Write Club: 11
After my experience pitching for STAR TREK, I had made the decision to shift gears and write something totally different – not TREK, and not something for television.
I dusted off the beginnings of a novel I had begun a couple years before – my attempt at a “raw” style of no-holds-barred writing. As I explained last time, I had wanted to emulate my hero, Stephen King, but as I reviewed the pages I’d written, I realized I failed spectacularly.
But waitaminnit… maybe the best place to tell the tale of Elijah wasn’t a novel, but a comic! I’d wanted to write comics since I was a kid – maybe this was the right idea, finally!
That seemed to be the breakthrough I needed. I did a bit of research on the proper format for a comic book script – and quickly found that there were many different – yet “right” – ways to do it. But having mastered the specific format required for a STAR TREK script, I thought comics must be easy!
Indeed, the format wasn’t hard to adapt to, although I needed a pointer or two. I had e-mailed John Ney Rieber a couple of times, and he was kind enough to offer me some pointers. (Today, John’s the uber-hot writer of Marvel’s Captain America – back then, he was spinning great yarns in DC/Vertigo’s Books of Magic.)
John offered me some pointers on constructing the first scene of my story, where Elijah observes a murder scene (also told in a different structure in the first couple of pages of the HARLOW’S END story in DIGITAL WEBBING PRESENTS #3):
When you're trying to convince an editor that he or she wants your story, you need to hook them right off the bat: you have to draw them in with the first sentence, and keep some real and unremitting tension on the line thereafter, to keep their interest from wriggling away. And here, although you do seem to have scattered a respectable number of hooks throughout the scene, I really don't have the feeling that your hooks are as sharp as you could make them, or baited as enticingly as you could bait them. I intuit that you're doing a lot of setup for revelations later on, which is certainly a worthwhile activity, but you need to say a little more right here and now.
Great advice, and something I always try to keep in mind. John also helped me with the script structure and the tricky nature of word balloons:
Note that editors start to get nervous if they see more than thirty-five words of captioning and dialogue in a panel. That doesn't mean that they won't let you use forty, eventually...but it's a good idea to keep the word count under that, if you can--especially when you're trying to break in, and you want to do everything you can to give the editor in question the impression that you really know what you're doing.
Another thing: rather than run one twenty-nine word caption in a panel, run one nineteen-word one and one ten-word one, or something like that. Split the caption. This is a good way to create tension within a panel. And it also makes it easier for the editor to figure out where on the finished page to place your caption; it's easier to position two medium-sized caption boxes on a piece of art than it is to position one huge one.
Before long, I’d finished the first draft of my script, taking John’s suggestions to heart. Issue one of … gee, what was it gonna be called? I had mentally referred to the novel as “Elijah,” after the main character, but never expected that to be the final title.
While writing the script, I found myself jotting many side notes about the city Elijah inhabited, especially the slum neighborhood in which he actually lived. That was an intriguing place that had many dramatic elements – sex, drugs, disease, religion, magic. Once I decided to name the series after its location, the name HARLOW’S END came to me. I have no idea what inspired it, but it had a certain ring to it. HARLOW’S END it was.
Since Elijah was a hustler, it was evident from the start that this would be a “mature readers” title. I didn’t want to have gratuitous nudity, but since Elijah’s best friend, Lilith, was a stripper, it wouldn’t be odd to see an occasional breast (or two, even). Every other word wouldn’t be a profanity, but Elijah lived on the street – he probably said “fuck” every now and then. And no matter how understatedly I portrayed his profession, he was a prostitute.
Over the next several months, I wrote full scripts for four issues of HARLOW’S END, and plotted a few more. My ideas for the series indeed worked better as a comic than a novel. I loved a lot of standard storytelling conventions in comics – for instance, the cliffhanger – and wanted to take advantage of them. (In my opinion, I think new ideas are great, but I don’t want to reinvent the wheel – I love comics because of the format, not in spite of it.)
I’m sometimes a decent artist, so I decided to visualize some of my characters. It was a lot of fun, and my sketches weren’t half-bad, but something was missing.
Back then, Jim Krueger had just released the first issue of Foot Soldiers, and in the back, he had a unique feature – sketches of his characters that professional artists had done of his characters. I suddenly had one of those moments where you almost say “d’oh!” aloud – why didn’t I get some artists to draw my HARLOW’S END characters?
Next: They’re alive! Alive!