THE SIMPSONS NEWS

Wow, I had a nice vacation in spite of the fact that I spent Christmas in bed.  I SOOO didn’t want to come back to work, even though I have a great job.  I came back and it didn’t take long before I was under the gun. I was given Act 1 of show 17 to finish by the end of the week. It has the most changes out all the acts on the show.  Hurray for me.

In other news, I was asked by Director/writer Luke Gray a few questions earlier this week about the show. One of them being about drawing ourselves or family and friends in crowd scenes on the show.  In answering the question, I remembered that a friend of mine had drawn me in one of the shows because he thought it would be funny.  He drew me getting pushed down by Mark Hamill in the show he was a guest star in.  Here’s the clip where I show up. Look for me at 0:08 seconds.  I’m the long haired guy with the brown hair, in the black t-shirt:

VIDEOS

Wow, fellow CARTOONISTA  Ted Seko ROCKS! The guy does some fantastic things. Check out all the cool things he makes.  He’s a production machine AND he does handmade comics to boot.  Sooo cool! Get ready to be inspired:

PODCASTS

So I thought, before I began writing about writing, I would let you know that I was on the COMICS ARE GREAT! podcast. In it, Jerzy and I talk about writing, so if you want to LISTEN about  story, rather than read it, I recommend you go over a give it a listen.

COMICS ARE GREAT 10

I had a blast on the podcast.

WRITING

(For those of you coming in late to these posts, if you want to read what my project is about, CLICK HERE to learn about the general world the story takes place in, and CLICK HERE if you want to know the story itself.)

Below is an excerpt of what I wrote the last two weeks, as set up for what I’m writing about THIS week, in case you’re interested in following along with more depth:

Right now, the theory of story that I like to use to flesh out my plot is the DRAMATICA theory.  Unfortunately the DRAMATICA theory is so complicated and convoluted, that I can’t really sum it up in a nut shell. If you want to get an idea of what DRAMATICA is all about, click the link below:

What is DRAMATICA?

In order for you to be able to understand it fully, you would need to download and read the FREE book on pdf. Click the link below:

Free DRAMATICA pdf book

or listen to the FREE audio book podcasts by clicking the link below:

Free DRAMATICA audio book

or read the FREE text of the book directly from  their site by clicking the link below:

The DRAMATICA book readable on the net for free.

As I did the last two weeks, I’ll put up the DRAMATICA Table of Story Elements in order for you to understand what I’m talking about and so you can follow along.   For a clearer pdf version of the chart (download chart now):

Alright, now that I’ve broken down the three Acts, the next step it so break those Acts into sequences. We do this by looking at our chart and seeing what quad has my theme in it, which is Truth. This would be the Memories quad. Inside that quad is Truth. I’m going to use that “variations” (in this light gray quad) to breakdown my Acts into sequences. I will do this by comparing all the pairs in the quads with each other. Doing so is suppose to get me a well rounded thematic argument. This is what I mean by “comparing the pairs to each other”. I’m going to compare:

• Truth/Falsehood
• Truth/Evidence
• Truth/ Suspicion
  
• Falsehood/Evidence
• Falsehood/ Suspicion and
• Suspicion/Evidence  

How do I compare them? Well, from what I can understand from the DRAMATICA system, I’m going to ask these questions in order to compare these variations:

Truth/Falsehood

• Which is better, Truth or Falsehood?

Truth/Evidence

• When Truth is the issue, how do we rate Evidence based on those who espouse it?

Truth/ Suspicion

• When Truth is the issue, how do we rate Suspicion based on those who espouse it?

Falsehood/Evidence

• When Falsehood is the issue, how do we rate Evidence based on those who espouse it?

Falsehood/ Suspicion

• When Falsehood is the issue, how do we rate Suspicion based on those who espouse it?

Suspicion/Evidence

• Which carries the most weight when it comes to Truth?

Somewhere within the telling of my story, these questions have to be answered.  Since they are six questions and I have 3 Acts, I’ve decided to give each Act two of the questions to answer. This is how I broke it down:

Act 1

• Falsehood/ Suspicion
• Truth/ Suspicion

Act 2

• Truth/Evidence
  
• Falsehood/Evidence

Act 3

• Truth/Falsehood
• Suspicion/Evidence 

So that’s going to be the themes running though the three acts of my story. The order is not written in stone so I’ve left myself an opening to change my mind as the process dictates. I’m thinking of keeping these in mind when I actually start writing, but I’m not going to answer the questions right now.   It seems better and more fun for me to answer the questions as part of the spontaneous writing process.

Now that I have that done, I have to decide if I want to break my story up even more. It’s a short story and I’m not sure if I can or SHOULD do so.  The next step according to DRAMATICA is to breakdown the sequences into scenes. Each Sequence is broken down into four scenes which would leaves me with 24 scenes. That’s 24 scenes I may not have room in my story for. Unfortunately, as of the time of this writing, I haven’t got the slightest clue as to how to breakdown the sequences into 24 scenes even if I WANTED to.

Can you help me out and read pages 138 and 139 in the DRAMATICA book? Maybe YOU can figure it out. I’m a bit stumped.

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