Devon Grayson
We found an interview with Devon Grayson last night with an interesting quote...
(For those of you not in the comics-fandom, she's a writer. Best known among fans for her support of the more complex side of the Batman/Robin relationship (read Bruce/Dick), and for her support of gblt issues both in and outside of her writing.)
GL: You've mentioned elsewhere (in your interview with Sequestial Tarts I believe)that you don't believe the writer or artist is more important than the characters they become involved with.
Do you think characters will tell you their stories, how they'd like to be written if you "listen" to them? Or is it more straightforward than that and simply telling the ego to go away while you create?
DG: I think there are millions of stories out there dying to be told, and that all you have to do if you want to tell them is become interested in them. If you show even a hint of an attention span, any number of fictional characters will leap forward with tales you honestly will feel like you could not possibly have made up all by yourself.
Now, maybe these are real fictional entities - energies beaming in from another dimension - or maybe they're archetypal or hidden aspects of yourself or the collective unconscious… it doesn't matter. It feels and operates like magic, and should be treated with the same respect. For some writers that involves a lot of rituals and discipline, and for others it involves being able to jump out of bed at four in the morning to write if that's when the story comes to you - that, too, doesn't matter. What does matter is that you learn to trust the process. You can edit the hell out of the story when you're done getting it down, but while you're writing it you are really, as far as I'm concerned, an interpreter, and you have to believe in the story as a sort of entity demanding your attention and trust. I have often fought with characters whom I wanted to take one way in a story while they wanted go another way, and the characters always win. There are structural and thematic elements that need to be attended to for a story to work, and so the aforementioned scenario leaves me with a lot of work to do after the character has marched off on whichever path he or she was determined to head down in the first place (you could call my work a kind of hedge-clipping in that analogy), but that's the craft part of it. And craft can save your ass, no question. Craft ensures that even your worst story is cohesive. But craft without an investment in the more esoteric elements of the process often reads as hollow or flat. You can always tell when a writer has been in genuine communication with the characters about which he or she is writing. And in comics, I think, you can usually even tell when one of the characters "likes" a certain writer. Every time that writer uses that character, there's an extra charge to the work - a harmony between the craft-based objectives of the tale and the thematic undercurrents that most of us are barely conscious of while we're writing.
Stories like to tease you. They like to end up being about something other than what you thought they were about when you started them. And when I say that the characters are more important than the writer, in part I mean that most successful stories have relied, at one point or another of their inception, on the writer being willing to get the hell out of their way.
The remainder of the interview can be found here
(For those of you not in the comics-fandom, she's a writer. Best known among fans for her support of the more complex side of the Batman/Robin relationship (read Bruce/Dick), and for her support of gblt issues both in and outside of her writing.)
GL: You've mentioned elsewhere (in your interview with Sequestial Tarts I believe)that you don't believe the writer or artist is more important than the characters they become involved with.
Do you think characters will tell you their stories, how they'd like to be written if you "listen" to them? Or is it more straightforward than that and simply telling the ego to go away while you create?
DG: I think there are millions of stories out there dying to be told, and that all you have to do if you want to tell them is become interested in them. If you show even a hint of an attention span, any number of fictional characters will leap forward with tales you honestly will feel like you could not possibly have made up all by yourself.
Now, maybe these are real fictional entities - energies beaming in from another dimension - or maybe they're archetypal or hidden aspects of yourself or the collective unconscious… it doesn't matter. It feels and operates like magic, and should be treated with the same respect. For some writers that involves a lot of rituals and discipline, and for others it involves being able to jump out of bed at four in the morning to write if that's when the story comes to you - that, too, doesn't matter. What does matter is that you learn to trust the process. You can edit the hell out of the story when you're done getting it down, but while you're writing it you are really, as far as I'm concerned, an interpreter, and you have to believe in the story as a sort of entity demanding your attention and trust. I have often fought with characters whom I wanted to take one way in a story while they wanted go another way, and the characters always win. There are structural and thematic elements that need to be attended to for a story to work, and so the aforementioned scenario leaves me with a lot of work to do after the character has marched off on whichever path he or she was determined to head down in the first place (you could call my work a kind of hedge-clipping in that analogy), but that's the craft part of it. And craft can save your ass, no question. Craft ensures that even your worst story is cohesive. But craft without an investment in the more esoteric elements of the process often reads as hollow or flat. You can always tell when a writer has been in genuine communication with the characters about which he or she is writing. And in comics, I think, you can usually even tell when one of the characters "likes" a certain writer. Every time that writer uses that character, there's an extra charge to the work - a harmony between the craft-based objectives of the tale and the thematic undercurrents that most of us are barely conscious of while we're writing.
Stories like to tease you. They like to end up being about something other than what you thought they were about when you started them. And when I say that the characters are more important than the writer, in part I mean that most successful stories have relied, at one point or another of their inception, on the writer being willing to get the hell out of their way.
The remainder of the interview can be found here