Yo. Troy here. I have been extremely slack here on… er… SubStack this year. I probably need to create a posting schedule and get some more regular content up. But I don’t think that’s going to work for me. If I am writing to order my creative muse says “fuck this shit, I’m off!” and then she goes off with her side-guy Captain Procrastination for some fun and games without me.
I tried writing a short story, I thought that might be better than simply writing a blog about myself, my process, the projects I’m working on but failing to bring to fruition, etc. Other writers on substack post short stories, I thought. But, after starting to write it, I realised something. I get no joy out of writing prose. I just find the grind of descriptive exposition snooze inducing, and I quickly come to hate what I have written, resent the thing I am failing to create and the entire process of dumping a bunch of words onto the page in a failed attempt to get the images out of my head and convert them into text.
“Well, Troy” I hear you say, “you are not a writer!”
I know, I hear myself saying it too. But listen, I think there is a reason for this. Well, apart form the fact that I have never really enjoyed reading prose fiction either. Walls of text, describing things that I can’t see in my head, let alone on the page fills me with rage. I literally feel it boiling up inside me and then the voice of darkness, my inner demon roars, “GET TO THE FUCKING POINT!” I think all my childhood trauma comes from shitty teachers when I was at junior school. Teachers who shamed me for not learning the times table or for being a slow reader and having terrible handwriting. When I think about that, it kinda makes sense that I rebel against academia. I’m a working class punk more than a school tie and smoking jacket laureate. But maybe that’s okay? My muse is definitely a punk chick with a ring through her nose, and she hates rules!
Getting back to the whole ‘painting pictures with words’ thing and how it irritates me, that never happens with comics. Maybe because I don’t have to waste any time or energy trying to decipher a writer’s verbose descriptive exposition. It’s a dark room, there’s a wooden table in the middle. That’s all I need, I don’t care what the furniture smells like, or how the specs of dust glisten against the moonlight piercing through a crack in the shutters. It’s a room, there’s a table, great! Scene set. Now get on with it! No, in comics the artist does all that for you, you can see everything that right there and you can see it all in a second.
I dunno, maybe I have mild ADHD, or something. But here’s the thing. I write a lot of technical articles for my work and I think that writing a prose story feels like work, not a hobby. If I’m not doing it for fun, I can’t do it, I might as well just write another article about muscle protein synthesis.
I’m also shit at outlining my stories and if you’re writing a ten thousand word short story, you really need to outline it. But if I’ve outlined it I don’t then want to write it, because I’m already bored with it.
Script writing, on the other hand, is a challenge that is both fun and refreshing. It’s different enough from writing a wall of text laden with scientific references to not feel like work. It’s exciting because you anticipate what an artist will do with your words, how they will take what you have written and turn it into something good.
Or, if it’s a screenplay, how will a director turn your scene descriptions into moving pictures? How will the actors realise your characters and their dialogue?
I would love it, if one day I had a story published in 2000ad (I know that’s an unrealistic expectation but it doesn’t hurt to float the intention out into the wooniverse). But my fear then, is what if getting paid to write comic scripts triggers my twitchy and perpetually capricious muse to bugger off to Barbados with her boyfriend?
Procrastination is a complex thing. Or maybe I'm just lazy?
I’m aware that my mind works slightly differently to a lot of people’s, I seem to see things - the world - a little differently to most of my friends. I’m not a highly conscientious person, I do not have an anal retentive attention to detail. I’m not a completionist and do not collect things. I hate spreadsheets! I never even write a shopping list… EVER! Am I broken?
I should make it clear that I am not really taking a huge steaming dump all over the expressive artform of literature. I don’t hate literature, I certainly don’t hate writers who are good at it. I’m probably a little jealous of them. But, my short attention span and direct, to the point, nature just means that I struggle to be seduced by a wall of text that isn't teaching me something real, like science or history. I would take Anthony Beevor over Dickins any day… sorry.
Anyway. As much as this brain dump might sound like a cry for help, I think it’s actually my way of saying; “pull yourself together Troy and just write that fucking story!”
But I also have a pitch for another Commando comic I want to get written and that excites me more, so I guess I should just do that.
Sorry if I have insulted you. I love you really.
Troy