Overcome the Fear of a Blank Page by Making It Less Blank
4 practical tips for storytelling and comics
4 practical tips for storytelling and comics
Have you ever been in a situation where someone says, “Say something in your language, I want to hear how it sounds.” You mumble something but you just can’t come up with anything at that moment. What should you say, anyway? The problem is you are expected to invent a sentence on the spot, without any prior context. This is exactly the kind of problem creators and artists face every day: The fear of a blank page and its relative writer’s block. So, how do we solve it? My answer is we need to make the page less blank. Here are a few ways to do it.
1. Limit the toolkit
When you want to start a work of art, you can literally create anything and that can be daunting. Unless you already have an idea you want to explore, the endless possibilities of the blank page can paralyze you and lead to writer’s block. You can fight these endless possibilities by limiting them.
For visual artists, this would be limiting the colors, brushes, or shapes you are going to use. In fact, you can literally make the page less white. As my painting teacher once advised me, adding a background color to your canvas kills the fear of the blank page. In creative writing, we often take 5 random words for a character, place, event, and time, and write a story starting with these prompts. They are here just to help us get started with our creative process.
I often limit my toolkit by using LEGO as inspiration. Last year I bought LEGO skeleton minifigures for Halloween and I wanted to use them in a comic. In the beginning I had no idea what to do with them, but I started thinking in very simple terms: Skeletons are dead, people are alive. What if I joked about life and death?
I was pretty satisfied with the result, as this joke superseded my usual level of being funny. The fact that my toolkit was limited made me think outside the box, in a way I would not have ever thought of if I just wanted to draw a comic on a blank page.
In the case of “Scary”, I also limited my thematic scope to Halloween, which was coming up at the time. I often find that holiday-themed comics are the easiest to make, simply because there isn’t that much wiggle room around what the comic can be about.
2. Use a real-life moment and create a story around it
A great way to instantly come up with an interesting premise, both in fiction and semi-autobiographical storytelling, is being observant of what people say and do in your own life. We might think life is not nearly as funny or dramatic as movies are, but that is often not true. We just don’t pay attention to the key moments that can become the heart of any story. Here I illustrate how I turned a normal real-life moment into a funny comic.
It’s not a secret that I have been completely obsessed with the Heartstopper show and comic in recent months. I also started following people on social media talking about Heartstopper, and I was suddenly sucked into the rabbit hole of Gen Z content online. One day my partner came up to me and said: “It’s like you’re becoming a teenager again.”
If written up literally as it happened, this situation alone is probably not interesting enough. In order to make this into a funny anecdote, we need to exaggerate it a little bit. What if, instead of my partner, a highly qualified doctor said I was in fact becoming a teenager again? That is how the comic below was born.
If you are writing fiction instead of creating funny comic strips, you might use a real-life moment as a starting point of your story, or as a formative moment for one of your fictional characters. Either way, pay attention to what happens around you and use it in your stories!
3. Choose a random action to start the story
If you cannot remember any potentially interesting life moments but you want to create something right now, I’ve got you covered. Just use any random physical action to start your story and see where you will go from there. In my comic class, our teacher once suggested we draw a comic with the character getting up and going to the fridge.
I thought of this comic just as a drawing exercise but as I started working on it, I kept making small additions and realized there is a potential for a funny story here. It’s not one of my best comics ever but it definitely delivers, in tone and humor.
4. Come up with a short story instead of a long one
Writer’s block often comes up when we feel that the task ahead of us is too big or daunting. We don’t know where to start and we fear failure. So, why don’t we just start small, and instead of a big story we create a short one first?
You can still plan your magnum opus, but for now a short story will 1) help you grow your (drawing/writing) skills, 2) give you the instant reward of having created something, 3) feed your self-confidence, which is desperately needed if you want to create your magnum opus, and 4) motivate you to continue working on your long-term bigger projects.
You got it, focusing on short and sweet is the key. But what is the direction you should take if you want this short story to be useful for your bigger projects? There is no right answer here, but try exploring the emotional theme of your big story in this short story. In other words, even if the characters and the genre of the short story are different, they can still reflect the emotional truth or dilemmas that you want to write about in your long story.
Although I am not exactly working on my magnum opus, there are certain themes I am interested in, which could potentially lead to bigger, more complex stories. For now, however, I am exploring these themes with shorter stories and autobiographical anecdotes, such as the one in “A cosmic joke” below.
If you create anything following these 4 tips, let me know in the comments below, I would love to see it!
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