Webcomic Diversity and Power to Change

@punkarsenic Aislinn
Fri, 09 Feb 2018 17:07:20 +0000

@punkarsenic wrote:

hey christode, reading through joe's replies, i kinda get what hes getting at, but disagree entirely w his approach and a lot of his perspective. im worried abt you feeling discouraged, bc nobody deserves that, so im gonna try n add my 2 cents n frame this in a more positive light:

the first thing you make will be crap (hear me out!). book, painting, song, whatever it is. if not objectively, then by your own standards - the best you can hope for your feelings towards your first thing, in five years time, is affectionate nostalgia. and that - the knowledge that what youre producing now is the first 200 pages of crap you need to shit out before the stuff you love, the stuff you are proud of for your entire career comes through - that is freeing.

why? because it means you can let yourself make mistakes here. you can steam on ahead and just push it all out - obviously, still put care into your work, but serialised work in general is a battle between finished and perfect. go for finished.

in the oldern days of 10 years ago, what youre writing right now - and what im writing right now - would be a trunk novel in the traditional respect. you prolly wouldnt wanna give it to publishers and that. however, the serialised online publishing platform means we can change the meaning of the trunk novel - maybe writers need to start airing their dirty laundry a bit. idk how much this can be said for writing, but for webcomics people love seeing the progress from crappy sketches to really great work - and that transition comes in the trunk novel, and it came about because they steamed ahead, accepting mistakes as they came, instead of rebooting over and over. and then, years later, when they do start fresh, it blows the roof.

so think of it this way: when youre finished with what youre writing now, beginning to end, whatever comes next will blow the roof off of what you write now. what youre writing now can be rebooted and remade whenever you want in the future, but finishing it is hurdle number one.

EDIT: please note that what im saying applies to my own work as well. i have soooooo much affection for the comic im making right now, and im really proud of a lot of the work in it, writing and art. but knowing that its the trunk novel, its the bad first book that kickstarts a career of good second books and brilliant third books - thats so exciting! be excited! if your first, crappiest novel is good, makes you happy and proud, that means the next is gonna be STUNNING!