ANTSY

September 18th, 2007Blog1 comment

Currently Reading:

I just finished reading Scott McCloud’s Making Comics; in there was a chapter on Japanese manga and its artistic/storytelling differences toward American comics. This got me thinking that I should read some manga to see what’s going on there these days.

Yotsuba&! is by the creator of my favorite anime of all time, Azumanga Daioh. This comic centers around a five year-old girl and her dad, and the various adventures they have after moving into a new neighborhood.

There are a lot of things I like about this series. The art style is clean and crisp, with cartoony human characters in front of highly technical backgrounds — it’s a similar style to Herge’s Tintin. The best part are the stories — Yotsuba centers on humorous discoveries of everyday things. Doorbells, balloons designed to scare birds away, and vengeance. You heard that right. One of the stories is all about revenge, and it’s probably the funniest one so far. The whole thing is reminiscent of Calvin and Hobbes, and I highly, highly recommend it.

I am antsy. I have completed the outline for my new project; at this point if it were a play, I could begin writing scenes. However, this is a feature screenplay, so what I need to do now is write a treatment. For me a treatment is a 60-80 page novella of the story. This is where the actual writing occurs, and from there it’s a short jump to the actual screenplay format.

But I can’t do that yet. I have to wait. I have to patiently go through the outline again and again, making sure that the things that I see are unconventional. Fresh. Surprising and paced properly. It’s a lot easier to shuffle around an outline and make its structure tighter than to have to rewrite and shift whole blocks of actual writing.

So at times like this I get really antsy. I want to move ahead, jump in and go, but I have to be patient. I have to be meticulous as an assassin. It sucks.