writing – Page 3 – Kelci D Crawford

May 20, 2015May 18, 2015

Outlines are Creative Writing’s Best Friend

We all have assumptions. And sometimes those assumptions serves us ok.

Assumptions like “Planning is good for buildings and other physical products” and “creating is an impulse.”

But a lot of the time, especially when we create new art and stories, those asumptions are wrong. When you create things, you gotta bend or break the rules to create something that’s worth a damn.

To that end, I say that outlines – that pesky tool that some creatives think gets in the way of writing because it’s used for book reports and not novels – outlines are not just handy in creative writing and storytelling. They are necessary.

Allow me to explain.

When it comes to how our brains work, we have this assumption that there’s a left and right brain, and that planning and logistics are logical, left brain functions, while creative expression and intuition are the domain of the impulsive and emotional right brain.

Except our brains don’t really work that way. When we create, multiple parts of our brain, not just the right hemisphere, light up with activity. The same is said for doing logical problems, especially math. Multiple parts of our brain light up. How many of us got creative with math problems?

I know I did. And I aced all my math classes.

So why are logic and organization shunned in the creative arts?

I don’t know (leave your thought on this in comments).

But I like using outlines for when I write, especially when I write for my comics. Why?

Because outlines help me figure out what’s next when my creative juices are stuck in the valve of expression. Outlines are the Drain-O that opens the valve.

Recently I was writing in a new comic script. The story is about an autistic girl, who’s exploring a town in a post-alien-colonized Earth to find a cyborg that killed her father.

I was writing act 1 when I stopped and went, “Crap. I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

So I walked away from it and shuffled through my notes of the story, which I keep in a notebook on my shelf.

I opened this notebook, and LO AND BEHOLD! There was an outline of act 1 that included events leading into act 2.

I then took the time to write out an outline for act 2. It only took about ten minutes.

And when I returned to my script, I wrote three new pages!

Ten minutes of outlining saved me hours of staring at a computer screen and wracking my brain for ideas.

My outlines aren’t even all that detailed. They’re essentially one-sentence ideas for scenes.

But it works for me.

I know I intend on writing more outlines for my stories. I have one in particular, about a haunted house and some elementary school students that explore it, that desperately needed an outline before I jumped into it. I’m going to take the time to write one up for that before I continue any further.

So the next time you get stuck when writing something, take ten minutes to write an outline. Your brain may thank you for it.

Thanks for reading!

You. Are. Awesome.

March 20, 2015March 20, 2015

Books, Conventions, and Goals

I probably should write about the Batgirl cover, because that’s the “it” topic the last couple of days. But,

That was new from two days ago,
the argument is stupid because god forbid a comic is made for an audience intended to be younger than 20 years old, and
There are more important things to focus on.

One of those aforementioned more important things is… Continue reading “Books, Conventions, and Goals”

January 21, 2015January 21, 2015

The Absurd List Exercise

A few years ago, back when I lived closer to Columbus, my big sis wrote this, in permanent marker, on a dry erase board.

We have never been able to wash this off, so nearly ten years later, we still have this list tacked to the refrigerator, and it makes us laugh.

Seeing this inspires me to try a new idea as a warm-up writing exercise.

The exercise?

Make an absurd list.

It doesn’t have to have a theme like “What to Do When I Grow Up,” but if it helps you get your silly gears going, then go for it.

So I just did my free-writing list of “What to Do When I Grow Up,” and this is what I came up with:

Learn to Cook a Unicorn
Speak Cat
Shave my eyebrows
Lint-roll the dog
Make a sweater for the Eiffel Tower
High five Adolf Hitler in the face
Fly with the owls
Stretch my toes into Nickelodeon slime
host a Dalek tea party
Put sunglasses on Shakespeare’s dead body
arm wrestle the sun

The fun thing about the Absurd List is that it gets your creative muscles moving, and that means you’ll be more receptive to ideas and suggestions, whcih is always a good thing in creative work.

Share some of your absurd lists in the comments below!

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

January 6, 2015January 5, 2015

Writing Claire’s Story

claire comic post apocalyptic zombie fighter — (Click to enlarge)

So one of my New Years Goals was to write 1000 words a day. Which sounds pretty lofty, but really I can accomplish that in about an hour. Sometimes less.

In writing 1000 words a day, I’m actually getting a LOT of writing done.

It’s not just blog posts either.

Thanks to my 1000 words written a day goal, I’ve revisited an old script of mine, and am now in the process of writing it and continuing off of it.

I’m talking about my post apocalyptic lesbian love story with zombie-killing, starring Claire and Tracy.

I finished editing Chapter 1, and I powered through Chapter 2. It’s a GREAT feeling knowing there’s progress finally being made on a project that’s been on hold for months.

I’ve been revisiting this project in my sketchbook, as well.

claire and tracy comic work in progress art sketch — A Work in Progress (click to enlarge)

claire and tracy comic work in progress art sketch of environment — Sketching out an idea of the world they explore. (Click to enlarge).

And I’ve been doing some sketching to flesh out their world bit by bit.

I’ve also been looking at this list of post-apocalyptic tropes to avoid and what hasn’t been done yet. I’m hoping to add elements of things rarely done in post-apocalyptic stories, pulling inspiration from this list.

Like bike-riding. Oh my shit there need to be more bike riders after cars become useless hunks of metal.

What are some tropes of the post apocalyptic genre you can think of? What hasn’t been done in a zombie story yet that you can think of? Leave them in the comments below. I would love to hear about them!

Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you tomorrow.