It’s been a bumpy start to the year but I’ve spent all my free time these past weeks wrestling with the story for my upcoming book, PROJECT BROKEN TICKER, and I think I’ve figured it out.
The devil is in the details, which is the main problem I kept slamming against. On one end I have too many details to wrangle into shape (this being an autobiography of sorts, with real life being so overwhelmingly generous with detail) and on the other, I don’t have enough details to fill out some of the more fantastical sections.
Solution? Power through the noise as matter-of-factly as possible, spotlighting the bits that are crucial to the emotional arc of the story so that a signal emerges. I had to perform a bit of mental triage as so many things present as important but just weigh down the momentum of the piece. Real life is nowhere near as organized as fiction, but we can treat it as such, imagining that certain sequences create a narrative skeleton that all the rest can hang off of like meat. It’s a chaos dragon and I’m going to ride it.
My other solution was to consolidate redundancies, which is honestly the most uncomfortable bit for me. The story hinges on a father figure, and he’s had to become a composite of five different father figures I’ve had in my life. While this means that the story is now not true-to-life in exacting detail, it helps the truth of the emotion come forward. I think it’s the right move for this story.
As for the more imaginative sections, I realized I needed to treat it as a completely separate comic and build it up the way I would my other comics—opening it up to tons of influences that I can remix for flavor, letting it accrue detail and volume until it forms up into something that feels solid. I think I cracked a big road block yesterday (the identity and direction of a secondary character, which necessitated rewriting the whole outline).
It’s all starting to come together much later than I’d like, but that’s okay. I gave myself a deadline to start production on final pages by March, and I’m going to stick to that schedule even if the whole story hasn’t quite cohered yet. As always, it’s gonna end up being a bit of an improv exercise, but that’s part of the fun.
Here we go. If you hear a hum in the background, that’s the sound of excitement.
Andrew Drilon / New York / 2.24.2022