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20.51: Howard Tayler’s Personal Writing Process · Writing Excuses

• 0:00
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• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Season 20, episode 51, this is writing excuses.
• 1:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: How are its personal writing process?
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Mary Ravanaett.
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm Dillon.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'm Dan.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'm Erie.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I get to drop the word magnum opus when I talk about Schlock mercenary.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: Because I made it for my name's Howard.
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: I made it for 20 years.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: I made it for 20 years and for that whole time,
• 1:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: I wrote comics the same way, and this process is one which, no lie, every time I've described this to another cartoonist or another comics person, they've looked at me and then taken a couple of steps back in case whatever that thing I have is contagious because it was just so weird.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: right in Microsoft Word, except I was writing in landscape mode instead of portrait mode.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I had pre-laid each document with four big text boxes that were empty that were just panels.
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I could grab the corners of them and resize them as need be.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then I had some other little text boxes with the various comic fonts that I was using in them.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I would drag a text
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: in that voice.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: And when it was done, I would grab another text box or I would duplicate the first one and do another line of dialogue.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: And the whole time I'm doing this, I am imagining the faces and the poses and the backgrounds and whatever of what goes in the panels.
• 3:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so it was a very visually
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: visually oriented approach to creating a comic strip to creating a script.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: You know, I had to have the pictures in my head and I had to have a place on the page where I could imagine them being.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: The place for the process gets weird is that the output of this was an
• 3:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: that had the panels, the size they were going to be, that had the font and the text the way it was going to be.
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I just penciled an inked right on that and drew dialogue bubbles around it and then scanned it and sent it off to the colorist.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, you are crazy.
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
• 3:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't do colors and that sounds like matter.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was an art major in college and that is Waccadou.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: It is, it is Waccadou do.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's, it is, and the the biggest problem with it,
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's one of those things where you think I will never need this, I will never need to have my work translated for other other languages or anything like that.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: Now, the art and the text and the dialogue bubbles are all in the same layer.
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's no translating.
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: If translation won't fit in the bubble I drew, well, it won't fit.
• 4:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: I was fast.
• 4:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: I could script a week of comics in one sitting.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: I could pencil a week of comics in like 90 minutes.
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: What?
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: Just plowing through the pencils really fast.
• 4:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then I got to do the part that I loved.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: which was turning on some relaxing music and setting the pencils in front of me and inking.
• 5:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: Was it Kevin Smith?
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: Was it clerks where somebody talks about, you know, anchors are just tracing all ink and outline around your corpse, whatever.
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: Inking is so relaxing.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: And it's the point at what my pencils are loose and terrible.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: But it's the point of which I look at what I've put on the page
• 5:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: and make the final decision about which lines are good.
• 5:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: And my whole process centered around these three stages in which one I'm really thinking about the story and really picturing what has to happen.
• 5:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then I'm doing this composition with pencil and trying to figure out how these pictures work.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then three, I'm relaxing and finishing it.
• 5:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: And inking for me was the reward.
• 5:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: And yeah, that process was weird, but I did it for 20 years, every last Schlock mercenary original is print, it laser-printed with hand ink on it.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that I'm going to say that I've also heard you talk about is that even though your process stayed the same, your craftsmanship got significantly better over the course of that.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I have seen season one of Schluck and your art is present.
• 6:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The way I described it for science fiction.
• 6:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: The way I described it for science fiction fans is the only way for my early artwork to suck any harder is for us to raise the ambient atmospheric pressure.
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have had this conversation and it's not like it is doing the job that you needed it to do.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what happens with your later art is that it is, it's not just doing the job that it's supposed to do, it is elevating the story at the same time.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: I learned a lot over the over the 20 years and what's fascinating to me,
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: from where I'm sitting right now is that for everything I learned about telling a story more effectively, about writing dialogue that more closely fits the voice of a character now that I understand them, you know, about composing panels so that the eye is drawn, where the eye needs
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: They fit within the original process.
• 7:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: The original process did not change.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: All that changed was the content that I was putting into it.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I wanted to ask if you ever thought about changing that process.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or I guess a better question is you clearly didn't change that process as you became a better artist as you became a better writer what was it about that specific part of the process that you felt like nope this I really want to keep it the way it actually want to back up on second it is let's start with how did you develop this process right I mean was this completely sweet generous that you just sat down day one to do should lock and that's how you did it or.
• 8:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: There was a page online, no longer available.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: It was Bill, a man of Fox Drop, talking about how he created comics, and he would lay out the panels first, and then he had ruler lines, and then he would handwrite where the dialogue went, and then he would draw the characters.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I tried that before I was actually creating the strip.
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: I tried handwriting, and because I am not a trained artist,
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: uh... i was holding the instrument wrong uh... i developed hand pain almost immediately and i realized if i have to hand right the story i want to tell i'm not gonna tell it i got to find another way to do this uh... what if i write the text on the computer uh... well how do i feed this page where i've drawn the oh wait i can have the computer draw the panels
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: And that aha, I basically took Bill immense process and thought, well, I can just do all that early stuff on the computer and then draw the pictures.
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: But to dance question several times, I consider changing it.
• 9:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I, you know, I flirted briefly with I'm going to put the dialogue in later or I'm going to prelay the dialogue on a template version up here above me and then draw on all blank panels and then lay so that I know where the dialogue is going to fit.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: And every time I did that, I had panic attacks about this is going to make me less productive.
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's going to be a learning curve and my paycheck now depends on me putting out a comic.
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: Me putting up a comic once a day.
• 9:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: I could make you can exchange horses mid straight.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: I can with that process, I think my record was three and a half weeks of comics created in one week.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: Um, but I needed to be able to do that because sometimes and people get sick people need to take a week off.
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: Um, I at one point, I had a 70 day buffer and then I went and drew a deck of, uh,
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: Uh, they'll kind of prove.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, yeah.
• 10:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I mean, I was away from home between the crews and the world con and Jenny con, I was away from home for a month and didn't make any comics during that time because my process allowed me to work far enough head that I could do that.
• 10:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: There were also times down where I looked at upgrading my croissant word and realized, oh, wait, wait, wait.
• 11:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: If they break the text box feature, I'm a dead man.
• 11:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: So I'm going to go over to this other computer and install the new Microsoft Word and see if it'll do what I want it to do.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I reached a point where the new version of Microsoft Word no longer did things the way I needed to do them.
• 11:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: It started rounding the corners of the text boxes and I couldn't find a way to fix that.
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so,
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: My work computer was then locked to that version of Microsoft Word.
• 11:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Something that I want to flag because I think it's useful for the listeners and then we'll go to break is that the way you started was that you saw someone else's process.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: and you adapted it for your needs and you jettisoned the pieces that didn't work.
• 11:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is, I think, a really good metaphor for the things that we're talking about for our listeners is like, we're describing our process for you.
• 11:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: You hear another writer describing their process.
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not the process that makes them, it's the way the process works with your brain, that interface, and jettisoning all the parts that don't work for you.
• 12:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: including parts of your own process if you are afraid of upgrading if that's going to get in your way.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to move up.
• 12:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I knew people who are still writing on word pro or things that don't exist that still need floppy disks.
• 12:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: into the early 2000s, Spider Robinson was writing on a Mac classic in word perfect for Mac and Tosh, and it was on a computer that couldn't connect to the internet.
• 12:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so point of all of this is as we've been talking, make sure that you are thinking about the pieces that you're like, oh, that sounds fun and interesting.
• 13:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now we should probably take a little break.
• 13:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, we're going to go for a break.
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: And when we come back, I'm going to talk about my new process and mention spiders.
• 13:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: I have a new process, but first I'm going to tell you about spiders.
• 13:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: You know how when you chase a spider around with a broom, he's like really, really fast.
• 13:22
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is assuming you're the sort of person who will chase a spider and just leave it alone.
• 13:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: They're really, really fast until all of a sudden they're just not.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's because spiders don't have circulatory systems.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: They have soup.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: And once their muscles have run out of fuel, they have to wait for Brownian motion and Osmosis to recharge.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I have, thanks to Long COVID, chronic fatigue and post-exertion malaise.
• 13:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: which means that when I run out of fuel in my muscles, it takes me forever to recharge.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: I am like a spider, and so my new process is built around me banking as much energy as possible in case the universe comes after me with a broom, and I need to move quickly.
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: Because I can move quickly, it's just that I will move quickly, and then I'm done.
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: Since 2021, when we recognized that I had, I now had a disability.
• 14:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: We actually had to acknowledge, yep, Howard now has a disability.
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: I have been rebuilding everything.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: my whole life.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: You know, I have a techno cane that is essentially a walking stick with a little mini arm and a magnet on it that will hold my phone because once I taught my stick, how to carry my phone, my phone would teach me to always carry my stick.
• 14:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: And that sort of mind set,
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: At every turn, I would rebuild pieces of my life in order to be able to get worked on.
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: And what I have found lately is that writing actually takes way more energy than I thought it did.
• 15:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: I sat down to write, I'm trying to remember what it was.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, it was a I was I was going to give a talk and give a talk in church.
• 15:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I sat down to write it.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: And as I started writing the monitor I wear for my heart rate, uh, started sending me alerts saying you've been in your over exertion zone for two minutes for four minutes for eight minutes for 24 minutes on my
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: What is happening?
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'm in a zero gravity recliner with the keyboard and my lap, just using my brain and my finger tips to make the words Why is my heart doing this thing?
• 15:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: An answer is I don't know.
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: I don't need to know.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: I just need to know that it happens and I need to be aware of the fact that after this writing session I'm going to need help feeding myself
• 16:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so my new process is a lot like, yeah, a lot like the old process except I'm not using Microsoft Word and, you know, drawing squares in it.
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: I sit down at the computer to write, but I have to bank my writing time against all of my other activities because it comes with a cost.
• 16:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So now that you are done with Shalak, I am interested in order to continue this discussion to know what kinds of things you're working on.
• 16:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Are we still talking about cartooning?
• 16:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Are you moving more into prose?
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: What is this a process for?
• 16:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: That is a question that I wish I had a definitive answer for two and a half years ago.
• 17:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: Because the definitive answer I have today is I wish I had a definitive answer two and a half years ago The current thing I am working on is a bonus story for Schluck mercenary and
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: I will have made mention of this.
• 17:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe I did make mention of this, talking about the the process of needing to pull up the panel borders and needing to pull up the script and needing to do the pencils and move back and forth between those stages.
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: in order to know exactly where the words go.
• 17:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: And some of that is probably an outgrowth of the original process, which had the words, you know, right on the pages.
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: I have gotten much, much better at comics in that I can look at a page.
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: I can write to the page turn.
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: I can write to the crease.
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: I can draw the eye through the panels, the way I want them to be drawn.
• 18:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'm really quite good at it when I have the time to do all of it and I'm doing, you know, a 13-page bonus story and it's going to take me three months to finish it, whereas a healthy person who can put in more than four hours a day at this would finish an entire 24-page comic book inside of a month.
• 18:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: The pros projects, I have several on the back burner.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: I have lots and lots of voices in my head demanding other stories.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I have a process for tracking that, which is created document and scrivener, fill out a few cards real fast.
• 18:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: Write down everything that's in my brain.
• 18:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: Save it, close it, move it out of the way, so that I can work on what I have to work on now because I can't multitask the way I used to be able to.
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: There are lots of other stories I'd like to tell.
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: I love horror.
• 19:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, something that you were, as you were talking, I was struck by two things that I just kind of want to point out to people that one of the things that you will have to do over the course of your career is redefine for, for whatever reason that is, whether it's because as we heard with Dan, you know, thinking that you thought we're going to take off, didn't take off, whether it's depression, whether it's life circumstances moving across country, whether
• 19:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: physical disability.
• 19:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think that one of the traps that we will fall into is defining our process, I help reductive we are.
• 19:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think what you were talking about doing is focusing on the satisfaction of the things that you're good at.
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that if you redefine in your own brain, how will I be satisfied at the end of this work period?
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I really love that because there's a way of thinking about process in the way of like I don't like product management books that are like your workflow has to be xyz to maximize efficiency at this factory.
• 20:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that's how creative practice works.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's how making artworks.
• 20:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you know,
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: at the end of this series about personal writing process, you know, looking back at what everyone said, but I'm especially noting in yours Howard is in rebuilding this process, the question you figured out how to answer is how to make process serve you, not give the way around, right?
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're not trying to fit into a workflow that you designed and to make the most comics in the smallest amount of time.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's okay.
• 20:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: these are my constraints, these are my goals.
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: What can I do to optimize?
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's actually been like fascinating watching you do this over the years of like finding these technological solutions, physical solutions, process solutions that let you do the thing that you want to do, not the way you used to do it, but it's never the way you used to do it.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Every project is new and different.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes things radically benefit.
• 21:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: finding the thing that is stopping me or slowing me down and going after it aggressively to kill it, destroy it, flatten it, smooth it out, shove it to one side, whatever because there are things that I want to do and if there's things that are keeping me from doing them, I'm going to make them go away.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: There was an episode of, as you as the big portion of the season of
• 21:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: altered carbon season 2 where an AI character has been brain damaged and someone tells him, you know what you should do, you should just make notes at the time you think of things and leave notes for yourself.
• 21:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: and the AI had ends up with this whole interface in front of him of little note cards and he'll stumble for an idea and then he'll look down and realize oh yes this thing this is the thing and I looked at that and had an epiphany and told Sandra keep index cards stocked here and stocked here and he'd pens in both places and one of the first things I do in the in the morning now is I'll pull down an index card and I'll just start writing a list of the things
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: And sometimes the list is there, in order to do I suffer from brain fog, it's possible I suffer from brain fog so that I am carrying that piece of paper with me downstairs and when I get downstairs, I can look at it and say, oh, that's right.
• 22:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's why I'm in this.
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: I do not love that that's a thing that I need, but I am solving the problem.
• 22:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: A lot of us need that for a lot of reasons.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: Solving the problem in that way.
• 22:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: And index cards, I think, bring us around to homework.
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm excited to hear the homework.
• 22:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
• 22:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: your homework is your homework is how we're taking a step by there I'm a puppy what are the rest of the host oh goodness and what you're gonna do is you're gonna write a scene about that now you're gonna write a scene about whatever you want to write a scene about take a stack of index cards and for each each beat of dialogue
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: each thing that would in your imagination be one panel of a comic strip.
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: I want you to take an index card, draw a couple of stick figures, you know, stick figures for the characters you're in the scene, or maybe just smiley faces, or frowny faces, or, you know, angry eye faces, or whatever.
• 23:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: It doesn't have to be good art.
• 23:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: On one side of the index card, you draw that little picture, and on the other side, hand right the dialogue.
• 23:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: Maybe even with a laryl pointing to which person's mouth it comes out of and then set that card down and write the next bit of dialogue and treat an entire scene like you are hand-creating a comic book.
• 23:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: And this is not to create a process for you.
• 24:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is to break you out of whatever process you're currently using and help you visualize doing things in a completely wrong
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: right, but probably completely wrong way and and see if it shakes something useful loose for you.
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't normally tag on to a homework, but I'm going to mention that I was just on a panel with James A. Owen who illustrates and writes and he said that he storyboards does a storyboard for all of his chapters and that if he has a chapter or a scene where he can not think of an interesting image, it is a cue to him that there is a problem with that chapter.
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And with that, you are out of excuses.
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now go, draw, and write.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends.
• 24:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Koal, Dongwon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Taylor.
• 25:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Junior, mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds.