{"id":437,"date":"2015-08-07T23:30:17","date_gmt":"2015-08-08T03:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/?p=437"},"modified":"2015-08-07T11:02:53","modified_gmt":"2015-08-07T15:02:53","slug":"story-construction-part-6-even-more-moore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aboutcomics.blogwyrm.com\/?p=437","title":{"rendered":"Story Construction \u2013 Part 6: Even More Moore"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week\u2019s column reviewed the first half of the book Alan Moore\u2019s Writing for Comics<\/em> covering the general thought process of the writer, the type of structures the creator might think about using, and the pacing of the events in the structure. This week will finish the review by discussing world building and plot and dialog.<\/p>\n

As discussed earlier, since Moore\u2019s work deals with the planning and writing components, he doesn\u2019t dwell at all on specific visuals (perspective, color, etc.).\u00a0 The book, which is 47 pages in length, has 22 panels, each isolated from the others in both location and in content.\u00a0 Clearly this is not a tome on drawing, nor does it concern itself with the visual composition.\u00a0 Its focus is on story-telling plain and simple.<\/p>\n

World Building \u2013 Locale and Character<\/h2>\n

Under the broad heading of world building, Moore lumps both the development of the characters and the construction of the inanimate locales in which they live. For him, the back stories of the environment in which the characters live are on the same ground as the back story for each character.\u00a0 The locales history is important to building a believable and consistent world, even if the bulk of it is invisible to the reader. To quote<\/p>\n

\nBefore writing V<\/em> [for Vendetta], for example, I came up with a mass of information about the world and the people in it, much of which will never be revealed within the strip for the simple reason that it isn\u2019t stuff that\u2019s essential for the readers to know and there probably won\u2019t be space to fit it all in.<\/p>\n
Alan Moore<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

This approach, which I rather like, shows roots in the gothic literature that has come before wherein the location of the events narrated is often a character in its own right.\u00a0 Consider that the first \u2018entity\u2019 that the reader encounters in Poe\u2019s The Fall of the House of Usher is the melancholy house of the same name and that much of the text is devoted to discussing the bleak and depressing nature of the setting and the feelings that it provokes.\u00a0 The house and the \u2018gray tarn\u2019 that surrounds it are just as important (or perhaps more) as the human characters of the story \u2013 the narrator and the two Usher siblings.<\/p>\n

Moore also advocates for a complete understanding, on the part of the writer, or the rules of the world that is being constructed.\u00a0 This is the concept of verisimilitude, where the fabric of the world being discussed is complete and self-consistent.\u00a0 Characters react in a well understood way to the rules of the particular environment in which they find themselves, just as we would react consistent (although not necessarily rationally) to the rules of ours. Moore states<\/p>\n

\nWhat is important is that the writer should have a clear picture of the imagined world in all its detail.<\/p>\n
Alan Moore<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

But he also cautions the creator in being too explicit in the exposition of this world.\u00a0 If the verisimilitude is the skeleton, Moore would advocate that none of the hard bones be obvious.\u00a0 All of them should be wrapped in soft flesh that hides the structure underneath.\u00a0 He cites the work of Howard Chaykin in American Flagg, where the reader is exposed to the political realities and popular attitudes though bits of advertising and media coverage of the events in that world.<\/p>\n

Once the locales are built, the next piece is characterization.\u00a0 Moore calls this piece highly problematical.<\/p>\n

He analyzes the evolution of character in the comics medium from its inception until the time of his writing.\u00a0 The earliest approach involved portraying a character in a \u2018one-dimensional\u2019 fashion \u2013 the character is good or bad; a hero or a villain.\u00a0 Although Moore doesn\u2019t mention it, this type of portrayal means that the vast number of characters in the world, which were neither good nor bad, per se, were actually part of the scenery.\u00a0 They were the organic piece of the locale that the creator provided \u2013 the good natured cop on the beat who offered a piece of advice at the right time.<\/p>\n

As time progressed, Moore claims that characterization became more developed and he cites Stan Lee as the person most responsible.\u00a0 He says<\/p>\n

\nThus Stan Lee invented two-dimensional characterization: \u201cThis person is good but has bad luck with girlfriends,\u201d and \u201cThis person is bad but might just reform and join the Avengers if enough readers write in asking for it.<\/p>\n
Alan Moore<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Despite this evolution, Moore believes progress since that point has been minimal. He blames this lack of progress on the industry reliance on the 15-word skeleton.\u00a0 If a character can\u2019t be summarized in 15 words then it is no good.\u00a0 He throws out the example of Captain Ahab from Moby Dick<\/em> as an \u2018insane amputee with a grudge against a whale\u2019 but notes that Melville spent more than 15 words delving into Ahab\u2019s psychology.<\/p>\n

Moore advocates that the writer should start by looking at real world people.\u00a0 Perhaps this was good advice back in the nineties when this piece was first written but in the intervening years real life has rapidly accelerated its imitation of art and I am not quite sure that people today allow themselves to be complex.<\/p>\n

He also recommends a \u2018method-acting\u2019 approach to writing characters.\u00a0 He claims that he imagines himself as the character and then tries to understand how he would react in a given situation.\u00a0 The particular example he includes involves his use of the character Etrigan the Demon in Swamp Thing.\u00a0 As\u00a0 a denizen of hell (or what passes for it), Moore imagines Etrigan as having a densely built body, needed to survive the rigors of such a place, and so he frames the pacing of the demon\u2019s movement appropriately.<\/p>\n

He finishes with a personal conclusion that almost everybody has a practically infinite number of facets to their personality but that each of us chooses to focus only one a few at a time.\u00a0 He urges creators to tap into the well spring and to become adventurous in their characterizations.<\/p>\n

Plot and Dialog<\/h2>\n

The final ingredient is the plot and the accompanying dialog.\u00a0 Despite Moore claiming that<\/p>\n

\nI suppose we might as well think about coming up with a plot although\u2026 if you\u2019ve read much of my work I very often can\u2019t be bothered with this formality.<\/p>\n
Alan Moore<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

his chapter on plot and script is by far the largest in his book.\u00a0 He begins by criticizing the \u2018disproportionate amount of effort \u2026 expended on coming up with madly elaborate plots involving dozens of characters\u2019 he does end up conceding that there are some stories where the plot is the central idea. He cites murder mysteries as the primary genre where this idea holds.<\/p>\n

Only after this long introduction does he actually define what he means by plot.\u00a0 Roughly speaking, if the world is the \u2018who\u2019, \u2018what\u2019, and \u2018where\u2019 then the plot is the \u2018when\u2019 \u2013 the time sequence of events that get the world from its initial state to its final state; along the way telling the story that needs to be told.\u00a0 (Note that the \u2018why\u2019 and the \u2018how\u2019 seem to be a complex interplay between the world and the time).<\/p>\n

For Moore, the creator has an idea he wishes to communicate and the plot underlines and reveals this idea in an interesting way.<\/p>\n

Since the plot must fit within a given page length constraint, the plotting mechanism is inextricably linked with the discussions of pacing, rhythm, and flow that he covered earlier. He also emphasizes that the plot can always be done in an \u2018interesting way\u2019 simply by the style in which the plot follows.\u00a0 He asserts that a good writer can make even a mundane topic interesting with the correctly constructed sentences.\u00a0 This is, of course, a habit that the British school of thought believes and practices on a regular basis even outside the domain of comics.\u00a0 Consider Douglas Adams opening sentence in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul<\/p>\n

\nIt can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “as pretty as an airport”.<\/p>\n
Douglas Adams<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Concerning dialog, Moore\u2019s fundamental advice is to speak the dialog out loud.\u00a0 This litmus test will determine if the dialog is natural enough to be digested by the reader.\u00a0 In his assessment, the majority of comics dialog fails this test.<\/p>\n

Finally Moore discusses the visual look-and-feel.\u00a0 For him, the visual narrative is simply what goes into the pictures but that it is vital that the writer think visually and try to take advantage of all the possible ways to convey the point.\u00a0 He further urges that the writer try to create rough thumb nail sketches of the pages before writing the story.<\/p>\n

Next week will be the final installment on Alan Moore in which various stories from his successful run on Swamp Thing<\/em> are presented and a comparison between his practice and his theoretical structure, as presented over these last two columns, is made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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