Newsarama Interview with Warren Ellis
Spreading Warren Ellis to the unwashed masses. A good interview from Newsrama about writing:
KLEID: Lately you’ve been spending a good deal focusing on story format - you’ve instituted what’s being called “The Dose” - the single issue story ala FELL and CASANOVA. I know you’ve been toying with the idea of writing 48 page novellas and everytime I turn around there’s another innovative Ellisian way of presenting a story. As a writer do you feel that you focus on format first and then the story or do you dream up the idea and then toy with the best way to present it? Are there any formats you have yet to try that stories are percolating for in the back of your head?
ELLIS: I’ll come from any direction that gets me a story. If that sometimes means that I’ll come up with an interesting format first and then have to think about the kind of story that’d fit the format best, well, I’ll take it. If that means a story idea drops into my head and then I have to decide what format would serve the story best, I’ll take that too. Sometimes I’ll just decide to attack a genre, or be requested to, and then try to devise something I’d like to read in that genre — that’s how TRANSMETROPOLITAN happened.
As far as other formats go: there’s a ton of things I still want to try. I’ve never done a European-style album. I want to do a STRANGE DAYS-style anthology book, and also a 64pp monthly. For years, I’ve wanted to do original graphic novels in the 100pp Paradox Mystery format, which I guess we now call the manga format, ha ha. Those things would’ve taken over the world fifteen years ago if DC hadn’t insisted on making them three-part serialisations. One of the biggest missed opportunities of the 90s. And while American publishers were still telling me that small affordable black-and-white OGNs would never sell, manga took over the bookstores. Yes, I’m still pissed off about that.
KLEID: This year I’ve heard talk of an Ellis novel, Ellis TV shows, Ellis video game scripts and of course, Ellis comic books and graphic novels. I’ve done a bit of writing for the stage and I know there are different limitations and freedoms that come along when writing for varying mediums. Which, in your opinion, contains the greatest creative hurdles - writing for comics, for television or prose/novels?
ELLIS: Television, definitely. Prose was a wrench, because I had to go from describing pictures to suggesting them. But tv scripts are just insanely structured beasts, far more restrictive than comics scripts. Hitting ad breaks is a lot harder than hitting 22 pages of art. And the notes! 45 minutes of notes on my episode of JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED! And they told me that was a light pass. I can’t imagine having to work in a writer’s room on a network show. Writers like Dwayne McDuffie, John Rogers and Javi Grillo-Marxuach must be more than human to survive that process.
In contrast, the notes on the book were very very light — I think at this point we only have one serious disagreement to settle. I’m finishing the DEAD CHANNEL pilot this week, and we’ll see how that goes…!
KLEID: Recently, I was watching a fellow writer at a gathering of like-minded comic folks as she pulled away from the conversation to jot something in her moleskine notebook. There are days where I often see something that I want to use for a future story or capture an image that strikes me in a particular way. Now, I know that in the past you’ve recorded images and ideas with digital cameras… what other ways have you gathered your observations and organized them for use in a project? Ever grabbed the ever-present cocktail napkin and scribbled down a project pitch that went on to fame, fortune and the accolades of the people who matter?
ELLIS: I used to have a watch that recorded audio, which was useful. I’ll thumb out notes on my Treo. I’ve never yet had an idea that led to fame, fortune or the accolades of those who matter. I think I’ve been given one award in the last five years, and it wasn’t even from the comics field. Hell, I don’t even get to go to gatherings of like-minded people in the comics field. The last time I tried, I got nailed by a crazy “fan” who demanded I review his art portfolio at 11.30pm while I was trying to watch a band, turned out to be too drunk to understand a word I was saying, and got nasty fast. His drunk buddy had to stop me from standing up and knocking him down, while accidentally kicking me three times because he was too shitfaced to control his legs, and I just left.
KLEID: Dialogue is very important to you. It defines your characters and sets your work apart from others by incorporating diverse tone, banter and often very spare, well placed bits of comedy. You’ve admitted a love for the shows DEADWOOD and THE WEST WING, citing how important the dialogue is in each of these shows - how much has your writing been influenced or affected by Sorkin’s “walk fast, talk fast” style or Milch’s rich refined-mixed-with-vulgarity Old West banter? What other instances of unique dialogue have caught your eyes these days?
ELLIS: That’s the worst bit — trying to trap bits of other writers in your work and taking them out. You really have to work hard to just understand how those writers got their effects and then incorporate that into your own style. And then you discover that some of that stuff doesn’t work in comics. Sorkin, understanding actors, gets some of his effects from just having the characters speak faster, getting that density of dialogue into a small slice of time. You can’t do that in comics without crowding out an artist — although I’ve noticed that lettering has gotten smaller in recent years, so I’ve been able to get denser on some scripts of late. Milch’s effects on DEADWOOD come right out of Victorian language. You can’t ape that. You have to dig deeper and understand his decisions, and parse his effects from there. Both of them have terrible tics — you can tell any script Milch has written a pass of because someone says “anyways.” Sorkin recycles lines like a bastard, partly because he works so fast and has written so much — this is a guy with something like 120 hours of television under his belt. That’s more than 10,000 pages of manuscript he’s written passes of.
Complicating matters is the fact that dialogue on the page works very differently to spoken dialogue. The film of SIN CITY is a perfect illustration. You can’t say that shit. It works on the page because comics are a bastard form — it’s got theatre in it, but it’s also got the t-shirt slogan in it. Time can pause around a single line and the right image: a pose and a statement. Movies, almost by definition, don’t hold that too well.
And it cuts both ways: trying a Tommy Schlamme tracking shot of people walking down a corridor talking is murder, not least on the artist, who also has to map the space for the speech balloons to flow properly. You can take ideas from other media, but not necessarily the tools. Sorkin can lay the pipe for an episode about the collapse of the American economy by having Josh and Donna talk fast during a brisk trot to the Oval Office: that’s a minute in screen time. Laying down that density of dialogue is probably two pages in comics, which is an awful lot of chronological real estate in a 22–page unit: adhering to the Stan Lee rule, a standard panel can only usefully hold 28 words or so. If you’re judicious, that’s three short lines. But you’ve already lost the top of the page to an establishing shot, you’ve got at least two people in every subsequent panel unless you start cutting to single head shots, you need at least four major additional actions to the characters in that sequence to stop the artist falling into a coma and the space to accentuate those so you’re probably dropping a line here and there… you know what I’m talking about, Neil, but everyone else can see how nuts this can drive you.
Anyway, back to the plot. I’ll watch stuff just to listen to the dialogue, yes, or read scripts. ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT scripts can be a joy. Troy Kennedy Martin was amazing with pauses and unexpected statements. Re-watching STAR COPS, I’m surprised at Chris Boucher’s facility with dialogue, although you can’t really go wrong with David Calder speaking it. Jimmy McGovern, of course.
In comics, Garth has always been the best dialogue writer. His process should be everyone’s: he reads the stuff out loud until it works. Grant understands the whole form, though, and brings in influences from music and theatre and, yes, slogan writing. Peter David, when he’s on his game, is instinctively brilliant at dialogue, as is Joss, who cranks off one-liners I’d kill for. I think Gail’s great strength is probably dialogue: I like watching her play with sentences and exchanges, the odd little inversions she pulls off. Brett Lewis does incredible work with language in WINTER MEN — he’s probably the guy working right now whose sensibility is closest to David Milch.
KLEID: Balancing a mix of company books, creator owned projects, Hollywood/alternate media writing and downtime is sometimes nigh impossible. Even those who devote their days to full time writing sometimes tend to burn out… how do you budget yourself and your time so that by Friday you’re not breaking your various bits of technology over the heads of passersbys screaming at them to make it stopMAKEITSTOPANDGIVEMEREDBULL… er,you get the idea.
ELLIS: Budget time? I work sixteen hours a day. That’s all I can tell you. I write until I can’t.
KLEID: Lately you’ve been spending a good deal focusing on story format - you’ve instituted what’s being called “The Dose” - the single issue story ala FELL and CASANOVA. I know you’ve been toying with the idea of writing 48 page novellas and everytime I turn around there’s another innovative Ellisian way of presenting a story. As a writer do you feel that you focus on format first and then the story or do you dream up the idea and then toy with the best way to present it? Are there any formats you have yet to try that stories are percolating for in the back of your head?
ELLIS: I’ll come from any direction that gets me a story. If that sometimes means that I’ll come up with an interesting format first and then have to think about the kind of story that’d fit the format best, well, I’ll take it. If that means a story idea drops into my head and then I have to decide what format would serve the story best, I’ll take that too. Sometimes I’ll just decide to attack a genre, or be requested to, and then try to devise something I’d like to read in that genre — that’s how TRANSMETROPOLITAN happened.
As far as other formats go: there’s a ton of things I still want to try. I’ve never done a European-style album. I want to do a STRANGE DAYS-style anthology book, and also a 64pp monthly. For years, I’ve wanted to do original graphic novels in the 100pp Paradox Mystery format, which I guess we now call the manga format, ha ha. Those things would’ve taken over the world fifteen years ago if DC hadn’t insisted on making them three-part serialisations. One of the biggest missed opportunities of the 90s. And while American publishers were still telling me that small affordable black-and-white OGNs would never sell, manga took over the bookstores. Yes, I’m still pissed off about that.
KLEID: This year I’ve heard talk of an Ellis novel, Ellis TV shows, Ellis video game scripts and of course, Ellis comic books and graphic novels. I’ve done a bit of writing for the stage and I know there are different limitations and freedoms that come along when writing for varying mediums. Which, in your opinion, contains the greatest creative hurdles - writing for comics, for television or prose/novels?
ELLIS: Television, definitely. Prose was a wrench, because I had to go from describing pictures to suggesting them. But tv scripts are just insanely structured beasts, far more restrictive than comics scripts. Hitting ad breaks is a lot harder than hitting 22 pages of art. And the notes! 45 minutes of notes on my episode of JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED! And they told me that was a light pass. I can’t imagine having to work in a writer’s room on a network show. Writers like Dwayne McDuffie, John Rogers and Javi Grillo-Marxuach must be more than human to survive that process.
In contrast, the notes on the book were very very light — I think at this point we only have one serious disagreement to settle. I’m finishing the DEAD CHANNEL pilot this week, and we’ll see how that goes…!
KLEID: Recently, I was watching a fellow writer at a gathering of like-minded comic folks as she pulled away from the conversation to jot something in her moleskine notebook. There are days where I often see something that I want to use for a future story or capture an image that strikes me in a particular way. Now, I know that in the past you’ve recorded images and ideas with digital cameras… what other ways have you gathered your observations and organized them for use in a project? Ever grabbed the ever-present cocktail napkin and scribbled down a project pitch that went on to fame, fortune and the accolades of the people who matter?
ELLIS: I used to have a watch that recorded audio, which was useful. I’ll thumb out notes on my Treo. I’ve never yet had an idea that led to fame, fortune or the accolades of those who matter. I think I’ve been given one award in the last five years, and it wasn’t even from the comics field. Hell, I don’t even get to go to gatherings of like-minded people in the comics field. The last time I tried, I got nailed by a crazy “fan” who demanded I review his art portfolio at 11.30pm while I was trying to watch a band, turned out to be too drunk to understand a word I was saying, and got nasty fast. His drunk buddy had to stop me from standing up and knocking him down, while accidentally kicking me three times because he was too shitfaced to control his legs, and I just left.
KLEID: Dialogue is very important to you. It defines your characters and sets your work apart from others by incorporating diverse tone, banter and often very spare, well placed bits of comedy. You’ve admitted a love for the shows DEADWOOD and THE WEST WING, citing how important the dialogue is in each of these shows - how much has your writing been influenced or affected by Sorkin’s “walk fast, talk fast” style or Milch’s rich refined-mixed-with-vulgarity Old West banter? What other instances of unique dialogue have caught your eyes these days?
ELLIS: That’s the worst bit — trying to trap bits of other writers in your work and taking them out. You really have to work hard to just understand how those writers got their effects and then incorporate that into your own style. And then you discover that some of that stuff doesn’t work in comics. Sorkin, understanding actors, gets some of his effects from just having the characters speak faster, getting that density of dialogue into a small slice of time. You can’t do that in comics without crowding out an artist — although I’ve noticed that lettering has gotten smaller in recent years, so I’ve been able to get denser on some scripts of late. Milch’s effects on DEADWOOD come right out of Victorian language. You can’t ape that. You have to dig deeper and understand his decisions, and parse his effects from there. Both of them have terrible tics — you can tell any script Milch has written a pass of because someone says “anyways.” Sorkin recycles lines like a bastard, partly because he works so fast and has written so much — this is a guy with something like 120 hours of television under his belt. That’s more than 10,000 pages of manuscript he’s written passes of.
Complicating matters is the fact that dialogue on the page works very differently to spoken dialogue. The film of SIN CITY is a perfect illustration. You can’t say that shit. It works on the page because comics are a bastard form — it’s got theatre in it, but it’s also got the t-shirt slogan in it. Time can pause around a single line and the right image: a pose and a statement. Movies, almost by definition, don’t hold that too well.
And it cuts both ways: trying a Tommy Schlamme tracking shot of people walking down a corridor talking is murder, not least on the artist, who also has to map the space for the speech balloons to flow properly. You can take ideas from other media, but not necessarily the tools. Sorkin can lay the pipe for an episode about the collapse of the American economy by having Josh and Donna talk fast during a brisk trot to the Oval Office: that’s a minute in screen time. Laying down that density of dialogue is probably two pages in comics, which is an awful lot of chronological real estate in a 22–page unit: adhering to the Stan Lee rule, a standard panel can only usefully hold 28 words or so. If you’re judicious, that’s three short lines. But you’ve already lost the top of the page to an establishing shot, you’ve got at least two people in every subsequent panel unless you start cutting to single head shots, you need at least four major additional actions to the characters in that sequence to stop the artist falling into a coma and the space to accentuate those so you’re probably dropping a line here and there… you know what I’m talking about, Neil, but everyone else can see how nuts this can drive you.
Anyway, back to the plot. I’ll watch stuff just to listen to the dialogue, yes, or read scripts. ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT scripts can be a joy. Troy Kennedy Martin was amazing with pauses and unexpected statements. Re-watching STAR COPS, I’m surprised at Chris Boucher’s facility with dialogue, although you can’t really go wrong with David Calder speaking it. Jimmy McGovern, of course.
In comics, Garth has always been the best dialogue writer. His process should be everyone’s: he reads the stuff out loud until it works. Grant understands the whole form, though, and brings in influences from music and theatre and, yes, slogan writing. Peter David, when he’s on his game, is instinctively brilliant at dialogue, as is Joss, who cranks off one-liners I’d kill for. I think Gail’s great strength is probably dialogue: I like watching her play with sentences and exchanges, the odd little inversions she pulls off. Brett Lewis does incredible work with language in WINTER MEN — he’s probably the guy working right now whose sensibility is closest to David Milch.
KLEID: Balancing a mix of company books, creator owned projects, Hollywood/alternate media writing and downtime is sometimes nigh impossible. Even those who devote their days to full time writing sometimes tend to burn out… how do you budget yourself and your time so that by Friday you’re not breaking your various bits of technology over the heads of passersbys screaming at them to make it stopMAKEITSTOPANDGIVEMEREDBULL… er,you get the idea.
ELLIS: Budget time? I work sixteen hours a day. That’s all I can tell you. I write until I can’t.
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