Star to Star: Constellation Storytelling

A methodology feat. the titular scratchpads!

Photo by David Everett Strickler on Unsplash

Ever since people have been people, we’ve looked up at the night sky and imagined lines connecting one shining point to another. From the darkness between lights, we dreamt up dragons and demons, lovers and heroes. We reflected our own lives up, up, up into the heavens and then let them shower back down in the form of story, and those stories spread and spread; they changed the world as it was known, because that’s what stories do.

Borges writes about how the movements of our dreams show how deeply imbedded in the human psyche narrative arts are. It’s part of who we are — story. We can’t help ourselves. In his seminal work Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud writes about how by its nature, sequential art inherently opens a door for the reader to bring their own storytelling into the page. The space between two panels represents an open area where we make the imaginative leap, guided by the art and words, to get from one image to the other. We fill in the blanks. It’s the space between stars.

This natural urge to conjure something from nothing, to connect dots and dance from star to star — it’s worth leaning into that when we think about our creative process too. The seed for a story can take a lot of forms, but usually it’s a growing combination of often disconnected elements. You might have a single interaction between two characters, and a beat of action amidst some vague setting, a particular song that really hits, and then a ton of vibes, just vibes. You toil that around in your mind for a while and a few other bits emerge: the interaction tells you who the characters are more, and then you know what one of them goes and does next, a sense of cause and effect, a hint of gravity and momentum.

If you’re working on a single issue in a comics run or some other project that’s a smaller arc within a larger sequence, you might have some straight forward data points already in place for yourself. When I’m working on The High Republic Adventures, I’ll usually know the big plot points of the issue I’m about to write, and how it fits into the big story. Sometimes I’ll have a larger meta-beat that’s happening across the High Republic initiative that I’m wrapping my own storytelling around, and this become another star in the constellation.

At this point in the process, things are falling into place but it’s still just a splatter of random details, occasional plot beats, and assorted vagueries. While I know there’s nothing brand new about the methodology I’m about to lay out, I think it’s helpful to talk openly about our work strategies and how we get things done, and it’s useful to frame these work flow tactics within an understanding of the constellation storytelling.

So here goes: There’s a running document I have for each project, and it’s called the Scratchpad (yes, the very Scratchpad of this blog’s name, in fact!) It’s where I go to dump out all the ideas in my head, all the randomness, any passing thought. I always work upwards, meaning rather than scroll to the end of the material already there when I’m going to put a new entry in, I put it on top of the last one. It’s a brain hack that works for me personally, I think because it means just opening the doc and starting, rather than scrolling through all the past work. It’s got a forward motion to it and when it comes to process, things like flow and momentum matter! Mainly, the move is to do what works. And try different things, always.

I’ll throw down loose titles on things as I go to keep it some kinda organized. Random thought dumps are called Scratch. When I have a handful of those, I’ll copy and paste them right above under a new title. This simple move, which I also talk about in the Editing Survival Guide, does so much to allow my brain to feel like it can be playful with the material, since if anything gets deleted that I realize later I need, it’s all right there below where I’m working. These kinds of hacks matter, because as with editing, playfulness is a must in the brainstorming stage.

Once you have all these seemingly random, disconnected parts on the page, a certain magic happens — it’s that age-old, deep down storyteller within each of us. We begin to connect the dots. Usually, it almost feels like the dots are connecting themselves for at least part of this section. Seeing it laid out, even in a messy list or scatter of words, somehow triggers that narrative impulse and very naturally, lines emerge from the darkness between each section. They might be slight at first, hard to find, unsure. That’s fine. Some of them will be erased, maybe even all. But they’ll have gotten you to the next level by the time they’re proved useless, so they weren’t really useless at all — just a temporary bridge. Every part is pivotal, even if it feels like a distraction. Follow the threads, let them spread and blossom organically, and then begin to guide them and trim and play. Amazing things will continue to happen if you trust the process and let them.

Once there’s more of a semblance of a story, I’ll copy and paste again and start to organize things chronologically. For a comic issue, this might be a Page By Page, where I’ll slot plot beats into areas where I know they go and then begin filling in even more blanks now armed with the knowledge that the bigger pieces are in place. There’s an amazing freedom to move around once you have a sense of structure and rhythm.

This is also a good time to play around with different archetypal and established narrative motifs. I know they can be cheesy or feel confining, but that’s only if you let them confine you. Don’t treat them as rules, treat them as roads. They’re there to guide. But if you see something cool way off the path, get out your machete and go. It’s that simple. Save the Cat is one of my personal favorites to play with; there are many others.

All of that is a lot of work! Now that you’ve got one possible run down of the events of your story — an outline, essentially — step away. Take a break. Breathe. Exercise. The dogs need to be walked! Leave the house. You want all that to settle and give it the breathing room it needs, and that you need, so you can come back to it and both be fresh to figure out what happens next.

Below the paywall, you’ll find an example of my own process in action: from scratchpad to page by page to script, from the High Republic Adventures. Enjoy!

And please do tell me about your process and ask me any questions you have!