Storyboarding! (Patreon)

I want to use this Patreon to kind of document my development process.  This project, (despite the fact that it hasn't launched yet and I have literally no idea if it will achieve any kind of success,) feels different to me. 

I am a creative person that has struggled for most of my life with unfinished projects.  I'm sure that some people can relate to this.  I'll be struck with an incredible idea for a project, start that project, slave over it for weeks, and get to the phase where the work becomes tedious, then abandon it in favor of something new.  This has been a recurring pattern my whole life, and it's been rather depressing at times.

This comic, however, feels different.  My mind doesn't let go of it any more... and I'm not entirely sure why.  Each new week brings a new lightning strike idea, but it's usually one that pertains to my comic, and leaves me thinking about how I can work it into the story, if I wind up wanting to use it at all.

I wonder if a big part of this is the fact I started storyboarding.  I was complaining once to a good friend of mine how terrible I was and how I'd never be any good at anything, and he made a simple suggestion.
Make a storyboard.  I got up, and -- albeit rather defiantly -- I grabbed a nearby pad of sticky notes and started writing on them and slamming them up against the blank wall of my office.

There wasn't a lot of room to write on each little yellow note, so I decided that each note would represent one page, or one quick idea.  Soon, the whole wall was covered and the first two chapters of my story were planned out.  It was kind of amazing to see it laid out like this.  To see that, my story was actually going somewhere, instead of just aimlessly drifting into the void of my subconscious.  It suddenly made a huge difference.  The story felt tangible.

Then I gave the first draft of my comic to my husband to read it.  I value his feedback most of all because it's usually objective, blunt and fair.  He never sugarcoats anything.  He read it, and basically said that my main characters were unlikable.  He liked Max, but no one else.  This stung me pretty hard because I knew it was true.  I'd fallen into a trap of writing banter between Kiva and Kiera, because it was a lot of fun to write, and I didn't realize that by having them constantly swearing at each other and always fighting, I had completely undermined their relationship and made them both seem like they were just... terrible, terrible unredeemable people.

It was initially a little devastating, because I wanted my characters to be likable, even if they weren't perfect or heroic in any sense.  So I sat in my chair, staring up at my wall of sticky notes, and rather than sink into despair, I got up and started moving them around.  The sticky notes helped me to see that I had a lot of good pages written, and a lot of good ideas still floating around.  And with a little bit of rewriting, I was able to reuse a lot of my existing sketches, even while completely rewriting a huge portion of the story.  My wall of sticky notes adjusted, I now had a whole new story to write, and it was one that I was excited about again.

I have over 4 chapters drawn now, about 80 pages organized on the wall, with more planned.  I've had to buy more sticky notes, and I even got different colors for different purposes.  I'm tracking the progress on colored pages, and which pages need to be drawn and inserted where. This silly, magical wall of sticky notes has become very important to me for a lot of reasons.  Primarily, it keeps my thoughts organized and my story moving, and helps me to see the cause and effect of each action, but I think it serves another purpose as well.  When I sit down in my office chair and think about playing a video game for the next 9 hours, I can just glance over at the wall and see my big ol' wall of sticky notes, standing as a silent reminder that I have something a bit more important to work on.