Welcome back to Graphically Minded, a publication about writing and storytelling, relating the lessons I’ve learned in a 20-plus-year career as a comic book writer and author.
Admittedly, the last edition of the newsletter was, well, odd. Instead of advice about writing, it was a short story, I guess, a sort of parable that had no clear point. It was, in terms of the metrics that this platform gives me, the least read thing I’ve shared.
Then why the hell did I share it? Hm. I don’t know.
But let’s get back to that.
I want to talk a little about my very first comic book. Not the first one published, but the first one I ever wrote. It’s called THE LEG, and it follows the disembodied leg of Mexican President Santa Anna on a journey through that country during the 1930s. It is, obviously, very weird.
It’s the only book I ever published, one that couldn’t find a publisher and only sold about 2,000 copies. I knew going in that it wasn’t “commercial,” meaning it wouldn’t make any money. So, why write it?
I don’t know.
I heard this story about Santa Anna losing his leg in the Pastry War with France, then giving his own leg a military funeral, and finally the leg being exhumed and dragged through the street to protest Santa Anna. And for some reason my brain said: “What if the leg is still alive?!”
I couldn’t get it out of my head. What would it be doing? What would it want? How would it feel about its legacy? (No way around that pun.)
I wrote a script, and then by pure chance I met a young artist named Jose Pimienta and as we talked I learned they were from Mexico and they read the script and insisted I let them draw it and so off we went.
During those first years of my career, my storytelling came purely through instinct. I followed character’s journeys based purely on feel, what my gut told me. And as I had some success, I began working on bigger projects, and I realized that instinct wasn’t enough.
There was a world of knowledge about storytelling out there, and I needed that formal instruction (as a writer, I’m essentially self taught). I consumed a lot of books, created a lot of rubrics and structure and plans, and I spent the next handful of years very purposefully applying this rationality to my writing.
Those were successful years, I suppose, but they also were creatively frustrating. When I looked back at The Leg, I felt like I’d lost something. Some magic. My stories were solid…but they were also rote. Predictable. A bit boring, at least to me.
About five years ago I had the flu, and in my delirium I dreamed of an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. And this asteroid turned out to be a humanoid alien. And it crashed into the ground…and was dead.
That was the first time I ever built a story from a dream. I worked at it for years, obsessed over it (that image above, by the way, is the “skull asteroid” that went past Earth around the time of my dream). Eventually, I wrote a novel based on that dream, and that novel will be released next year.
I thought it was an oddity at the time, but then over the following years, I started having more ideas intrude in dreams or when I was in near-sleep states. Visions, I guess you could say. I never quite knew what they meant, but I deeply understood the way they made me feel.
A young man carrying a wooden box, and inside the box is a severed hand. A severed hand that moves.
A man who rises every morning, digs a large hole into the dirt, screams into the hole, then fills it in.
A storyteller with golden ears, who doesn’t understand the real value of his gift.
When these first started to appear, I would look for ways to incorporate these strange bits into the story structures I had created. Rationalizing the irrational. Spoiler: It didn’t go well.
And then I read Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul. There’s a chapter in there on artists, and it posits that true art is created when an artist willingly allows themself to be dragged down into the mass subconscious. To gather something from there and dredge it up. To share it with the world. He uses the example of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.
It’s a painting that on a purely technical level might not even be good. But, good lord, the way it makes me feel.
And the thing is, I don’t even understand the way that it makes me feel. But it hits me so powerfully that I can only look at it for a few seconds. It disgusts me.
Jung’s point is that this type of art:
Cannot come from rational thought.
Cannot be rationally understood.
Is essential to the human experience.
Why? I don’t know.
No one knows, Jung suggests:
I am accused of mysticism. I do not, however, hold myself responsible for the fact that man has, everywhere and always, spontaneously developed religious forms of expression, and that the human psyche from time immemorial has been shot through with religious feelings and ideas. Whoever cannot see this aspect of the human psyche is blind, and whoever chooses to explain it away, or to "enlighten" it away, has no sense of reality.
There’s a word in the Japanese language that I came upon recently. Yūgen. The definition is, roughly: “A profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe… and the sad beauty of human suffering.”
I’ve come to believe that yūgen is the most important aspect of storytelling. Yes, structure is critical, and you should study it. But an understanding of structure doesn’t matter if your stories have nothing to say.
So, then, how do you incorporate the ethereal/weird/subconscious/yūgen into your thinking and writing?
The first step is simply to be open to it. Not just as a creative thinker, but as a human. Allow yourself to acknowledge that most of reality is numinous, never to be understood. (If you take this as an anti-science stance, just stop. I am a firm believer in the power of science.)
Embrace the moments when you are not fully in conscious mode. Allow your subconscious to take the steering wheel. When you go on walks, don’t put in headphones. Just…exist.
When something does come to you, some kernel of the strange, don’t look for ways to fit it into your conscious construction of reality. Instead, spend time reflecting on the way that this vision makes you feel. And think about that feeling in terms of characters. What does that feeling mean emotionally (not logically)?
I mentioned above about the guy screaming into the hole. That vision struck me a few years back, as I was thinking about my second novel. I put aside all of the outlining I had written, and I held that vision in my hands. This is my protagonist. A man who digs holes and screams into them. This is essential to his journey.
Why?
I don’t know.
As always, I hope this is helpful to you as you write and tell stories. If you’d like to learn more about me and my writing, please visit vanjensen.com. You can like and comment on the post below! Till next time…