Man, I'm really getting stuck into the full script now, and it's tough. My outline is pretty water-tight, for good or for ill, so I'm not hugely worried about wandering off the beaten track or anything. But as I progress, I'm coming across elements that I suspect have maybe been done in some form before, and that can at times be in danger of bordering on the cliché. I'm second-guessing myself all the time, and I'm not sure if that's a positive or a negative. I certainly respected writers before, but now I'm simply in awe at the ones that can conjure up purely original concepts and ideas, and execute them in a fresh, invigorating way. It seems like pretty much everything has been done in one form or another somewhere along the line. Maybe the trick is to put a fresh twist on any given cliché, to present it in a new and interesting way.
It's true to say that the matinee adventure serials I'm trying to emulate were ridden with such clichés; all the various entanglements and cliffhangers being recycled over and over. The execution was what mattered, whether it got folks on the edges of their seats or merely became predictable and tiresome.
Hmm. I used to assume in a way that simply because it took far longer to draw a comicbook page than write one, that the artist had the harder job. I was wrong. Dead wrong.
5 comments:
99% of writers seem to get around that by not worrying about churning out cliched crap.
ooooh, burn! Sock it to the man, Thompson.
Well you're an artist so it's natural that you'd find it harder to write something good than draw something good. But ask your average comic writer to draw a book and see who ends up with the better all-round product.
If you have a dinosaur in the comic and you introduce it by focusing on a plastic cup of water that begins to ripple... then you're in cliche country!
*runs to scrap last draft of script*
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