"3 Common Myths about Writing Graphic Novels"

Thrilled to say that my article about writing graphic novels was published today by Women on Writing. Ta-da!

To learn more, check out my Fundamentals of Graphic Novel class. Sign-ups open now through the first day of class: Friday, October 30th.

“3 Common Myths about Writing Graphic Novels”

By: Melanie Faith

I’ve enjoyed reading graphic novels for the past ten years. These character-driven books are often humorous and fun-loving, but they can also be thought-provoking or even gritty and dramatic page-turners. They might explore historical landscapes, our current world settings, or a future planetary colony.

The astounding variety of graphic novels earns this genre a coveted spot on my overflowing bookshelves, always.

If you’re anything like me, though, you might initially have thought, this is so cool, but I can’t even draw a person to scale. I could never do that.

Let’s dive into three of the biggest myths about crafting graphic novels and take heart that not only can we read graphic novels, but we can write our own quite well, too:

1.       You have to be a great artist who gets compliments on their drawing talent. False.   By far, this is the myth I hear most. The thing is, if you can draw a stick figure, you can craft a comic. If you can sketch a caricature, you can create a comic. If you can run computer software, you could also make a graphic novel using software. If you have a pal who loves to draw, you could team up (you craft the story, they craft the illustrations) or you could hire an illustrator to bring your dialogue and characters to life for a collaboration that way.

Comics are an elastic, vivacious art form, made in all of these ways and more.  For example, sometimes elements such as photographs and collage are also the art in “drawing” a comic.

There are as many styles of comics as you can imagine: from hand-made photocopied zines to computer-drawn animations and figures, from works produced on a shoestring budget of a single author with a day job in another industry to comics backed by an international corporation or a local small or regional publishing house, and everything in-between. Best of all: they are all legitimate art forms.

Just as we wouldn’t say that Gertrude Stein was any less of a poet than Shakespeare, they just both had vastly different literary styles and subject matter, a one-person, hand-sketched comic still belongs to the art form.  

We can always take art classes later to improve our drawing skills if that’s our aim; what’s most important is that all of us, starting where we are, today, with whatever our native talent, can create an outline or caricature with personality and have fun exploring just what and where that drawing will take us and our stories. With the skills we have at this very moment.    

2.       You have to have an earth-shattering plot to begin a project like that. False.  There are graphic novels about as many happenings under the sun as one can imagine, from cooking (Relish: My Life in the Kitchen) to living with mental illness (Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me). While some awesome comics do celebrate celebrities (Josephine Baker and Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide) or are set against a backdrop of political revolutions (Persepolis), just as many great comics detail what it’s like to be an everyday person with hopes and dreams that are frequently dashed in this topsy-turvy world.

There are graphic novels that explore familial and relationship turmoil, what it’s like to be a teen or a college student living away from home for the first time, or an immigrant learning a new language and culture, or a struggling middle-aged father who has lost a child, or someone living with an infertility struggle.

If it’s happened to you or someone you’re close to or if you’ve observed a truth about life, it could make an excellent graphic novel.  Comics are about human experience, and the range and breadth of human experience is vast and breathtakingly promising for a writer.

3.        You have to have the entire plot figured out before even bothering to start. False.  One of the great aspects of writing comics is that you can begin by brainstorming a protagonist. Someone with a personality. Someone with struggles. Someone with a set-back and hidden (or not-so-hidden) dreams. And that protagonist’s little (or big) corner of the world (aka: setting). And that protagonist’s antagonist. One spark of inspiration builds and leads to the next.

And hey, you don’t even have to create a fictional character from scratch if you don’t want to—you can be the protagonist of you own story in graphic memoir. Many established and award-winning graphic artists, like Alison Bechdel and Lucy  Knisley, are heroine characters in their books. Graphic memoirs can be autofiction, too. What a diverse genre!

It bears repeating: it doesn’t take a degree or special talent in art per say to create a narrative that meshes with artistic imagery to develop story. If you can doodle some forms in a margin, you can create a comic sketch. If you can pen a vignette or a short story-length tale with some conflict and characterizations and setting, you can develop the working start for a great graphic novel.

Whether you chose to buddy up with a trained artist or collage the scene yourself or incorporate photos or draw outlines and squiggles of your own or explore computerized software to craft drawings, you already have the basic building blocks to begin in this fascinating genre.

Photo courtesy of Unsplash, by: Mahdiar Mahmoodi

Photo courtesy of Unsplash, by: Mahdiar Mahmoodi

Photography Published in Molecule :)

Check out the latest amazing issue of Molecule, which features one of my black-and-white film photographs as well as excellent short poems, prose, and even a play. Here’s to issue #3!

Roll4BWBSGilbertBottle3-22-20.jpg

The bottle was a find in my dad’s workshop— it’s glass, with a wonderful heft, and the letters on the bottle are raised/embossed. I love the font and how the bottle’s inscription includes a place on it.

"Sharpen Your Sensory Writing with Food Writing" Article Published :)

Great news! My article was published today at Women on Writing. Read on, and savor the prompt at the end.

“Sharpen Your Sensory Writing with Food Writing”

By: Melanie Faith

Photo by Brooke Lark at unsplash.com

Photo by Brooke Lark at unsplash.com

Food, glorious food! I’ll tell you a secret: I’m certainly not the world’s best or most adventurous cook, but I adore food in all of its gooeyness, crispiness, savoriness, sweetness, smoothness, chewiness, cheesiness, and freshness. I even sometimes love its greasiness (here’s looking at you, beloved French fries with a dollop of salty-sweet Heinz ketchup).

Food is variety and memory and creativity. Food is innovation and tradition and resilience. Food has meant even more recently as it’s meant comfort.

Since quarantine and COVID-19, I’ve found myself, like many writers and creative folks, considering the great value of any certainties and peace-givers amidst the many uncertainties. Food has brought structure to days that, otherwise, would have felt adrift.

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks happen every day, however much our schools have closed and gone online, our jobs have gone away or gone online, and our everyday activities, like meeting friends at our homes or at the movies, have been reduced to streaming alone on a phone.

Food remains a constant that has cheered my days, and I’m not the only one—many of my writing friends have noted the uplift food has brought them. We’re trying new recipes or breaking out older ones. Families now spend more time at home without getting take-out and as a result are cooking together, making amazing desserts, main courses, and side dishes that have filled my Instagram with awe.

Friends and family from afar have had motivating, friendly “competitions” to see whose chili recipe or chocolate cake turned out the best; some of us have even Zoomed or Skyped our creations, like a long-distance picnic, while talking or watching TV together. It’s a new world, and yet food shows us that it is also still a connected, social one.

I don’t even have to make or eat the meal myself to enjoy it. Lately, I’ve been watching lots of Netflix cooking shows and the Food Network: from The Great British Baking Show, Crazy Delicious, and Nailed It! to Beat Bobby Flay; Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives; Chopped; Amy Schumer Learns to Cook; and The Pioneer Woman. Some of these shows are competitions while others take viewers into restaurant or home kitchens (or sound stages) where the host offers pleasant explication and a feast for the eyes every time.

As writers, we don’t have to own restaurants or host shows to be experts on the topic. We all eat numerous times a day. We have all eaten hideous dishes that we’re not anxious to repeat as well as delicious food we wish we could eat every day. We all have had the dish that turned out great and the recipe that, despite our best efforts, bombed. We all have memories of food connected—for good or bad—to friends, family, and places (school and hospital cafeterias certainly have their own distinctive tray-bound dishes).

Authentic human emotions are often tied to eating. Many of us have experienced food anxiety, food disorders, food pressures, or struggles with our weight—this is meaningful terrain that can be incorporated into food-writing pieces.

As creatives, writing about food awakens our senses. Food descriptions, symbolism, and images are often profound and resonate with readers. Food has the obvious plate appeal, but it also has scents, textures, and sounds: that sizzling of steak or fajitas, for instance.

One of many things I savor about teaching my Food Writing course is the vast variety of writing food inspires. Writing about food is a wonderful way to deepen our descriptive skills in many genres (fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction essays, to name just three), because writing about food includes incorporating many senses and sensations. It’s also often very, very fun to write.

Food writing is a scene from a novel where characters partake in a protagonist’s going-away potluck dinner. Food writing is a poem about plums in the rain. Food writing is the creation of a new recipe or an essay exploring the cultural and familial history of a beloved tried-and-true recipe.

Food writing is also a short story where a character must learn how to cook within two weeks to impress his in-laws. Food writing is a review of the paneer and the chicken tikka masala at your local Indian restaurant.  It’s also a blog about missing your mother and never quite being able to replicate her recipe for macaroni and cheese no matter how hard you try.

Food writing is all of these genres and more; its variations are endless as well as its enjoyment. Food writing is available to refresh the writing of every writer in bite-sized portions or by the baker’s dozen.  

FoodWritingforFunandProfit-MelanieFaith.jpg

Care to learn more? Join my Food Writing class. No previous cooking experience necessary. :) More details here: Food Writing for Fun and Profit.

Try this exercise:   Write a list of three or four of your favorite foods. Now, write a list of three or four foods you find obnoxious. Pick one food from your favorite list and one from your least-favorite list and compare them in a scene, a story, a poem, an essay, or any other genre of your choosing. Go!  

Photo by Cayla1 at unsplash.com

Photo by Cayla1 at unsplash.com

My Poem Featured :)

Cool news this week: I was honored that a poem from my This Passing Fever collection was chosen and read online by Lee Ann Berardi Smith as a part of an awesome poetry project. Catch it here.

Care to get your own signed copy of This Passing Fever? I’ve got you. Here.

Want to learn more about writing poetry? I’ve got that, too: here.

I’m in the midst of exciting music collaborations with the poems. More details later this year. Stay tuned!

this passing fever 2 9-01-18.jpg

My Photos Published in Burgundy Balloon :)

Pleased to announce that I have some photos (including this one, called “Next Steps”) published today in Burgundy Balloon.

Check out all of the images and some stellar creative writing, too (and consider submitting your own work) at: https://burgundyballoon.org/ .

Moment Series-- Next Steps.jpg

Poetry in a Time of Pandemic

It’s my honor to have a poem published in the St. Charles Arts Council’s project, Poetry in a Time of Pandemic. My poem, “Quarantine III,” was just published. May these poems bring comfort, insight, and hope to us all as we wait out this terrible virus.

“Quarantine III”

I cracked open a window, to be touched

by chilled arms: shrill April winds better

than nothing. Sister says she’s started

having nightmares about social distancing.

She wandered through a hall, body shaking,

shaking a fist at duos in sweaters carelessly

entwined in chaste hugs. Last night, I dreamt

of an anniversary party in a giant ballroom.

I asked at every festooned food table for

pretzel rods. I was that specific; they weren’t

just pretzels. The punch was Hawaiian red but

all I could scoop into my cup was pale pink,

square ice pellets that tasted of run-off and

blankness. Not even water could quench

as it vanished.  I took more anyway.

SCAC-logo-216x300.jpg

My Article Published: "4 Photo Hacks to Inspire Your Writing"

Great news! My article was published today. If you like writing & photography, then this one’s for you. Enjoy the writing exercise at the end.

“4 Photo Hacks to Inspire Your Writing”
By: Melanie Faith

Last week, I shot my first roll of film in over a decade.

Up to this point my photos, like a lot of my writing drafts, were entirely digital and screen-manipulated. This analog film process was nothing like that computerized process, refreshingly; it shook up the way I thought about crafting my work.

Roll4BWFlagCloseup3-22-20R.jpg

That first roll of film last week was also a lot of other firsts: first roll of black-and- white film, first time loading 120 film (I used to shoot 110 and 35 mm), first time shooting medium-format square negatives, first time using a cute, plastic Diana F+ camera.

120 film has just 12 negatives per roll. Unheard of in the digital world of endless do-overs and deletes. I still love digital, but practicing image-making on film is teaching me to approach my making creatively.

What can photography lend to our writing process?

• Renew your beginner’s mind.
I’ve been photographing since I was a teen, and yet here I was, trying several new photographic styles that were entirely fresh to me.

Many of us have been writing creatively for years, yet we, too, can capture that beginner’s mind and use it to create innovative drafts.

If you normally write prose, give poetry a shot. If you often write novels, try a short story or two.

Or pick a genre you’ve never practiced: perhaps flash memoir or writing a graphic novel or jokes for a stand-up routine.

Or switching POV from your standby third-person to first-person or second-person.

Or it could be as simple as writing a first draft longhand.

These changes won’t necessarily be permanent; they will, however, bring out new ideas and imagery that will surprise and motivate.

• Add a few restrictions to your art and watch it flourish.

In both photography and writing, sometimes if you put obstacles or limitations in your path, you can create something remarkable.

I know: paradoxical.

When shooting with film, I had just 12 clicks of the shutter. I also couldn’t preview it after taking the shots; the Diana F+ camera has a tiny viewfinder, but it’s not entirely accurate to what the lens will capture—it’s more like playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey than aiming at a dartboard. It’s a machine made for teaching how to approach and then let go of expectations.

I had my film for four days before I took that first roll for a spin; four days of narrowing down possible subject matter “worthy” of my twelve little compositions. Seven turned out well enough to submit to a literary magazine. I certainly don’t approach my digital photography that way. 

• Approach your writing with more of your full attention.

Because the camera and the shutter-release (on the side of the plastic lens!) and pretty much everything else about the camera was new to me, I had to slow down… and then slow down again… and then a third time. I watched a YouTube tutorial on loading the film about 12 times; no joke.

I quickly learned to trust my instincts more and to rule out certain subject matter in favor of other options, because I knew that I was paying $7.50 for the roll of film and almost $20 for developing.

Even though the cost isn’t exorbitant to practice film photography (especially getting third-hand cameras at an auction site like I did), that it COST me something made each shot precious.

What does your writing cost you? Sleeping in? Time out with family or friends? We value our art more when we sacrifice something for it.

• Think thematically.
Just like writers begin a novel, short story collection, poetry manuscript, or series of essays that surround the same theme or characters, photographers often challenge themselves to create a series based on the same subject, setting, or motif.

The other day, I took a twenty-minute walk with my new camera and then found, in storage, two lawn chairs that had almost been thrown out several times—their worn green webbing and silver metal bases redolent of my parents’ youth and endless picnics and fireworks displays. Yet they’d been stored away.

Gleefully, I dug them out from behind the staircase and arranged them in various configurations on the lawn. Six of out my twelve shots became a mini-series about the chairs.

If I’d had limitless shots would I have found the chairs as compelling, especially for a series? Maybe. But probably not.

It’s very common for writers, like photographers, to take part in creativity challenges that encourage such project-based thinking. Practicing your art with a group of like-minded people for consecutive days will more likely yield workable results.

We writers have NaNoWriMo in November and NaPoWriMo each April. Photographers have challenges like the 365 Project and monthly challenges, such as at Instagram where photographers post themed lists of ideas.

These challenges are often informal but incredibly liberating.

Both writing and photography rely on intuition and self-exploration. A mixture of knowing some things and making up the rest. Both arts often include elements of self-doubt or curiosity that are assuaged with practicing your craft on a regular basis.

Try this exercise: Make a list of five themes you could explore as a series in prose or photography.

Want to learn more? Try my May 2020 online Imagery Power: Photography for Writers class.

Take a perusal of Photography for Writers, my exercise-packed, creativity-fueling book. Signed copies also available at my Etsy: WritePathProductions.

Courtesy of Women on Writing https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/MelanieFaith_Photography.php

Courtesy of Women on Writing https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/MelanieFaith_Photography.php