Q&A 1: starting stories

N. Forsythe writes:

"When you write a new storyline, does it usually begin in terms of a plot idea or with brainstorming snippets of dialogue/banter or a given situation or scene? I ask because your work does feel so dialogue and comedy driven, but your plots and emotional arcs always seems well thought out."

When I start anything, there has to be a plot element. When I worked on Scary Go Round, I was working week to week in terms of story, so a lot of the stories would start on the page, with a fairly unstructured search for whatever the plot was, then I would find it through necessity and chase it down over the following weeks. There were no rules in terms of how long stories were, so I would go running, looking for the end, until I found it. It was improvisation on a theme. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. The deeper I got into a story, the more notes I would assemble as to its conclusion. 

As I began to work on projects with relatively fixed lengths, or print comics with very defined page lengths, I took my plotting more seriously and began to develop it more rigorously before writing pages, to give what would hopefully be satisfying stories within those limits.

The difference between working on what was a daily strip that is collected, versus a very defined multi-page story, is the expectation of the reader. My earlier work existed in an ambient, spreading state where I could follow any direction I wanted within the comfort zone of the audience. 

When I started to work for print, I encountered responses where that approach confounded reviewers who were not familiar with my earlier work. They couldn't see where the books were going, what point they were making. For 10+ years, the enjoyable ambience was the point - an ambience which relied on the dialogue, the emotional pull between the characters, but no real sense of a destination - any more than Peanuts or Garfield has a destination. 

I consider that ambience my "style" and it is generated through a process completely separate, but often conducted simultaneously to, my plotting. Over the last decade I've had to work out on my own how to balance the techniques that found an audience early on with what would sustain an audience outside webcomics.

I do almost all my early work for a story on paper, where I will jot pre-existing characters, fragments of dialogue, little scrawled dialogue back-and-forths, one-off bon mots, new character ideas and so on. I will also sometimes flow-chart the plot, driven by these drawings. Other times I will draw columns on a piece of paper, headed by the protagonists of a story, and list potential plot points under them, while thinking about ways to join those plot points up in satisfying ways. 

Somehow I know in my head which of these two approaches is correct for the sort of story I'm writing. Often I employ both at different stages. Obviously, one (lists) is more structured than the other (flow charts), which serves a different impulse which may not always be available. 

When I've done all I can on paper, I type up all the plot points and fragments of dialogue in a Word document, then cut and paste them onto a list of page numbers until I'm happy that what I've written is fairly balanced. I tidy up the notes and look for any inconsistencies of location, time, or character status, then use this neat breakdown to write my script.  If the project has an editor, I send the breakdown to them first. If the breakdown is satisfactory, I seldom have to make any significant alteration to the final script after submitting it. 

I would say that I've come to rely on the structure of a plot in my writing, but when it begins to crowd out the space for fun dialogue (which underpins any emotional arc) - and it can, very easily - I've gone out of my comfort zone, and begin to produce something I, personally, might not enjoy.