Branch out

I recently read a great piece from Brian McDonald’s Invisible Ink blog about how imagination is like a reservoir.

Here’s a sample, but go read the whole thing (and check out his book too!)…

For a while, I was baffled as to why my screenplay made my agent think of a cartoon show. Then it hit me – he had no better reference for dead people walking around.

That’s when I realized that imagination is like a reservoir: you can take out only what you have put in.

I grew up reading comics, watching the Twilight Zone, Star Trek and The Outer Limits. I had also had books full of art by fantasy artists like Frank Frazetta. My mind was full of fantastic images and stories. This was the reservoir from which I drew. It was all of these things I took in that allowed me to create my own stories with their own realities.

My agent had a much more limited palette, so for him dead people equaled Scooby-Doo. He had no other reference point.

Before my internship at Wizard magazine, my comics intake was primarily Marvel books. Once I started on the job, I quickly learned that as expansive as I thought my Marvel knowledge was at the time, it wasn’t going to be enough to get by at a magazine that needed to fill its pages with just as much info on DC Comics, not to mention Dark Horse publications, IDW serials, and other pop culture info due to the rise of genre TV on the heels of hits like Lost and Heroes. So, being young, wanting to be good at my job, and partially equating that with becoming as much of an expert as I could in comics and pop culture, I began reading tons of comics and watching even more TV than I already did. I focused on the consuming as much of the specific mediums I had to cover, and I gorged myself.

I kept up this pattern for years. I forsook prose and limited my screen watching to, almost exclusively, serialized genre TV. The format of the bit-by-bit story fascinated me and I wanted to break it down and unravel the puzzle of how this format worked. But not in a general sense. I wanted to know why one sci-fi comic worked and another didn’t. Or why one supernatural show was a hit while another flopped. I figured that if I read enough graphic novels, good and bad, and did the same for TV, that some sort of truth about this type of serialized storytelling would reveal itself. Eventually, this focus got so intense that it became about analyzing the pieces of the puzzle as much as the puzzle itself. Did zombie infestations spread by bite work better than those spread by blood? Were the best zombie stories the ones about people, not about the undead themselves? Was one type of vampire mythos better than another? Why did Marvel’s superheroes work differently than DC’s and why did I think one worked better than the other?

Like MacDonald suggests, I was trying to put as much into my imagination reservoir as possible. And while I think that was a valuable experience, I think it became so much about cramming info into the reservoir, that I forgot about distilling that info into something that could actually help me better understand the puzzle of story.

Over the last few years, I think my brain subconsciously kicked me out of the rut of “the only way I can learn more about storytelling in comics/TV is through comics/TV.” Be it the need for something different in the face of a wave of subpar genre TV, the drive to be a better editor, or just the realization that studying any one piece isn’t going to help you complete the puzzle, I began to branch out. I’ve started reading a lot more prose, watching non-genre TV shows and movies, and—more recently—reading a lot about the craft of storytelling and writing. It’s made me realize that by specializing my quest for story understanding, I narrowed it to a detrimental place in which I was missing a ton of information that I could have learned. I had ignored the basics to focus on the specifics and, while the specifics can help you gain a greater understanding, you’ve got to keep perfecting the basics so the can amplify your specific knowledge. By broadening my intake, I’ve been able to see the patterns of how story works. I’ve been able to see the basics shine through better, the building blocks visible beneath the facade. When I decided to focus on story in general instead of the specialized knowledge of superhero stories or genre entertainment, it became clear that comparing the ins and outs of different werewolf origins might have value, but in the end, comics and TV that work don’t succeed based on a unique take of a zeitgeist monster—They thrive and work because they’re good well structured stories first and foremost.

Keep filling that imagination reservoir, but make sure to fill it with a variety of nourishment. We can’t live on bread alone, nor can we grow as storytellers on any one genre either.

Or, at least, I think that’s helped me over the past few years. Maybe switch up what you’re doing and see if it helps you.

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