This post was graciously sent in by Ran Brown of
Hollow and
Strike the Earth. It was allowed to be reposted from her site,
| brainspill |.

You’ve been working on that story for years–you’ve rewritten it, you’ve taken it to places for critique, you’ve rewritten it again. But something isn’t right. Maybe the people you asked for critique didn’t like it, or maybe you can’t figure out how to fill a particularly large plot-hole. Perhaps you’ve taken a step back and decided that your concept is all wrong or that your characters are unbelievable or unlikeable, or both, again. You feel like you’ve been working on this story forever, and yet you’re no closer to actually making it into a comic than you were on day one. So what can you do? The answer is simple:
Kill your baby. Or at least send it on a nice vacation.
When you work on a comic for a long time, you start to become attached. You love your characters like you’d love your children, and you become very set on the scenes, ideas and conflicts that you first imagined them in during character creation. The following statement may come as a shock, but, some of those initial ideas and scenes and conflicts will be bad. They will not work, no matter how hard you try and rework them, because as someone who is attached to their ‘baby,’ you can’t bear to cut something that you feel is the lifeblood of your character, or, if necessary, the character him/herself. You will almost always never even know it’s necessary, because the more attached you become, the less flaws look like flaws.
Often, when we find ourselves enthralled by a ‘baby’ project, there are plenty of signs that could but fail to alert us, because they don’t seem like signs. Here is a short list of some of the more common signs:
- A gigantic cast of characters. I cannot count the times I have opened a thread on a comic creators forum that says something along the lines of "Hi! I’m really having trouble starting my comic. I have 45 characters designed, and since they’re all so important, I’m having trouble deciding where to start. It’s a big project, I know, but everything needs to be perfect! Please help me!"
- An abundance of Mary-Sue characters. Everyone is awesome, and no one is just normal. The problem here is that everyone is just so special and cool that you have no idea how to start because you’re not even sure who the main character is, or who should be narrating, or whose eyes the readers will be seeing through, making actually starting scripting or pages difficult.
- An important scene that has to happen. Important scenes are not in themselves bad, but can become bad if they’re all your character has going for them. If everything you do to develop a character is just working up to a particular scene, your audience is likely to empathize with your character less. If you’re really having trouble with a scene and making it ‘feel’ right, you may want to ask any overly critical friends or forums for an input and brainstorming session.
- Critiques feel like a personal attack. Sometimes critiques are a personal attack–the person giving them has something against you, or contains personal attacks, for example: "Only a moron would think an idea like this would be worth making into a comic. Don’t quit your day job, stupid!" However, if ALL critiques feel like a personal attack, the problem is you, not them.
- You find yourself uttering the phrase "Don’t ask me to change anything." There is not a single story out there, especially among amateurs, that could not benefit from unnecessary scenes or characters being cut or replaced. If you ever say this, its because you think everything is perfect the way it is, and don’t really want critique as much as you want a slap on the back and a handshake for making something so awesome.
So what can you do? Well, you can change your scenery. Put that project on the back-burner, and work on something else. Change everything–change the genre, change the setting, new characters, new relationships, new everything. And start small–the last thing you want to do is end up enslaved to yet another baby project. Set deadlines for yourself, and get them done. If you can’t meet them, consider enlisting in a particularly motivated and like-minded friend who can keep you in check by working as your partner or editor.
And if you don’t? Welcome to Stagnationville, population: you and your baby.