4.5 Visual Writing
( Due: Sun, 19 Dec | Status: Not Completed )
1. What is Visual Writing? Well, when you’re writing a screenplay, you may provide some details about what a room contains or what a character might look like, but a lot of the details get left up to the director and the entire staff that works under him or her, making props, sets, and costumes; casting; and creating special effects. The division of labor is different in a game, but in many contexts, you will be doing the same thing: trusting others to put together their piece and trusting that it will fit with yours.
2. Some comics are written and drawn by the same person, and some are created by an entire team with a variety of roles, but most comics involve a close collaboration between a primary writer and a primary artist (the “penciller” in American superhero comics), even if others are involved. As you will see in the next section, comics scripts vary immensely in style and format and are often personal in tone, addressed directly to the artist. Not all comics scripts provide much visual detail, but most do. Visual Writing is writing intended to inform and inspire an artist.
3. Visual Writing is the kind of writing that games writers do when they write Descriptive Text for artists. If there’s a difference, the difference is that the games industry is more down-to-business and expects brief, clear descriptions, while much of the comics business has allowed and encouraged more evocative description.
4. One of the ways to learn Visual Writing is to read comics scripts. Another is to read visually descriptive prose. Read this passage from near the beginning of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, a novel written in 1819:
“The sun was setting upon one of the rich grassy glades of that forest, which we have mentioned in the beginning of the chapter. Hundreds of broad-headed, short-stemmed, wide-branched oaks, which had witnessed perhaps the stately march of the Roman soldiery, flung their gnarled arms over a thick carpet of the most delicious green sward; in some places they were intermingled with beeches, hollies, and copsewood of various descriptions, so closely as totally to intercept the level beams of the sinking sun; in others they receded from each other, forming those long sweeping vistas, in the intricacy of which the eye delights to lose itself, while imagination considers them as the paths to yet wilder scenes of silvan solitude. Here the red rays of the sun shot a broken and discoloured light, that partially hung upon the shattered boughs and mossy trunks of the trees, and there they illuminated in brilliant patches the portions of turf to which they made their way. A considerable open space, in the midst of this glade, seemed formerly to have been dedicated to the rites of Druidical superstition; for, on the summit of a hillock, so regular as to seem artificial, there still remained part of a circle of rough unhewn stones, of large dimensions. Seven stood upright; the rest had been dislodged from their places, probably by the zeal of some convert to Christianity, and lay, some prostrate near their former site, and others on the side of the hill. One large stone only had found its way to the bottom, and in stopping the course of a small brook, which glided smoothly round the foot of the eminence, gave, by its opposition, a feeble voice of murmur to the placid and elsewhere silent streamlet.”
--cited from the Project Gutenberg version of the text, available at:
5. So, Visual Writing is not new. This passage may be interesting or dull to you, but it is full of visual detail, as well as some speculative context (were the stones dug up by a zealous Christian?). Some comics writers include such speculation in order to help artists get into the “feel” of a scene (Alan Moore’s scripts are notoriously detailed and full of context and chatter), but most would write more tersely than Scott.
6. Let’s look at another passage. This is from H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, and is a scientist’s description of an alien being (an “Elder Thing”) found frozen near the south pole:
a. “‘Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot, five-ridged barrel torso three and five-tenths feet central diameter, one foot end diameters. Dark gray, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot membranous wings of same color, found folded, spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing framework tubular or glandular, of lighter gray, with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have serrated edge. Around equator, one at central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges are five systems of light gray flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of over three feet. Like arms of primitive crinoid. Single stalks three inches diameter branch after six inches into five substalks, each of which branches after eight inches into small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of twenty-five tentacles.
‘At top of torso blunt, bulbous neck of lighter gray, with gill-like suggestions, holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colors.
‘Head thick and puffy, about two feet point to point, with three-inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each point. Slit in exact center of top probably breathing aperture. At end of each tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane rolls back on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised globe, evidently an eye.”
--cited from the Dagonbytes.com version of the text, available at:
7. Lovecraft was a master of alien horror, but the description above wouldn’t have earned him his reputation by itself. Contrast that description with this one from later in the same story, when the narrator is fleeing from an even stranger creature, a Shoggoth:
“‘South Station Under - Washington Under - Park Street Under-Kendall - Central – Harvard –’ The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it. We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see - for the mists were indeed all too maliguly thinned - was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s "thing that should not be"; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform - the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.
But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train - a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry- ‘Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!’ and at last we remembered that the demoniac Shoggoths - given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot groups expressed - had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters.”
--cited from the Dagonbytes.com version of the text, available at:
8. Now, to put that all into context, watch this talk by comics artist/writer Ben Katchor, at TED:
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