would quite like to adapt a book I bought in a Dublin bookshop six or so years ago. It was a light comic novel from 1914. When I read it, I thought, this is like one of my comics. It was a "picaresque". I don't want to say what it was in case someone else does it first.

Finally, Joanna Castellon asks:"Which part of the story gets you most stressed out in writing? Taking for example a full volume which usually has a starting, middle, and end result, is there any part of the story writing that you always simply struggle in, and if so, how do you push through it?"

I think I've described my writing process in previous posts, one which is carefully designed to eliminate the most stressful parts of the process, or at least smooth them out. One of them is working in a serial form, where the problem solving is always manageable. Referring back to the question above about longform graphic novels, I think having a big beginning, a big middle and a big ending is terrifying. With serial writing, you have a lot of beginnings, middles and endings, and can slowly build towards a crescendo. Working slowly, you can have a rough idea of the end, and tease out themes and motifs throughout that will make the final, big end feel more meaningful. The great failing of superhero movies, to my mind, is that the huge, overwhelming conflict at the end often feels rote and unearned. It's big, without being important. Its arrival is totally predictable.

But this doesn't answer the question entirely. For me, the greatest struggle is converting the excitement of a fun idea into something that stands up to narrative scrutiny. I have come up with a lot of things that felt great for an afternoon but vanished like mist when I tried to make them real. Often they simply became boring when I forced the rules of my story writing onto them. I've learned that the best thing is just to throw them away. Stories that work seem to reveal themselves to me when I relax. I have to push through when I am organising and structuring my notes for a comic - the most difficult part of the process - but I usually find that most of the broad ideas have been collected by that point and it is a matter of putting them in the right order.