Neil Gaiman interviews Stephen King

Neil Gaiman interviews Stephen King. A good read for a writer of any genre.

Read Full Post »

Does this idea suck?

I’m not sure how other writers work but I tend to have 5 or 6 projects going at once. Some are similar and only one of the group will fully develop. For instance, I have 3 picture books I am actively working on. But I suspect only one has the legs to move on. If I was a corporation I would have to wonder about all that wasted time on ‘bad’ projects. Of course, how else do you get to the good ones? I suppose, maybe, perhaps…someone as amazingly prolific as Stephen King has the ability to make bigger jumps. Perhaps one of his innate abilities that was refined in his career, was to know a little faster than others that “This idea just isn’t going to work.”

I have to spend quite a bit of time on something before I can say that.

I enjoy working in a couple of different genres at once. I have a high fantasy/detective/film noir graphic novel I am editing. A middle grade, horror novel that is slowly turning into a graphic novel (once I hit upon what made the story intriguing, I realized it works better as a graphic novel). I have the sci-fi graphic novel I am working on for Chronicle Books, an animated short that will take me 10 years to finish and a few other projects that dare not speak their names.

Projects I like to call ‘cellar’ projects. These projects are probably too much of a mash-up to ever find a home at a publisher. But I am driven to complete them. Get them out of my head, so to speak. They take up a lot of time, but I enjoy the creative adventure and the opportunity to just make something that hits the beats I want to, with little concern about what demographic they are for.

What amazes me is how much time goes into projects that never quite make it. The creative process is pretty bizarre. You don’t know exactly what you are going to get. That’s why Hollywood is such a non-traditional business to try and manage. Millions of dollars on the line and still it’s filled with fickle starts-and-stops. Good ideas that never quite develop. Films that are labored over and fine tuned only to die quickly and painfully once released.

At least I get to go through the process of creation and destruction in the private on my third floor studio. Only my dogs see the fits I go through as I try and find an idea with legs. An idea that works through beginning, middle and end. It’s become obvious to me that every project I do, no matter if it finds a published home or even gets finished, is simply practice for the next idea that takes up residence in my mind at 2 in the morning and gets in the way of my life until I have no choice but to jump in with both feet and let it start eating up time.

Read Full Post »