Pink Raygun talks with Brian Wood about Local, and his approach to writing:
PRG: You have that nugget you want to grow into a story. How do you get from nugget to story?
BW: I start off with The Point. What’s the point? What emotion or idea do I want this story to communicate. Look at Demo #5 – the girl who is constantly judged, despite her best intentions, falls prey to that same human emotion and judges others. That’s just the point, and I have to create characters and a sequence of events and an emotional story around that. I write these outlines by hand, lots of arrows and circles and rewrites until I have a pretty decent outline I can take to full script. This sounds pretentious, but in a lot of ways it feels like mixing music. All these ideas and scenes need to be organized in the proper way to make the story.
PRG: What do you do when you get stuck?
BW: Worry, complain, seek distractions… all the while assuming that the ideas will start flowing again in enough time to make the deadline. Which they usually do, but in that respect I really feel like I’m on borrowed time. It’s like the dreaded mega-tsunami that’ll destroy the west coast of America. It’s not a matter of if, but when. Same with my crippling, months-long writer’s block.
Local #11 hits stores later this month.
