Starting points

As I mentioned, coming up with a beginning point for the story was a bit contentious for us in the first graphic novel, and so it is worth discussing. 

There are many ways to come up with how to begin the story, but the point is that we have a bunch of artists and writers ready to begin work. Writers can argue for months over an idea, so it’s essential to find a way that you can bring everyone together quickly. 

We definitely knew that we wanted to set the story in the city we were in, as that helps ground that event as being about the town, and means that if you need inspiration you just have to go outside to see it. 

I personally felt that we needed a single image concept that could allow writers to get their artists started, and then figure out the story. Others felt that we needed to let the writers find something as a start point among themselves. 

There are a few ways to work this out, and by no means is this list everything, but at the least it should get you thinking in the direction of how you’d want to find your beginning. 

A single concept to begin

As mentioned, this is what we did in the first graphic novel weekend. I came up with an image of astronauts in a Dutch city even before we knew where we would set the event. My reason is listed in the recap of the first GNW. 

But basically, I wanted a single image that could be drawn by everyone and which wouldn’t require writers to know more than how many characters they were writing for. And you could do this. 

An improv game to come up with the concept

As the rules of improv are already very important to this concept, why not steal something else from them? 

In improv it’s often the case that a call will be made out to the audience to come up with a location, a profession, an object, whatever. You could use this here, and just throw out to the whole crowd to come up with something you wouldn’t expect to find in your city, or a job, or an object. And then vote for the best combination. It would take a few minutes, and get you started. 

A pre-meeting

This was a topic that kept coming up. The idea was to have the writers show up in advance to figure out the story. There is a lot of benefit to this. Personally, though, I was hesitant because I feel like the artists need to be involved from the beginning, but that might just be me (and an argument could be made that my chosen method didn’t allow anyone present at the stage of coming up with a concept) and at least for coming up with a concept, it’s definitely a good plan. 

Tie it to an event or a cause

One of the real hopes of Doe Het Niet Zelf was to make these graphic novels about something. And so events and charities are a great way to go. Put a focus on a cause and let the story spread from that. 

Don’t be constrained by your beginning

Once you have an idea, that’s just the starting line. Plan to go beyond that and do new and different things. To prove this point, during the first event, I put up a slide with this on it:

What do these specific things have in common?
The Beatles
The Crimean War
The Hulu hoop craze in America in the 1950s
Doing your taxes
Lodewijk Napoleon
The Stegosaurus
Japanese Calligraphy
The Computer Language Fortran

The answer is that all of these things relate to our world. As unrelated as any two of them are to each other, you could write a story connecting them fairly easily. Because it’s all within our world and our knowledge. So treat the beginning point as what it is – point A on a journey, nothing else. The journey is to the end point.