The writer in the script describes what the beat is. The artist interprets that to illustrate such in the language of panel-by-panel storytelling. How much or how little should the writer describe? Take the sequence below from The Be-Bop Barbarians, the graphic novel Dale and I produced about jazz, the Red Scare, and three cartoonist characters who will find themselves at odds with one another. One of our main characters, Ollie Jefferson, wakes from a nightmare, a harrowing replay of an incident from his soldier days in the Korean War. Written originally to be one page, it became two.
PAGE EIGHT OF BE-BOP BARBARIANS
Panel One
Medium down-angle shot as Ollie Jefferson comes awake and is sitting up in his bed after reliving this episode from the war. He is in boxers and T-shirt, his sheet and blankets a jumble around his legs. He rubs a hand to his face. The lighting is blue and somber in his bedroom.
OLLIE: OH, MAN.
Panel Two
Close-on shot of his bare feet now on the side of the bed. There’s a folded-over copy of the Communist Party’s tabloid-style newspaper The Daily Worker on the floor.
Panel Three
Medium shot as Ollie, now in his robe tied at the waist, sits at his drawing board. He clicks on the swing lamp attached to his board.
SFX: CLICK
Panel Four
Now our POV is over his shoulder. He holds a pencil and on the drawing board is a sheet of paper with a very rough drawing of two cops using their nightsticks on a man on the ground. Ollie is reaching out with his other hand, clicking on the radio on a stand near the table.
VOICE OVER RADIO:… THE REVEREND WILMORE HICKS HAS CALLED ON POLICE COMMISSIONER KENNEDY TO ATTEND A COMMUNITY MEETING IN HARLEM TO ADDRESS POLICE AND NEGRO RELATIONS.
Panel Five
Reversed angle, closer in as Ollie fleshes out his pencils, though we can’t see the page now.
VOICE OVER RADIO (off panel): AND IN OTHER NEWS, PRESIDENT EISENHOWER HAS ANNOUNCED A TWO-YEAR BAN ON NUCLEAR TESTING.
Here’s the result:
Now, you’ll note the section with the announcer coming over the radio is absent from that former page, as is Ollie clicking on his light over his drawing table—and no robe. All of this is now picked up in the latter page. Dale felt the first part would work better if the initial sequence was silent. He was right. The combined pages worked so much better in establishing Ollie’s mood after his harrowing dream. The published graphic novel is in color; a full pallet of hues playing its part in telling the story. The coloring I’d indicated for the first panel was laid in by our colorist J. Brown, which further relayed to the reader Ollie’s state of mind.
DALE:
As you can see, the artist’s job is to be interpretive—in a sense, to retell the story using pictures. So when working from an author’s script, an artist has roughly two choices: interpret from a less specific, more generalized script (sometimes just an outline), or follow a highly detailed script to the letter. For the artist, both approaches bring certain challenges and rewards.
Working from a generalized script or outline, the artist has to fill in more of the blanks. This means not only designing all the scenery, the characters, the wardrobe, and the hairstyles, but also drawing everything the writer hasn’t mentioned, while including everything they have. Not every written sentence needs to reiterate that a gentle snow is falling around the characters, but every panel of art will need to reflect it.
This sometimes dictates having to break down a script’s otherwise perfect one-sentence description of a moment into several pictures in order to clearly express everything called for. Panels are added and subtracted. Beats are shifted. This can subtly change the rhythm of the story, and it’s the responsibility of the artist to keep track of that rhythm when deviations occur. The artist is not just illustrating the script but storyboarding it, like a film.
The advantage of this approach is that it can create more impact for the reader and more successfully heighten the story’s drama.
The disadvantage is that it can take longer to create. (Note to artists: don’t go off-road if you don’t know how to get back.)
On the other hand, say an author has written a highly detailed script, describing every element on the page in depth. Every beat, down to the lighting and “camera angles.” The artist can then simply follow along and draw what’s asked for.
This approach makes the overall production process fast, and for marketing and budgetary reasons can be especially successful for producing on a tight deadline. However, it can sometimes create an uninspired final product and a flat visual interpretation of the story. The end result can be a perfectly good product, but not great. And for some writers, this approach can hamper their voice, forcing them to slow down their own process by adding too much description.
So how much detail does a writer need to inject to give the artist enough information to work with?
My own rule of thumb is that it’s always easier to write “Ten thousand horsemen came over the hill” than it is to draw it. So when scripting, I think writers should always describe as much as they envision, but leave some room for expansion/contraction by the artist. A good writer will leave just enough information to trigger the artist’s imagination. (This is where working with such an experienced author as Gary is a bonus.)
The artist, for their part, must always do due diligence, making sure to lay out the story as accurately and emotionally “real” as possible, remaining true to the script or source material and evoking the right mood as needed. Research is essential to make sure every image and sequence looks and feels right.
(And as a side note to writers: Try to find the right artist for you. Plenty of people draw well, but not everyone will be able to express the mood or style your story requires.)
In the end, success depends on how simpatico the writer and the artist are with the material and with each other. This concept goes even further when you add the equally major contributions of a letterer or colorist. Every choice they make adds an important layer of interpretation and expression to the work.
This means there will always be give-and-take during the production process. Rewrites will occur, and pages will have to be redrawn, regardless. But the more the artist and writer are in sync with the “feel” of the material, the more dimension the story will have, the more the reader will get out of it, and the more effective a graphic novel it will be.
This inherently collaborative nature of the medium is what makes such a simple printed format become more than just an expression of the writer’s voice or the artist’s eye. The final result is a grand, entertaining synthesis of everyone’s contribution (up to and including the reader). In this way, the modern graphic novel becomes one of those wonderful media where the more love you put into it, the more love you’ll generate.
Plus, it’s just a great way to tell stories.
DAG ÖHRLUND
When I teach writing classes and students tell me how difficult it is for them to write, I always stress the few things I feel are basic and necessary for successful writing: You must have a really good, preferably unique story. You must feel a burning desire to tell it, feel—actually—that few things are more important than doing just that. You must have fun, feel joy, while you are doing it. You must create interesting characters. You should write the kind of story that you, yourself, want to read. If you are into crime, skip the feel-good stuff.
The Short Mystery
What do the characters (and readers) want in your mystery short story?
ART TAYLOR
What ingredients add up to excellence in short fiction within the mystery genre?
Reading the Edgar Award winners for Best Short Story might seem a good step toward discovering the “secret recipe” to success in this form. But even from the beginning, the range of stories on that list—diverse in genre, structure, and style—defied categorization. Before 1955, this award honored authors and full collections rather than individual stories, and Lawrenc
e Blochman’s Diagnosis: Homicide, the first book to win the honor, featured realistic, clue-driven mysteries, leaning heavily on the forensic training and scientific knowledge of pathologist-cum-detective Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee. The second book to win, John Collier’s Fancies and Goodnights, couldn’t have been more different, with stories that were determinedly surreal, absurdist, fabulist—four-hundred-plus pages and not a single traditional detective story in the batch.
For the balance of the 1950s and into the 1960s, the short-story Edgars spanned a similar variety: the realistic and the fantastic in alternating years, for example, or a plot-driven tale succeeded by a more deliberately paced character study. Even leaping forward to our latest decade, Doug Allyn’s more traditional historical mystery “The Scent of Lilacs” stands in stark contrast to Gillian Flynn’s half-gothic, half-noir “What Do You Do?”—and while both John Connolly’s “The Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository” and John Crowley’s “Spring Break” boast supernatural elements that might once have been considered unwelcome in the genre, even these two couldn’t be more different in style or tone.
In short, analyzing more than six decades of award winners, I’d be hard-pressed to find one single solid model for how to write a short story. In fact, the only thing truly holding these tales together is their more limited word count—and what can you do with that common (and obvious) denominator?
Well, perhaps a bit, as it turns out.
* * *
For extra perspective on that point, we might need to go further back in Edgar history to… Edgar himself.
Poe believed that the short story was the pinnacle of prose compositions—the one that “should best fulfill the demands of high genius”—in part directly related to the form’s brevity. Short stories, according to Poe, should be capable of being read in a single sitting, with “unity of effect” being both a goal and a challenge:
If [the author’s] very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.
No word written that doesn’t serve the story’s design? I imagine that strikes you, as it does me, as an unattainable ideal. However, if brevity is the defining characteristic of the short story and unity of effect the goal, then perhaps some of the qualities behind that sentiment—economy, efficiency, and unrelenting focus—should stand as guiding principles, whatever the subgenre or style of a mystery short story, and always with an eye toward entertaining the reader in the process.
Already anticipating that need for economy, efficiency, and focus, aspiring writers often circle back to several core questions in seminars or postpanel Q&A sessions: How many characters can you have in a short story? How quickly should the story get into the action? Can short stories have subplots? How important is a surprise ending, and how do you write one?
Rather than simple answers, some of these questions might depend on the story a writer is trying to tell. A woman unhappy with her husband and contemplating (or even carrying out) murder? That story can be told with two characters. Make it a love triangle, with jealousy leading to murder, and then you’d need three. How many for a clue-driven story? One victim, one detective, and three suspects might be just enough.
One piece of writing advice I think about regularly may help provide context to this question of characters as well as the ones on story beginnings and subplots. In her own quirky but insightful how-to book, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, Patricia Highsmith talks about establishing lines of action or of potential action in the openings of stories and novels. What do characters want that they don’t have? (That’s one line of action a story might follow.) What conflicts or dangers do they face? Where do they connect with other characters or disconnect from them? Making sure that all characters have some role to play in those various lines of action will help determine whether each is integral to the overall design—or perhaps whether there are too many plotlines, or subplot-lines, to navigate successfully.
This idea of lines of action also offers perspective on a story opening. While conventional wisdom might advise writers, “Start your story in the middle of the action!” what does that mean? Not every story should begin with either a detective standing over a dead body or a killer running away from one. Instead, what conflicts will the story’s characters navigate ahead, and how can you introduce some hint of those conflicts early and efficiently—laying down the lines of action that you’ll then pluck and tighten consistently and with increasing intensity, to their breaking point or even beyond?
One of Highsmith’s own stories, “The Terrapin” (a finalist for the 1963 short story Edgar), starts with a simple opening of doors, but everything that follows—emotional abuse, psychological turmoil, terrible violence—is presaged in that short opening paragraph:
Victor heard the elevator door open, his mother’s quick footsteps in the hall, and he flipped his book shut. He shoved it under the sofa pillow out of sight, and winced as he heard it slip between sofa and wall and fall to the floor with a thud. Her key was in the lock.
Lines of action might well be found crisscrossing a corpse, but they could as easily, as strongly, be established as internal anxieties or even at the level of the prose itself. Literally nothing happens in one of Poe’s own most famous opening lines—“True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”—and yet it’s always struck me as gripping: the tone and the backward syntax, that question swung solidly at the reader, that disconcerting mix of exclamation points and em dashes… and the hints of insanity, too, of course.
After an opening that sets conflicts in motion, the prose throughout the story should be guided by economy, efficiency, and focus. Can a short story support lengthy descriptions, digressions, diversions? More on that in a moment, but in general, it’s a solid rule to try to do more with less—and to trust your reader to fill in the rest. Suggest instead of describe; imply instead of explain. Rather than a long portrait of place, for example, highlight some telling specifics or emphasize a character’s relationship to the setting.
This was the old house at Nyack, the same living room, the same Utrillo on the wall, the same chandelier glittering over his head. The same everything, he thought bitterly, even to the faces around him.I
Rather than an exhaustive inventory of character, frontload a key point or a distinctive bit of backstory.
I didn’t stop giving hand jobs because I wasn’t good at it. I stopped giving hand jobs because I was the best at it.II
And don’t forget that voice distinguishes character, too—especially if established early and strong.
Here’s the thing—I never took drugs in my life. Yeah, okay, I was the champion of my share of keggers. Me and The Pope. We were like, “Bring on the Corona and the Jäger!” Who wasn’t? But I never even smoked the chronic, much less used the hard stuff. Until I met Pope’s little sister. And when I met her, she was the drug, and I took her and I took her, and when I took her, I didn’t care about anything. All the blood and the bullets in the world could not penetrate that high.III
Wherever possible, let each sentence serve several purposes: a bit of dialogue, for example, that might reveal character (the character speaking, or spoken about, or listening, or all three) and push plot forward in one fell swoop.
“If I’d told him once, I’d told him fifty times never to talk to strangers or get into cars. But boys will be boys and he forgot all that when the time came. He was given sweets, of course, and lured into this car.” Whispers at this point, meaningful glances in his direction. “Threats and suggestions—persuaded into goodness knows what—I’ll never know how we got him back alive.”IV
And for
clue-driven mysteries, if you’re able to slip evidence into the predicate of the sentence or tuck it into a prepositional phrase—subordinating it, hiding it in plain sight—well, that’s economical, efficient, and focused, too.
My father shook his head at me. “I don’t like to hear ugly gossip coming out of your mouth, all right, Buddy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“She didn’t kill Hugh Doyle.”
“Yes, sir.”
His frown scared me; it was so rare. I stepped closer and took his hand, took his stand against the rest. I had no loyalty to that woman Papa thought so beautiful. I just could never bear to be cut loose from the safety of his good opinion.V
Transcribing those previous lines, I recognize that they provide no clear example to follow—not if you haven’t read the entire story. But there’s a key clue there—first scene of the story, and it’s right there. And the necessity of reading the entire story proves this excerpt’s success, too, since this passage lays the groundwork for the twists that follow, right up to the ending—a fine example of Poe’s challenge that there should be “no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.”
Which brings me to a couple of thoughts about endings.
Specific endings are notoriously difficult to analyze without (a) layers of spoiler alerts or (b) summarizing the entire story to explain how the ending earns its success. However, even generalities might help here, since some ending must be reached, for better or worse. A detective must unmask the killer and restore justice—or the killer must escape that justice. The jealous husband must kill the wayward wife—or be killed by her—or maybe by her lover—and husband or wife or lover must be caught or not caught or else the wife needs to turn on her lover, too, and.… In whatever direction events turn, a story needs to be complete—somehow.
How to Write a Mystery Page 11