I'm always interested in writers of all kinds of genres. Vice magazine featured an interview with Charles Burns, the writer and artist who creates creepy comic books like "Big Baby," "Black Hole," and his latest, "Xed Out." The article says, "This time, Burns’s own rememberings of his time as a punk rocker/pretentious art-school kid alternate with a surreal complementary story line in which a Tintin-ish character wanders through a Burroughs-esque city of monsters, intrigue, and paranoia."
He said he starts with a rough outline, but sometimes things don't go according to plan: "And, you know, there were a couple of false starts there. I was initially doing this black-and-white story, and it was rendered in a very similar way to Black Hole and I was just not happy. I was looking at this work like, “This is awful.” Anytime you have that feeling, it means you should tear up those pages and start again. So there were two or three false starts before I really wanted to have some way of pushing myself into unknown territory. One of the things that was helpful was taking on a color book, with two major plot threads—one that takes place in this more cartoony Tintin sort of world, and then another thread that’s much more typical of the world that I look at."
Confession: that willingness to dump what's been done and start over is something I've resisted probably due to laziness but I'm working on it! Hmm, maybe I should rewrite this post totally...naah.
(If you want support for your writing, check out my Writing Breakthrough Strategy program--full details at www.jurgenwolff.com)
