The Written Word!

Hello again, Meat-Heads!

It seems Eric here is writing me a nasty letter because it's been so long since I've posted, and I can't say I blame him!

So at this point in the chronicling of how Dead Meat has been shaping up, I've talked about over-thinking lots of things, lots of elements, and how this can get in your way when trying to get things on paper. Well, when it came to actually getting things on paper, i.e. writing my story, I didn't so much over-think it as much as have a ton of false starts. I've talked previously about how story elements changed, plots changed, characters changed, tone changed, etc, and I think it was this state of flux that prevented me from writing anything substantial up until the most recent incarnation of the story. To date, I think I've actually written and re-written what would become the first issue.....maybe 5 or 6 times over the past 10 years. Now I don't think that this is a bad thing, as if it wasn't for all those previous drafts I had done, I wouldn't have gotten to the stage I am now. I think, much like the evolution of art style, all the hacking away I did showed me what worked, what didn't, what I liked, and what needed to go.

I knew from the get go that I didn't want to do an outbreak story. As I said before, the very first incarnation of the story featured my characters as an extermination-type group, much like Ghostbusters. While this idea was sort of fun, I didn't get very far, and I felt like it wasn't very relatable. The next version was completely different, and focused on a young girl named Ashley and her brother Georgie, and was set up like a Wizard of Oz-type story where Ashley and Georgie were thrust into this horror-filled world after Ashley woke up from a coma. The idea here was to have the girl and her brother stand in for the reader who is thrust into a crazy, incredible situation. This concept felt a lot better, because I really liked the idea of having this group of extra-ordinary characters who are just larger than life compared to Ashley and Georgie who interact with them. However, I wrote myself into a corner because I realized that I had so much fun writing writing my characters that I kept trying to find a way to get rid of or ignore Ashley and Georgie, so I could focus on my guys.

This, along with the sheer number of characters I wanted to play with, led me to structure it in a new way, which is how it currently exists. Instead of dumping Ashley and Georgie, I broke the structure into multiple stories that would then criss-cross at certain points. This allowed me to introduce a lot of characters, and in the future would allow me to jump around with who I focus on without feeling like I'm flat out neglecting others.

I think this change in structure and approach has been really beneficial to the project as a whole, because once I determined a structure that felt good and somewhat natural, it really allowed the stories I wanted to tell to start flowing out easier. So at the end of the day, it's one thing to be over-obsessive about perfection, but it's another thing to know when something's not working, and to find a new way to approach. I think being able to recognize when something's not working, and being open to re-working it, is a really important attribute to develop as you develop your writing.

Until next time,

Eat Dead Meat!