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Writers’ Mill Minutes August 2020

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This month’s speaker was Erik Nebel, whose first book of comics was published in 2014 by Yeti Press. Erik’s work has appeared in Best American Comics 2015 and Best American Comics 2019. Most recently, Erik finished work on a graphic novel adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel, WAR AND PEACE. Find Erik at OUR LIBRARY at https://wccls.bibliocommons.com/v2/search?query=erik+nebel&searchType=smart

After Erik’s talk and a short break, Peter announced the winners of August’s Mountains and Valleys contest:

  1. Judy with Leaving the Valley
  2. Catherin with her poem, Journey
  3. Robin with her essay, Mania Mountain and the Valley of Shadow

Other entries, in no particular order, were:

  • Sheila’s poem: A Psalm From the Valley
  • Zita’s poem: Highs and Lows of Writing
  • Robert Mixon’s poem: New Love on High
  • Matthew’s story: The New Normal
  • Jessie’s essay: The Roller Coaster of Life

We have several deadlines coming soon – firstly the contest deadlines, which are always the end of the 1st Sunday of the month. Send entries to contest @ portlandwritersmill.org. Maximum word count 1,200.

  • September: Strange Times
  • October: Beyond the headlines
  • November: Words I never want to hear again

And then the anthology deadline, which is the SAME AS SEPTEMBER’S CONTEST!

  • Topic: Challenges – Challenges – Challenges !!!!!
    • Interpret the topic how you choose. We discussed the entries received so far and other entry ideas, such as poems stories and essays about:
      • History, present day, and future
      • Physical, emotional, and environmental challenges
      • Covid, of course
      • And more… Join us! Just write!
  • Titles: Here’s now we researched titles last year:
    • Start typing your title idea into Google. What auto-completes does it offer? Are they relevant?
    • Finish typing it. What sort of articles are listed? Are they relevant?
    • Refine your title until you get more useful autocompletes and more relevant articles, then
    • Repeat with Amazon and refine again.
    • Remember, Google knows everything about you, so if you can try this in a different browser from your usual one, or from a different computer, that may give better results.
    • Please send your suggested titles to anthology @ portlandwritersmill.org. If you send them to admin, they’ll get lost of the morass of deletable emails.
  • Entries: Send your entries to anthology @ portlandwritersmill.org by end of 1st Sunday in September, so… same deadline as the Strange Times contest. Why not send your entries to both BUT
    • If you want your entry to go into the contest AND the anthology, please send it to BOTH email addresses – the mailboxes don’t talk to each other.
  • Rules:
    • No more than 5 written entries per person
    • No more than 5,000 words in total per person
    • Royalty free images only (and as many as you care to send us)
  • Editing: When it’s all put together, authors will be asked to suggest edits to their own work and to the two adjacent pieces in the book. That way everything gets viewed by three pairs of eyes. Some brave souls will read and suggest edits for everything and we’ll be hugely grateful to them! Please volunteer
  • Publication: We’ll upload the files during November’s meeting, provided nothing goes wrong. And we’ll press that dreaded PUBLISH button on Amazon kdp.
  • Deliveries: The price on Amazon will be around $6, but the price to us can be less (because we are – or technically, the library is – the authors). Sheila will wend off an order after the meeting – Pre-paid only (Paypal or check (made out to Sheila) or cash, socially distantly delivered to Sheila’s door). The price will be around $3.50 each but we’ll give you a better estimate when we find out how big the book will be. And delivery will be at the library if Covid permits, or socially distantly at Sheila’s door.
  • Don’t forget, you can see our previous anthologies on our Amazon page at: https://www.amazon.com/author/portlandwritersmill (Sheila’s working on getting them all added!)

Final announcements:

Graphic Novels, Inspiration, Creation, Publication and Marketing with Erik Nebel

This month’s speaker was Erik Nebel, whose first book of comics was published in 2014 by Yeti Press. Erik’s work has appeared in Best American Comics 2015 and Best American Comics 2019. Most recently, Erik finished work on a graphic novel adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel, WAR AND PEACE. Find Erik at OUR LIBRARY at https://wccls.bibliocommons.com/v2/search?query=erik+nebel&searchType=smart

Erik Nebel is a multiply-published graphic novelist, based locally, and also a speech-language pathologist working in elementary schools. One of the first images shown in this presentation was of happy kids displaying the zine they were working on in a workshop with Erik.

Introducing us to the world of comics, Erik explained that a graphic novel is a comic in book form – in color or in black and white. Images from various novels and cartoons showed how emotion can be seen through art – touching, meeting, reaching… even sadness and whimsy… inspiring us to wonder also, how is it shown through words.

Inspiration

Beginning the talk with “inspiration,” Erik led us along a road that began at age 4 with a love of Peanuts. Even without reading, a 4-year-old can follow the stories, relationships and expressions. As Erik showed us, a child might also recognize (or at least appreciate) the elements of story pacing – when should the upcoming disaster first be introduced – and the use of negative space – details that aren’t filled in, but are there around the characters so they exist in space, not a box. Both ideas are surely as relevant to writing novels as to graphic novels.

Erik moved on to Italian comics at a time when family visits to Italy involved the children, who didn’t speak Italian, being left with comics to read. Lacking language, again Erik saw how images conveyed the story.

Next came Raw, an avant-garde comics and graphics magazine that truly inspired Erik, with a serialized graphic novel called Maus included, chapter by chapter inside.

Next came art books, where the juxtaposition of images, even if not intended by the artist, begins to convey a story. The human mind seeks connections – between a bird and a bird’s-eye view, between a man by a lamp-post and the lamp-lit party he may be watching, etc. These are the connections an artist – and a writer – tries to create in story.

Comics have changed over the years and are differently presented in different cultures, but Erik’s interest remains the same—the surreal, the avant-garde, the enigmatic and more. Then Maus (that serialized graphic novel), won a Pulitzer, moving comics and graphic novels from the edges to mainstream. For Erik, graphic novels give the freedom to “depict differently.”

Many graphic novels are adaptations of epic poems… or epic stories in Erik’s adaptation of War and Peace though (in answer to a question) Erik confessed that, if adapting something, it’s best to choose something old so as not to run into copyright issues.

Novelization

But how do you get from Peanuts to War and Peace? Erik has worked on the graphic novel of W&P since 2010 and hopes it might be released in 2022 – it’s a long slow process, as is the writing of any novel.

Providing great inspiration for the Writers’ Mill, Erik showed pages in a “diary” of writing W&P.

  1. Creation came first, with six months or so between excited entries that proclaimed the characters were working right, their expressions were good, or the dialog for various scenes was written and ready …
  2. Breakthrough is next, with diary entries coming every few days, even every day, and 1st page drafts, and
  3. Doubt. Will anyone want to read it? Is this even going the right way?
  4. New ideas, and now the entries are speeding up again
  5. The characters are coming to life! Till ONE YEAR on
  6. The New Version, but Erik’s still working on it (and probably cutting down that huge number of characters, in order to cut down on pages – How do you capture the spirit, telling more with less?)
  7. Going to bed with a difficult scene in mind, and waking up ready to draw it, but
  8. Going to bed with a great scene drawn, and wondering if it’ll still look good in the morning. Then
  9. The Last Page! Then
  10. Rereading, redrawing bits and pieces
  11. Putting the story online, but will people like it?
  12. Presenting it to a crowd in a bar!
  13. The Second draft is done
  14. The 3rd draft is DONE!
  15. And it’s time to find a publisher!

Things that become important in this process are the revisions and rhythms of dialog and speech. The script changes, building the relationships. Getting the balance and rhythm right is as much a problem for the novelist as for the graphic novelist.

Then there’s the (graphic) decision about how the characters will look, and the backgrounds, and how to balance detail and simplicity. Even how to make the characters distinctive so readers can tell who is who. How do any writers do that, from children’s picture book authors to poets, essayists and novelists? The problems are the same for all of us.

Pacing becomes important, influenced by how many panels per page (or how many paragraphs – that question of the need for “white space” on the page of a regular novel). And there’s the choice of word balloons or text above the panel, even the shape of the panel. While these aren’t questions all writers face directly, they provide a good way of looking at questions of, say, dialog tags, level of detail, point of view, etc.

One particular point Erik made was the issue of readers taking sides. How do you portray a quarrel and avoid readers choosing to love or hate one or other character?

Publication and Marketing

The road to publishing a graphic novel is somewhat unique. First you get your work out there – at zine festivals, in the community of cartoonists, online, etc. Then you wait for a publisher to come to you. A graphic novelist NEEDS community, and unsolicited submissions will get you nowhere. “If we like it, we’ll contact you.”

There are agents who work with the big publishers, like Scholastic, but, for the most part, graphic novelists aren’t agented. An agent would want to know the “target audience” – for Scholastic they’d want you to target parents, teachers and librarians (not kids!) – but a graphic novel can reach adults and kids – just write!

At conventions, a graphic novelist will make those all-important connections with:

  • Cartoonists – people who write and draw their own comics, and become deeply involved in publishing and marketing them.
  • Comic artists, and
  • Comic writers. Most commonly, comic writers will have been hired by a big company to work in collaboration with others on characters owned by the company – for example, Marvel or DC

At a zine convention, they’ll meet other zine creators, other creatives who all help each other. Perhaps a group of authors will share a table, each of them printing just enough copies of their own zine to sell.

At Comicon there’ll be TV and movie people, and costumed fans, while at Comic Festivals there’ll just be books. Then there’s Indie con (https://portlandindiecon.com/), https://floatingworldcomics.com/ and http://www.frankensteinscomicbookswap.com/ – all good places to meet.

Erik uses the internet to “share” for publication, much as we might be encouraged to use it for marketing.

  • Tumblr is great for people scrolling through a comic on the phone, with 3 panels showing on a single screen
  • Instagram doesn’t work as well because its images are square – only 2 panels
  • Twitter has similar limitations, and
  • Facebook is good.

Using these, Erik builds an audience. Then waits for the email from the publisher… and thus Erik’s shorter pieces in magazines (Carousel), anthologies… then the book WELL COME was released, which can be found at the library. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22608792-well-come

But how does are those panels on Tumblr etc created?

  • Erik uses paper and pen
  • Scans the image onto the computer
  • Then photoshops it to add background or color.

Enjoying the way the ball feels when a ball-point pen touches the paper helps. But it’s not a fast process, and it shouldn’t be. For War and Peace, Erik will probably scan all the pages in at high resolution, print 10 sample copies and send them to industry friends (remember – connections matter), asking “Who in the industry do you think would be interested?”… and please show it to them! If more than one publisher shows interest, the best fit becomes the next question, then in one or two years … watch this space for War and Peace! And make sure you plan to attend the release party!

Self-pub or Find a Publisher?

Zines are self-published and self-printed, with just enough copies to self-sell. Self-publishing and printing your own copies of a book could be a big commitment though, but self-publishing print-on-demand might work, if you can persuade a store to carry the books. Kickstarter is probably the biggest “publisher” of graphic novels at the moment!

But Erik wants a real publisher. Why?

  • A publisher will organize event appearances – no need to spend hours booking a table etc.
  • If you’re published by a publisher with a “following” you’ve got a guaranteed audience.
  • If you’re published by a publisher, the reader knows someone thought your work was worth reading.
  • BUT make sure you retain all rights, copyrights, media rights etc.

However, you don’t need to worry about “copyrighting” those pictures on Tumblr (or stories on your blog). Just as long as they have your name attached, you don’t even need to add the symbol and date, though you might want to. However, if you see a cartoon with no name, be very suspicious (and don’t re-use it!).

Finally

Finally, Erik reminds us that to be creative, to produce a creative project, requires:

  • a big commitment
  • not just self-discipline but also
  • faith that the project itself is meaningful, and
  • that what you’re doing serves a higher purpose. It requires
  • JOY

Thank you Erik for a really inspiring, informative, and amazing presentation!

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