Bite-Size 2.0: A Creator Discussion and Advice Thread

Preferred Name: wnqs

Pronouns: She/her

Genres you create: Fantasy/romance

Where you plan to take your writing journey: I want to continue working on my current comic and have ideas for related comics in the future.

Link to Tapas Account: https://tapas.io/series/The-Cat-The-Vine-and-The-Victory

Numbers to me represent a shift in the way we all consume art. Comics are much more accessible to everyone than they were years ago worldwide. For me, every view is a person experiencing a much broader world of art, contributing to the growth of art and maybe even adding their own art to the collective.

I find the stats on my comic fascinating. The numbers at first glance seem really out of whack, but that’s because I have a lot of pages. I don’t feel validation in numbers as in numbers aren’t the driving force behind why I draw or post my comic.

Interaction between myself and my readers makes me feel joy rather than the number of people reading, if that makes sense. Knowing that there’s a core group of people that have been with me since the beginning (almost five years) is amazing.

I think the balance of caring or not caring about book stats really depends on why a creator publishes to begin with. If someone is looking to make a career out of making comics, then statistics are quite important. If you aren’t getting the numbers you think you should have to reach your goal, then you need to seriously look at why and figure out what needs changing/improving.

If a creator is like myself and doing it as a hobby, then stats are nice to have and interesting to look at, especially when the numbers are all over the place. I think it’s when someone who looks at stats and sees them as judging their self-worth that stats become a problem.

• By gathering little bits of everything I see. Maybe I went to a cool city and the landscape stuck to my brain as I wanted a location in the comic, maybe I watched a movie and I wanted to apply its themes to something else and see what would change and if I'd like it as much as I did originally (cough Megamind), or I read a fanfic where they approached something that was forgotten about a character and I was inspired by fellow fans being concerned about it, and sometimes I imagine a scene to music though it's rarely put into a story. I've also got many ideas from dreams, though it doesn't apply to Splitting Image.
• Thinking of how to tie the theme/setting to a scene, and seeing if it still matches with the original idea. Once the story feels more like itself, also seeing what's required to progress the plot and character development, and trying to reach into my mind and trying to remember anything cool about a subject (redeeming a character, a betrayal, a plan that goes awry,etc)
• I hoard a lot but I only write down what I particularly like; or I'd have a long long list of dreams to put into art. In my opinion, anything can inspire, but I'm inspired by things that I haven't noticed lately in my routine and works that really seem to have a lot of heart in them.

It's really crazy how much I can get from dreams. I've dreamed of a bus station being destroyed by a fleet of floating wooden ships and the buses being hidden inside; a spacewoman haunted by four weird spirits with strange designs and might or might not be external versions of her emotions; a tribe of scavengers next to a giant purple HR Gieger looking forest where the animals have psychic powers; a cyberpunk town where neon attachments are made of literal magic and can be infected by viruses all the same; and a student waking up to a giant obsidian egg in the campus. Every time I think I could work on just this cool idea, a ton more show up, so wanting or not I end up hoarding.

Oh boy. I live for talking about this.

• Music. 95% of my ideas come from music. Metal music to be precise.
They live in the guitar riffs and solos, when that tasty lick hits, then I get a flash of an image. Then the lyrics develop the idea further. I listen to a lot of music, because that's where all of the ideas live.

•As I mentioned before, the idea is sparked by the music. Now...Dragon Sparking was in development hell for around 10 years, and I kept fumbling around due to life getting in the way. But the music kept me thinking about Dragon Sparking.
In particular I must shout out Dragonforce. Without that band, Rip as a character would not exist in the form he has now. Their music shaped his personality, fighting style, and appearance. Listening to their music was the place I could get full images of who Rip was. There was something about the guitars that brought him to life...and a buzzing sensation I'd get in the back of my head, just past the temples, that's when I knew the music had brought a character action to life.

Going even further in, the bands Iron Savior, Freedom Call, and Dark Moor all pushed those images further. Rip is a child born of Power Metal, and without it he wouldn't exist as he does now. Not only that, whenever I felt like quitting, their music brought me right back into creating the DS world.

Additionally I use musical sections to craft my fight scenes. I get strong mental images that show me the movements, facial expressions, and emotional outbursts.

One additional thing I use is Wikipedia mythology lists. I'll read down the list without clicking anything and just use the blurb to come up with ideas. While listening to music of course xD

•Idea hording...not really? I'm kind of a flash in a pan, where if I don't use the idea almost immediately, it's gone. At most I'll do a quick doodle to remember it, other than that, I just write in the moment into the comic. I don't often have ideas about anything else other than Dragon Sparking. If I do, it's assimilated into the DS Multiverse I plan on creating over time.

For me most of my inspiration and ideas come from the animes I watch and the video games that I play. There is just so much that I can get inspired from when it comes to both. I can see different characters and the settings and how I could create my own similar to it. So some of my stories I create with the image of anime or video games in mind.

One I have an idea I try to write it down and I have a bunch of notebooks that have character ideas, story plots, setting plots and many notes in between, From school I have learned to create story charts that help me organize my ideas and able to expand on them as well. Creating both the world and setting for my ideas. I like world building.

I do like to collect ideas just so that it will help me on my next step towards the story I want to create. I don't want to collect too many ideas or else it could feel a bit overwhelming.

I don't think I'm constantly inspired day to day but my mind always seem to be in a creative mindset when I'm watching anime shows and playing video games. So I can picture what types of stories I would like to create on my own.

Ideas:

• I rarely struggle with raw ideas. I'm often overflowing with them and the problem is they often distract me because I'll get really excited about whatever my latest idea is and not be able to think about anything else! I have story ideas all the time when I'm just alone with my thoughts; they'll just keep coming up like annoying pop-up ads. Most of them are novel, but not necessarily good, so my approach is to let lots of them flow, write them all down and then pick out the actually usable ones and keep any viable but not currently helpful ideas for later. My day job pretty much employ me for my ability to think about a theme for a bit, then dump a ton of ideas based around that theme.

• Turning an idea into an actual viable product is really hard. Often the act of chaining down the idea makes it dull and frustrating as I have to confront the logistics of making it a story or notice the holes in it that my sheer excitement at the new idea weren't allowing me to see.
  Nowadays, I'll look at my idea, then I'll start to try to hammer it into the shape of a basic three-act structure, assigning roles to characters, looking for things the narrative needs like a catalyst and climax and coming up with deeper details for how this novel lore actually works mechanically. I have a bad tendency to fall out of love with the idea at this stage and go pretty quickly from "this is the most amazing idea ever" to "this is absolute trash and unusable". Nowadays, I try to make this process more like refining or iteration and not just give up at the first obstacle.

• Yeah, I have lots of folders and notebooks full of ideas. Errant is a rework of an older idea, a comic called Fan Dan Go I did years ago, which was itself a mixture of a bunch of ideas from other vague comics that I rolled up into one big weird comic about magical knights with emotional drama and this bold, retro aesthetic. I mixed that mixed with some notes I made about Arthurian Legends I found interesting and reworked the plot to have.... a plot, which FDG didn't really have.

• I love to look into history and mythology and Shakespeare because the themes are so big and there's so much room for interpretation. I'm also very likely to be inspired by things that are visually striking, especially if they're colourful and evoke strong emotions. I try getting too directly inspired by any particular work, but sometimes I'll experience something like Deltarune or Netflix She-ra and I just can't help myself, my imagination will be aflame and I won't be able to think of anything else!

Preferred Name: Em
Pronouns: they/them
Genres I create: LGBTQ+ Fantasy
Where I plan to take your writing journey: A good question. I'm mostly focusing on finishing my current story, for now
Link to Tapas Account: https://tapas.io/emrowene

The question of being too niche is something I worry about a lot - my current novel is an lgbtq+ fantasy novel, but more specifically, it's a gothic fantasy novel, heavily inspired by both classic fantasy and Victorian gothic horror.

I've made myself a home in both lgbtq+ writers' twitter and gothic literature twitter, so I know the niche is there, but I've also worried that branding the story as a "gothic fantasy" will turn some people away from it. I also hesitate to brand it as gothic horror- gothic horror is a very different beast from regular horror - it's not what most people think of when they hear "horror," and often, its more about an aesthetic than horror content.

As to the third question, I think it's entirely a matter of your goals for your story. No matter how niche you get, there will be someone out there who can relate to it. If, however, your goal is to gain a large audience, then it may be possible to be too niche.