Extremely incremental
Well, on Monday I wrote the dialogue for that big scene I hadn't done yet -- bringing the dialogue-writing up to date -- and got about a third of the way through the scene I had been putting off starting because 1) I wasn't at all sure of the staging and 2) I knew the renders were going to be a bitch. And today, I finished that scene, salvaged the part I gave up on last night as a bad go, and wrote its dialogue. Finished that as of a few minutes ago.
I hate to talk about my weird little not-comics using film language, because I know it sounds pretentious, but the thing is, there are a lot of similarities. I joke that I didn't realize when I started doing these that I wouldn't just have to be my own director, but also my own costume designer and set designer and lighting designer ... I joke, but it's no lie. And one of the film things which I knew, but which hadn't ever really sunk in personally until I began doing these, is that plot is not storyboard.
Knowing what's going to happen in a scene -- even knowing what they're going to say in that scene, having a full script, which I never do, by the way -- is not the same thing as having a storyboard. The storyboard doesn't plan what's going to happen or what they're going to say -- it plans how you're going to show it. Camera angles. Where people are standing. That kind of thing. The film equivalent of stage blocking.
Going into a scene without this is usually not a problem because my scenes usually aren't complex this way, but sometimes it is, when I find myself knowing what has to happen but being completely unsure how to proceed with showing it.
Knowing what's going to happen in a scene -- even knowing what they're going to say in that scene, having a full script, which I never do, by the way -- is not the same thing as having a storyboard. The storyboard doesn't plan what's going to happen or what they're going to say -- it plans how you're going to show it. Camera angles. Where people are standing. That kind of thing. The film equivalent of stage blocking.
Going into a scene without this is usually not a problem because my scenes usually aren't complex this way, but sometimes it is, when I find myself knowing what has to happen but being completely unsure how to proceed with showing it.
I also did a fair bit of actual paying day-job work the last two days and had a doctor's appointment yesterday, so all in all I have not been sitting on my thumb. But.
You know, there are a lot of days these days where my focus isn't great, largely because of the trashfires. I don't have as much of a "social media has destroyed my attention span" problem as some of my peers do, because I learned a long time ago how to turn everything else off and do one thing -- I don't think I could be a writer without having learned that. But when my brain is stuck in fret-and-fear loops, those are a lot harder to turn off than the usual mental noise and chatter and distractions.
I've often had to fall back on the "OK, I am going to get one thing done today, and then anything else is gravy" process a lot. And there's nothing wrong with that. Incremental movement -- tiny little steps -- is still movement. One thing is better than zero things.
But I do get impatient. I say, "OK, but does it have to be that incremental?"
Four scenes left to do. But one of them's big.
21 April 2026