Note: spurred on by Mark’s excellent comment on my “new house” post, I’m posting this excerpt from my undergrad thesis I wrote in the spring of 2005 (pre-blog). The thesis was called “Pictures Before Words,” and it was about using visual thinking techniques like clustering and storyboarding to create prose fiction. It’s surprising to read back through it now, and realize how much it laid out the ideas I would explore in the next 3 years or so: sense of place and writing as world-building, the connection between pictures and words…thanks to Sean Duncan for introducing me to a lot of the material!

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IN CHAPTER FOUR of Dylan Horrocks’ graphic novel, Hicksville, a character named Dylan Horrocks and a character named Grace travel to a land named Cornucopia to meet its greatest cartoonist, Emil Kopen. Upon their meeting, Kopen refers to himself not as a comics writer, but as a “cartographer” or a “maker of maps.” This puzzles Horrocks, and prompts Grace to ask Kopen to explain. Kopen says that comics are the same as maps because they are “using all of language—not only words or pictures.” Horrocks asks Kopen about the purpose of maps.

“Maps are of two kinds,” Kopen explains. “Some seek to represent the location of things in space. That is the first kind—the geography of space. But others represent the location of things in time—or perhaps their progression through time. These maps tell stories, which is to say they are the geography of time.”

This monologue is quite similar to Scott McCloud’s argument about comics in Reinventing Comics. He argues that space is the form of comics, and time the content: comics work by mapping time.

In Horrocks’ online article “Comics, Games and World-Building” (highly recommended) he responds to McCloud’s argument by exploring and expanding the theories of James Kochalka. In Kochalka’s comic, The Horrible Truth About Comics (included in The Cute Manifesto), he proposes an alternative definition of comics to McCloud’s: comics as world-building. “Comics are a way of creating a universe.”

Horrocks interprets:

Now, most discussion about comics (or fiction, for that matter) assumes that their main purpose is to tell a story – a narrative that moves through time; hence McCloud’s description of comics as a "temporal map." But here, Kochalka seems to suggest something quite different: that comics create a world, a place. Instead of SPACE = TIME, this is SPACE = SPACE.

Even those narratives that would seem to be primarily interested with mapping time, with telling stories, or plots, can be seen in spatial terms. Horrocks’ character Emil Kopen explains to the character Dylan Horrocks that along with maps of geography, he feels that “stories, too, are basically concerned with spatial relationships. The proximity of bodies. Time is simply what interferes with that, yes?”

In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes that while plot has often been seen as a type of “power war” or “back and forth” that seems to be going on between characters, “narrative is also driven by a pattern of connection and disconnection between characters that is the main source of its emotional effect.” Connection and disconnection are spatial terms; they imply different degrees of proximity.

Horrocks observes that the notion of “world-building” has mostly been popular within the genre of fantasy (i.e. J.K. Rowling’s Hogwarts, or Tolkien’s Middle Earth). But Horrocks suggests that “all writers are engaged in ‘sub-creation,’ to the extent that all fiction takes place in a ‘Secondary World,’ no matter how closely it may resemble the ‘real world’ in which we live.” No matter what genre you write in, you can use the same world-building techniques used by fantasy artists and writers.

When we read comics and fiction or watch movies, we are asking the artist to take us into a universe of his making. In the words of Kochalka, “When we encounter a great work of art the physical world fades away as we step into this new reality. We are alive in a living world.” This sounds remarkably similar to John Gardner’s idea of fiction as “a kind of dream” that the reader falls into: “We read a few words at the beginning of the book or the particular story, and suddenly we find ourselves seeing not words on a page but a train moving through Russia, an old Italian crying, or a farmhouse battered by rain. We read on—dream on—not passively but actively."

If writers and cartoonists accept the idea that what they must first do to create a convincing narrative is world-build, the next step is to wonder how they might go about such a thing.

Alan Moore, in the chapter entitled “Worldbuilding; Place and Personality” in Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics, suggests that world-building simply means coming up with the working details of your world and environment before you actually go about writing your story. He suggests coming up with

a mass of information about the world and the people in it, much of which will never be revealed within the strip for the simple reason that it isn’t stuff that’s essential for the readers to know and there probably won’t be space to fit it all in. What is important is that the writer should have a clear picture of the imagined world in all its detail inside his or her head at all times.

Moore suggests that gifted writers will avoid dropping huge amounts of detail on the reader at one time, but instead use these details sparsely in each frame, to suggest that there is a world going on outside of the frames of the comic. This idea parallels Scott McCloud’s theory of closure—“the comics creator asks us to join in a silent dance of the seen and the unseen. The visible and the invisible.” The comics reader is required to fill in the details of the world going on outside the comic panel, and this will succeed only if the world is concretely realized by the creator.

My argument is that the artist can see written fiction, comics, and film as multiple disciplines on the spectrum of storytelling. Although they all have different ideas about what a story is and how you build and present a story, if we accept that what each discipline does is world-build, then we can use the term “world-building” to move fluidly between disciplines. When we have the world-building tools and processes mastered from multiple disciplines of storytelling—whether it be drawing in the case of comics, or writing in the case of fiction—we can use these tools and processes across disciplines to generate the worlds that we imagine.

Recommended reading:

• Dylan Horrocks, Hicksville
• Derik Badman’s review of Hicksville (there’s a paragraph about the “maps” section)
• Dylan Horrocks, “Comics, Games and World-Building”
• James Kochalka, The Cute Manifesto
• Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics

“Comics get to the essence of something quickly and efficiently….They distill and refine, they don’t necessarily tell stories or have a message.”

—Mark Newgarden in an interview, and “The Little Nun” from We All Die Alone

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Of course, they can tell stories. The trick is just a million different combinations of words and images and panels.

I’m still a bit obsessed with this idea of a novel constructed out of gag strips. The gorgeous thing about a gag strip is that it doesn’t have to be funny, it just has to have a punchline. And the good news is that a decent novel chapter does the same thing: there’s a rise and fall and then a good punchline at the end to give you some kind of closure, but also get you to turn the page and read the next one. What happens next?

Here’s Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without A Country:

It’s damned hard to make jokes work. In Cat’s Cradle, for instance, there are these very short chapters. Each one of them represents one day’s work, and each one is a joke. If I were writing about a tragic situation, it wouldn’t be necessary to time it to make sure the thing works. You can’t really misfire with a tragic scene. It’s bound to be moving if all the right elements are present. But a joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it’s supposed to snap.

There’s a reason why Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library is way better than Jimmy Corrigan. Acme is still Ware’s melancholy world, but Rocket Sam and Big Tex have that snap—that punchline of a good gag strip. (Maybe this is because Ware’s art trumps his writing, and a good deal of the gag strip has to do with the visual tricks involved…)

Now: wouldn’t you love to read a graphic novel’s worth of Mark Newgarden’s “Little Nun” gag strips? (You can check out more of them in McSweeney’s 13 or We All Die Alone). All it would require is continuity. Some kind of journey or quest. The Little Nun could just take a trip across America. Maybe she could meet other nuns. Gather a crew. Fall in love or something. It could go on for something like 100 pages. It’d be so easy to draw, you could just churn out the pages. And think of the serializing potential! It’d be spectacular.

Eventually, I think The Complete Peanuts will read something like this. George Saunders wrote in his Shulz obit:

…try to imagine, say, three kids sitting against the side of a suburban house on a summer afternoon….If these characters are allowed to grow up and leave the suburban lawn and get jobs and fall in love, this is called a novel, and you, the creator, are called a novelist. If the imagined children are not allowed to grow up but are confined to the suburban lawn, where they continue for the next 50 years to be rich manifestations of their creator’s psyche, and if this creator’s imagination is supple and energetic enough never to tire of reimagining the children on the suburban lawn and never to make us tired of observing the children on the suburban lawn, this is called “Peanuts.”

But if you read them all together, doesn’t the collected work take some kind of shape, some rise and fall of action that resembles a narrative? Some continuity that resembles something the steps in a journey? Certainly it presents a world.

Or is it the ending that we demand, the closure, the change, the move to point B from point A?

The book I’m working on includes a kind of memory plot: the main character retrieves his lost memories by retracing his steps, moving through the geographical spaces of his past.

This idea is nothing new: pretty much every character who goes through some kind of trauma in literature deals with it by retracing his steps. Telling his story. Beginning with Odysseus, and more recently, Eternal Sunshine, Memento, Time’s Arrow, Slaughterhouse-Five, etc. These great stories do exactly what they’re supposed to: not only do they give us a map and take us on a journey, they give us a new way of mapping our own lives. (I remember stumbling out of the theater after watching Memento, barely able to read the street signs.)

So this morning I’m reading the good ol’ Science Times, and I get another shocker: according to a recent article published in the Journal of Cognitive Science, “the speakers of Aymara, an Indian language of the high Andes, think of time differently than just about everyone else in the world. They see the future as behind them and the past ahead of them.”

It seems that humans began conflating time and space long before Einstein ever picked up a piece of chalk. Instead of equations, however, we use what are called conceptual metaphors, in which space sits in for time.

Most of us describe the future as ahead or in front of us, and the past as behind us. Until the view of the Aymara speakers was deconstructed, no significant exceptions to this way of thinking about time had been demonstrated….

…the Aymara call the future qhipa pacha/timpu, meaning back or behind time, and the past nayra pacha/timpu, meaning front time. And they gesture ahead of them when remembering things past, and backward when talking about the future.

…the Aymara speakers see the difference between what is known and not known as paramount, and what is known is what you see in front of you, with your own eyes.

The past is known, so it lies ahead of you. (Nayra, or “past,” literally means eye and sight, as well as front.) The future is unknown, so it lies behind you, where you can’t see.

Well, this really blew my mind, and has obvious implications for the story I’m trying to tell. If the future is behind us, and the past up ahead, do we back away from the past, trying to edge closer to the future, but still blind to it? Or do we try to put the past behind us, and are therefore doomed to bump into it in our quest to make it into the future?

I think it also has something to do with comics, another “conceptual metaphor…in which space sits in for time”:

page from REINVENTING COMICS, quoted by Dylan Horrocks

Of course, Dylan Horrocks and James Kochalka toss this theory on its head: comics don’t just spacially represent time, “comics create a world, a place. Instead of SPACE = TIME, this is SPACE = SPACE.”

I’m not sure where my thoughts are headed at this point, but how curious to me that we must map time in order to conceptualize it. That we all seem to be cartographers, trying to map our worlds…