HAPPY AT 90 MILES

Here’s a drawing of Jorge and his friends, all around the age of 16, ready to get on a raft and paddle away.
Left to right it’s Papili, Jorge, Pichi y Mañanga. (those Cuban nicknames!)

Comment

As I take on the role of the author as well as the artist, I’ve been reading more about the act and craft of writing lately. Since the Graphic Novel will be in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, I have been looking at some books in this field and I’ll just mention some of them in brief;

Writing Life Stories, by Bill Roorbach. His style is a bit smug and jokey, but there is good advice in here, particularly interesting was the chapter on finding the metaphor that may add meaning to real life situations.

Writing the Memoir, by Judith Barrington targets writers interested in exploring their personal stories, and like Roorbach’s book ends each chapter with a series of excercises meant to reinforce the lesson. I don’t have the time to “explore” in this way, instead I pick at the many great examples she puts in her book.

What has proven to be a really great resource is Writing Creative Nonfiction, Edited by Carolyn Fourché and Philip Gerard. It is an anthology of more than 30 concise essays on the problems and solutions to writing good nonfiction. Highly recommended for bloggers, journalists and creative writers. It’s like being at a seminar with one great speaker after the other.

All of this advice is perfectly apliccable to the field of comics. If you haven’t yet, please check out Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde for examples of quality Graphic Nonfiction.

Lastly, I want to mention that the iTunes stores has made available FOR FREE a series of downloads of short tips(2-4min), on improving your writing. Author Roy Peter Clark of The Poynter Institute covers elements of style, better communication and creative solutions. Even if it’s only for improving your email writing or facebook postings, it’s well worth it. Go to the iTunes store and search for his name.

Comment

While I’m confident in my sequential storytelling abilities, I admit I don’t have much experience writing. I took several creative writing classes at The Art Institute of Chicago, but this will be the first time I’m writing with an aim to publish.

Two things in my favor facing this challenge is the Graphic Novel format, in which most is said in pictures and the words accompany or compliment the drawings, and the fact that I’m drawing from actual events rather than creating fiction.
Yet this is not a documentary, I’m telling a story. The challenge is to present the nonfiction material of Jorge’s experiences in a creative, engaging way. In playing with structure and plot, applying the elements of creative writing to the events, I found a great ally: Scrivener.

My friend Brian Reed, mighty writer of marvelous exploits turned me on to this fantastic piece of software. It permits you to work in a true non-linear fashion, dividing the story points into neat separate yet connected documents that can be shuffled around. An altenative view even simulates a cork board on which you arrange your story on index cards.

Another great feature is that it permits you to import all sorts of reference (audio, video, pictures, links, etc) and through a split screen access it in one pane while you are writing in the other pane.

This was extremely helpful as I imported the audio files of the 5 hour long interview I did with Jorge, and divided them by chapters. This way I could refer to and manipulate the audio file in a very direct and comfortable way while I was transcribing

Keith, the developer, calls it a Project Management Tool, which is a good description of its capabilities. Final Draft is the industry standard for writing screenplays, but I find Scrivener to be a much more organic conducive to giving structure to the chaos of ideas and elements for your story. It is non-linear, informal and intuitive. At the end, you can export to Final Draft and polish the final script there.

Check out a free 30 day demo at www.literatureandlatte.com, and if you like it, pay the developer $40 for the license. It is well worth it.

Alert: the software is mac ONLY, so get on the apple wagon if you want some.

Comment