Have you been wondering about the Camp FUNdament book? Updates, course changes, cover concepts, pre-sales? No? I haven’t either. Erin at Scholastic is working her fingers to the bone (I never really understood that phrase) and I am onto other projects.
One is a picture book about acknowledging your inner monster, which I struggled over for a while and finally put away because I can’t make it fun. Who wants to read about how yucky we all are? The story is important, but I don’t know how to tell it. Not yet.
Meanwhile – the focus of this post - I am recasting another book as a graphic novel. Which means eliminating about three quarters of it. Interesting work.
Losing description is straightforward. I didn’t spend hours deciding on the perfect poetic phrase to depict eyes or weaponry or furnishings or sunsets. I’m happy to strike out my words and let the artist do the heavy lifting.
Putting action into pictures – writing instructions about what I want to see - is a useful exercise. Success will depend on the artist’s skill, but I’ve learned some things along the way.
Insight is a problem. My heroes spend a lot of time thinking. How many of those words can I lose? Graphic novels gain in pace but lose in nuance. A paragraph of internal conflict, weighing both sides of an issue, turns into a single thought bubble. ‘Ugh’ or ‘Wow.’
Should I accept emotional minimalism as characteristic of the genre or fight for change? Maybe I could try to revolutionize the idea of the graphic novel so that it would include more insight! Wouldn’t that be something? But am I the right person? I’m not that popular, not that committed, more unconventional than iconoclastic, too distractable, not much of a crusader in general. Or, as my thought bubble would put it:
‘Hmmm.’
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