Advisory: L O N G.
Back in the middle of February, before Pestilence rode over the world and started the first phase of the Apocalypse, I went on a Satoshi Kon binge watch— I believe I watched Millenium Actress and Paranoia Agent successively. During that time, I fell asleep and had a dream about a sweet-smelling mattress. Before it became a faint memory, I was able to jot down the few things my foggy mind could remember and put it in the back of my brain to explore maybe sometime in the future. Three days later, Line Webtoon announced their new short story contest. Seems the future came far more quickly than I thought, and Mattress at Luvia came into fruition.
I’ve never created a short story from start to finish before, and the closest I can think of is a six-page comic excerpt from a class reading back in high school (I’ll probably write about that too sometime soon)...but I don’t think an excerpt counts. Actually, I hardly ever finish anything, whether it be procrastination, insecurity, or the godawful habit of making an idea way bigger than it has to be, thus debilitating myself from even starting because it’s “so much work” and “I need to practice first” but never do. So I took this contest as an opportunity to — besides earn money and exposure— finish something that I started, if only to prove to myself that I can.
(Side note: I’ve been aware of this “incompletionist” disposition for a while, and I tried to combat that by making a ‘short’ to a larger story named Bobby, which you can find [incomplete] on Tapas, but it became so drawn out and tedious, never getting to the point I wanted it to, so I’m eventually going to be remaking it with the experience I gained from Mattress at Luvia.)
(Side note: If it wasn’t obvious based on my inspiration, I’ve submitted it into the “Brains”category. I consider the ‘psychological thriller’ genre to be appropriate for Mattress at Luvia. Working in that category is a first for me, though I’ve always wanted to try my hand at it, and while I am very self-conscious of my first approach to it (does it make sense? Will people understand it?), I’m glad I took the challenge, and am looking forward to exploring the “Mind-bending” genre a little more.)
This isn’t a How-To, nor am I trying to give advice or tips. This post just documents my four-month creative process in making Mattress at Luvia, simply because I wanted to talk about it and share my experience with others, and maybe have others share as well.
So think of this as a public journal entry, a form of catharsis to release any leftover tension and anxiety I have over a third of the year on something that had no guarantees.
Well. Here I go.
A Thumbnailing Beginning
Starting was the hardest, as it often is. There were interesting plot points in my dream (most of which unfortunately never made the final) but I couldn't figure out how to connect them all. The first thing I did after resolving to participate was to do what I did when I started Bobby, thumbnail the beginning pages. Those pages never came to be.
(Just two of at least twenty pages worth of thumbnails that have not come into fruition. This is also a semi-accurate depiction of my dream started).
The initial thumbnailing process took roughly two weeks— the rest of February— for me to conclude that this isn’t working. The little notes I took and surplus visions from various midnight napping were not enough to make a coherent story, and more importantly, did not allow me to see past the beginning and into the middle, the heart of any story.
- (Side question: I also had an inkling of what the ending might look like. The final product looks nothing like how I’d envisioned, and it’s probably what I’m most insecure about, but does anyone else often “know” a story’s “ending” but nothing besides that?)
It may have only been February, and the contest hadn’t even officially started yet, but based on past experiences (read: school assignments that caused way too much stress than it rightfully should have), I knew time was of the essence because time sneaks up so quickly on you. The failure of my first approach solidified something I already knew I should’ve been doing from the start (including with Bobby), and that was to simply write a script to organize my thoughts and better visualize the sequence of events within the story.
So I wasted all of March.
Procrastination and (mostly) Meaningless Research
Procrastination was not my intention in march, but my extreme lack of scripting knowledge, coupled with the near-crippling anxiety of no longer having a starting point I was confident in resulted in me just not doing anything.
...Which is a bit of a lie. I did take the majority of March to research the topics of olfactory stimulus in dreams and sensory analysis and 90s culture...among other miscellaneous things. I thought if I could relate the story to real life, I could have a better jumping-off point, and the story would feel more...learned. It didn’t help. Much.
- (Side question: Should I start a Go Fund Me for that clock?)
I think that researching topics and themes and other literary centric nouns can help better develop story ideas, and while I still believe that, it was rather...counterproductive while working on Mattress at Luvia. It made me realize that so much strict, extensive research and anally retaining real-life connections could damage the creativity in a story, especially a non-sensical one about a mattress with smell-o-vision because...who cares? I realized I needed to let my whimsy take hold more the same time I realized a whole month went by and I made NO progress.
Looking back now, I wondered if I could’ve achieved the level of completeness I sought after had I not let March go to waste. Would it have come out more towards where I wanted it to be? Plausible.. but I honestly don't think it would have made a difference. I may have finished earlier, but with that allotted time I would have had simmered in my self-doubt, second-guessed my decisions, and most likely implode my story with unnecessary clutter that I found “researching.”
So I took procrastination as part of the process, learned from it, and moved on.
- (Side note: Looking through my writing, I now remember starting a script in March, but it was in the form of a story, and I was still “winging it” as I did with the thumbnails, now it was just strictly literary).
Writing the Scripture(s)
Anxiety left way to frustration on not making any progress come April 1st. I still didn’t know how to “properly” write a script, but at this point, I didn’t care. So I went waaay back to how I wrote to every essay ever since middle school and asked myself: “What happens first?”
(These are from the app Nebo. It’s not perfect, but it converts handwriting to formattable text and that helped save a lot of time for me. Also, my penmanship is much nicer than this, I was just rushing...Please believe me.)
It was a very simple question, “What happens in Chapter 1? Chapter 2? 3, 4, 5?” but it allowed me to outline all the ideas swimming through my head and order them in a neat, coherent list and build upon it to make an even more detailed script (or as my friend dubs it, “outlining my outline”)
(That expanded outline directly influenced the script— it not only showed how the events were organized but also why things happened the way they did. Also, this is the first script, and it went through four drastic changes to reach the final product, which I ended up winging roughly half of it (maybe less) because of time restraints. I liked the first script, but the latest one I feel got to the point in the right amount of time).
I don’t know how other people write scripts, but I’m a visual person; as I wrote, I could conceptualize how each scene would look without even doing thumbnails first, so if the panel descriptions look bare, keep in mind it was only used for me to jog my own established visuals (but if you have any tips on script making for others to see, please share).
I had the intention to finish the scripting process by the end of the month. Even as I write this, all four major scripts are left incomplete, because I knew I had to start drawing soon. And that also had its ups and downs.
Battling a Learning Curve
Honestly, everything I’ve written about so far was a huge learning curve for me. There’s a lot of “never have I ever’s” sprouting in this post; Never have I ever finished a story, wrote a script, wrote for this genre, etc. To add to the list, never have I ever made a comic in Procreate.
I won’t go into extensive detail about comic making in Procreate (I’d like to make a separate post about that, comparing the experience with working in other software), but the biggest plus to working in Procreate was that I was not tethered to my computer desk or Wacom plugs. (Tangent: The Cintiq 13HD’s 3-in-1 cable is a bitter, bitter joke.)
(Thumbnails for chapter one. Pretty much verbatim how it looks in the final product)
Procreate is not made for efficient comic-making—which I knew already. It doesn’t have comic tools you’d find in software like Clip Studio Paint, but I also wanted to draw in Procreate because it’s new software for me, and I don’t plan on dishing out a yearly payment for a product I own on desktop anytime soon. All the panels and bubbles are drawn manually, even the guides were made in Affinity Designer. In Clip, these are all quick tools and page setup functions. I’m not complaining, though—they were kinda fun to make if a bit time-consuming. The only thing that truly annoyed me is there is no efficient way to outline the bubbles; I eventually embraced an offset white fill for the bubbles in MaL, but I don’t always want them to look like that, especially for Bobby.
Speaking of Affinity Designer…
That is where I did my final layout. I needed precise measurements for each export (a total of 178 800x1280 pages) and Procreate severely lacks that. This is also something I would’ve done in Clip, but Affinity has this cool “export persona” where you can create “slices” to export, which you can see on the right of the screenshot
- (Side note: I know the slice borders say 799x2179, but it’s 800x1280. I should know, I struggled to get that measurement right)
But besides good ole’ fashion page layout elbow grease, the most pressing, and highest learning curve for me was the character design.
I love Character Design. I love Environmental Design as well, but admittedly, the average viewer doesn’t focus too much on backgrounds, and the human face is something everyone relates to. It’s also the hardest thing to draw. I would’ve loved to take time and focus on designing my two main characters so they’d just be easier for me to draw (as I’ve done with Bobby. But Bobby’s not people so Bobby doesn’t count), but since the beginning, time was not on my side. Consequently, there were times when I had to redraw the same panel over, and over, and over, and over, andover,andoverandov—
You get the point. Character design is important. For multiple reasons.
I had to accelerate my learning in every aspect if I was going to qualify for the contest. I hope I did it justice.
A Shy Conclusion
I want to have the confidence to say I did a good job, but this project has truly shot that confidence to the dirt. There were countless times I wanted to give up because there was just so much work to be done, and there is an extremely low chance that I’d win (I have no large following, so my submission will just get lost in the shuffle if it hasn’t already). I haven’t even shown to many people — I barely shared it within my circle because I just don’t know if it’s good. And that hasn’t happened before. I’m insecure about a lot of things, but not my artwork (not even my old artwork) so this is new to me. However, I accomplished what I set out to do. Even if nothing else comes of MaL, I finished something, and the pride I feel from that grounding foundation I will slowly rebuild my confidence on; this essay-long post was one step.
For all the emotional turmoil this has given me, I don’t regret participating. I learned a lot about story-making and I know I’ll keep learning. This experience has made me reevaluate how I approach story building, and value visual narratives that much more— especially short stories made by one person.
If you finished reading this, I thank you. For listening to my rambling, and being intrigued enough give me your attention for this long (also, write ‘bingo’ in the comments cause that’s fun).
If I could ask for a little more of your time, I’d be very grateful if you checked out my four-month short story in the making. Or take a gander at this portfolio. Or simply spruce through my Instagram.
Thanks again for staying this long. Hope you enjoy Mattress at Luvia.