Sometimes my head is so full of random ideas that the resulting feeling is like teetering over an abyss, falling slowly, then finding myself caught mid-air, in a breathable fluid that I could almost push my hands through to form a wave if only I had some sort of creative outlet to give shape to that rushing imaginary water. My ideas attack me, desperately crying for some sort of release. Most of the time, they're snuffed out by my own inactivity and procrastination before they ever get a chance to blossom beyond their basic concepts. On the other hand, some of my creative impulses need to be let go, as the subjects of my writing, and what I desire to write about, move further from the juvenile fantasies of my past, allowing room for more personal pieces to take root and gestate. Hopefully, these ideas will find life on a page, rather than just the messy Five Star notebook of my mind's eye.
This is an attempt to catch the creative process of my writing while the white hot lightbulb in my brain is burning most brightly.
Lately, I've been wrestling with a desire to be more ambitious. Part of that is because I want to make writing my life, or, make a living at writing. More than that though, a new need is coming from a place inside of me that wants to see myself create something tangible, a book of some kind, from start to finish. I don't want to write the next Great Canadian Novel. Absolutely not. But I do want to write. I need to write. And I need to, at some point, be able to see the printed fruits of my labors. And I haven't labored much at all over the last year. To take account of what I've written in the past, examine everything for what it was, or wasn't, worth, and build from there.
Conceptualization for this started with a simple idea: a book, roughly 90 pages in length, 45 character drawings and 45 written pages, detailing the appearances and classified desires of the people who post in newspaper personal ads. This came from an earlier attempt at a collaboration with an ex-girlfriend, a poet named Lila Zais, who was going to write page-long responses to a series of freely improvised pen and ink drawings I was busy making in Iqaluit, Nunavut. I completed a couple drawings for the project, maybe 3 or 4 in total, and one draft of a written response was finished, but nothing further ever came of the project or the idea that began it. After that relationship ended, I took a year-long hiatus from writing to rethink what it was I wanted to even write about. What could I say that someone else hadn't? Is there such a thing as originality? Or, is originality a vain attempt at what should be a matter of creating a new context in which to tell an eternal story? The reconfiguration of classic human archetypes to fit a new reality.
Personally, I believe the latter to be true. There are only so many stories to be told. However, there are SO MANY new ways you can tell them. Which brings me to my story. Initially, I didn't intend on having one. Technically speaking, since I haven't begun any of the writing of this, no story yet exists to tell. That said, I can say that when I first got the idea to begin work on what would be a major writing project, I didn't really intend there to be all that much writing involved. At the onset, my basic idea was to have a book where for every two pages one page would be a personal ad, either fictitious or actually lifted from a real newspaper. Using an actually published personal ad is legally questionable business, no doubt, but since most of these ads are so cliched to begin with I'll bet noone would ever notice in the finished project. I don't exactly expect this book will be remotely high profile. Anyways, getting back to the pages.
For every two pages, one will be a personal ad, and on the next, will be an illustration of the character who wrote the ad itself. Some of these wordsmiths will be degenerates, no doubt, and I expect that most people who are familiar with my drawing style are going to think that this is just going to be a crass art book full of trashy characters who post trashier personal ads. This isn't my intention. In fact, one thing I want to stress with the actual art of the book is that each character take on their own style: some realistic, some detailed, sketchy, vile, humorous, sad, sexy, etc. The style of the art should match the style of the character: this is something I intend to stress.
We all want to find love in this world: this I believe. These are just the people who pay by the letter to advertise it.
In the past week, since coming up with this central idea and mulling the concept over in my head, I have found what I think will be a story, told over the course of this semi-graphic novella. It's a story that recent events in my personal life have allowed me to tell, and I can't think of a better framework for this project.
The framework is: boy meets girl, boy is too timid to approach girl directly, boy advertises his affection in the local personal ads. Girl does the same.
Original, I know.
Click here to take a look at some older original artwork of mine.
Posts
