Meltdown™ Comics Presents: #SUPERGODS an Evening with Grant Morrison & Gerard Way
happiness is awesome and you should ride it as long as it lasts. hope will keep you going, even when things really suck.
eureka moments often come when you least expect them. sometimes they come when you go looking for them, too. the last couple of days have been spent in the wake of one of those moments. more precisely, there were about 60 of them, taken in the form of the interview linked above (the embed was disabled).
after watching that, my head was aswim with ideas on the process of self-actualization, creativity, and what it means to be a human being in this world. the next time i sat down to write, i had to take a look at what i was working on and ask myself a couple of hard questions.
“is this worthy of the idea that i had when i started?”
“where did the energy, the dangerous edge, of my initial draft go?”
“is there a way to fix it, to bring it back from the dead without it feeling like a zombie?”
i came up with answers. some of them i didn’t want to acknowledge and some i accepted readily. no, it wasn’t worthy of the original idea and i knew quite well where the energy had gone. i had strapped it down and ripped out its soul when i tried to make it into a traditional narrative. plain and simple and easy to recognize and acknowledge.
it was fixable, too, but this was the part i didn’t want to face. it meant rewriting. again. but if i wanted to keep going, to finish it and see what it can become, i had to do it. so i started from the top, pulling chunks of the original first draft back in, making the ‘danger edition’. i know what the themes are underlying this story, but when i sit to write, i don’t think about them. you can’t or the story becomes heavy-handed and the theme becomes the story itself rather than what it’s about.
anyway, there’s work ahead of me and sometimes it will make me happy and sometimes i’ll just have to go on hope. that’s okay because i know i’m digging in deep and learning about myself, my voice, my ability to tell a story, and about the world and how the pieces all fit together. that makes it worth writing, even if it never sees the light of day.