16th Jul 2021, 8:15 AM
Exhaustion and writer’s block (possibly caused by the exhaustion) meant that I took a lot longer to figure out this page than I would have liked.
Making this comic has become kind of a second job for me. After a while, it does tend to get tiring, as I’m sure anyone who makes a webcomic can attest to. I’ve been lucky enough not to have suffered from writer’s block up to this point, and I have to say, WRITER’S BLOCK SUCKS!
I have never written a complete script for Steamroller Man. I came up with a beginning, an ending and then it was just a matter of working out a loose outline of the events and story beats that needed to happen between beginning and end. This way I feel like there’s still room for improvisation and inspiration, to add jokes and to take the story in unexpected directions (case in point: Night Knight and Sleep Tyke were not part of my initial plan for the story, but I feel like they’ve added a lot of humor and interest since they arrived). The part that sometimes trips me up is the connective story tissue - the stuff that gets me from scene to scene. “I know they have to end up in the building, but how do they get in? Why would they choose that way in?”
Having gotten over the hump, these questions seem trivial in hindsight, but I guess that’s always how hindsight works!
What finally got me past the block was attending a Zoom seminar on comic writing given by Mark Waid! During his decades-long career, Mark Waid has written almost every superhero you’ve ever heard of, and he had some great advice that really helped! He said that writer’s block was your subconscious telling you that you were trying to force the story in a direction that you didn’t really want it to go in. The best way he had learned to get past it was to go back to the last point in the story that you felt the story was really flowing, and then “take a left turn”. Come up with something out-of-the-box, unexpected. It may not be the exact right direction, but the act of doing this will usually be enough to get the creative juices flowing again. It definitely worked for me, and you see the results on this page!
We’re rapidly approaching the end of this chapter - just two more pages left after this one! I have those pages already thumbnailed out, so hopefully there won’t be further delays. Fingers crossed, I’ll see you in two weeks!
Thanks for reading!
Follow me:
Deviant Art