Author2Author: Jessica Abel & Alison Bechdel

Perhaps you noticed yesterday’s enthusiastic NYTBR review of La Perdida, the new graphic novel by Jessica Abel. It also got a starred review from Publishers Weekly, as did Fun Home, the graphic memoir by veteran cartoonist Alison Bechdel. The ways that these two women are taking the comics medium and using it as a vehicle for personal expression convinced me that getting them talking to each other would yield a lot of insights for readers…and as their conversation unfolds, I hope you’ll believe I was right.

Alison Bechdel: La Perdida originally came out in serialized form over a period of four years. As a comic strip artist, I’m really interested in the aesthetics of serial publication, so I’m wondering things like, how tightly did you have the whole story mapped out before you started drawing? How much did you make up as you went along? Did you paint yourself into any interesting corners? Was serial publication an economic necessity? Did reader response influence the development of the plot at all? How did the constraint of the serial volumes, lengthwise, effect the structure of your larger dramatic arc? And finally, were there any major plot changes between the serialized version and the graphic novel?

Jessica Abel: One thing I’ve figured out as I learn to teach art students to make comics is that my own method of making comics is at least unteachable, if not just plain unadvisable. There’s a huge proportion of improv that goes into it, even in the short stories, though of course, they’re really short.

Basically, I started with a vague idea for a scene (the hallucinatory scene at the end of chapter one). As I thought about who might be having that vision, and why, I came up with Carla, then Harry. I spent a long time developing and thinking about the characters and what bound them together, which led me to come up with a lot of the major plot points. I have to admit, how I got from that first idea to the whole arc is sort of lost in the mists of time. But as far as I remember, I worked out the whole story arc, then sat down and started writing chapter one. I probably started drawing it before I even finished writing it, knowing me. There were a number of directions I intended to follow to resolve the events at the end (no spoilers!) that I ended up rejecting as too byzantine or just not necessary. For example, the scene in chapter one where Carla and Harry go to meet a journalist—I had the idea that she would be instrumental later on, that the drama would somehow play itself out in the newspaper as well. But in the end that idea was just too unwieldy, and I simply left that early scene in to give some sense on context. It’s one of the few based on actual events; I met a journalist like her early in my time in Mexico, and she said similar things about living in Mexico. A lot more of them, actually.

But anyway, I dived right in before I’d nailed down all the details of the story, in order to motivate myself to move forward on the book. The thing this method had in common with my earlier short stories was the fact that I had to fit the chapter chunks into multiples of 8 pages, due to the way books are printed. In fact, it’s better/easier to print books in multiples of 16 pages, which is what I did in this case. So all along, as I’m writing, then thumbnailing the pages, then penciling and inking, I’m thinking: this has got to come out at 44 pages (to account for the title page, indicia, etc.). I’m massaging, projecting ahead, trying to shorten or lengthen…OK, seriously? I never have to lengthen. Only shorten. But anyway, it’s a strange process that I trained myself into early on, a version of what you have to do with the space for your strip, but of course a lot longer, so a lot more can happen (i.e. go wrong) in the middle. Though maybe that’s presumptuous of me. I think working in strip form—such tiny chunks of narrative—must be incredibly demanding.

Overall, I fit chapters one through four into 44- or 45-page chunks, but I still missed my length by about 60 pages (all of chapter five). I expected to finish in four 48-page books. So I obviously didn’t know what I was doing too clearly.

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5 June 2006 | author2author |

Author2Author: Patrick Ryan & Stephen Harrigan

When Patrick Ryan’s Send Me and Stephen Harrigan’s Challenger Park showed up in my mailbox within a few days of each other, I found their thematic correlations so intruiging that I immediately started thinking about how I could get the two authors talking to each other.

Patrick Ryan: Reading Challenger Park was like stepping through a looking glass into a parallel universe. I grew up on Merritt Island, Florida, always in the vicinity of astronauts and launches, and have written fiction about characters in the shadows of that whole operation (either as employees with less-than-glamorous jobs or as local residents who just happen to have Saturn rockets and space shuttles climbing into sky over their shoulder while they’re, say, mowing the lawn). Your novel is about actual astronauts, so I felt as if I were reading the story of what was happening on the other side of the glass, so to speak. It was fascinating for me, and interesting that the challenges your characters face are, in some ways, very similar to ones mine face.

Can you talk a little about how the themes of the book may or may not have affected the writing? I could argue that some of Challenger Park‘s themes are regret, self-disappointment, and certainly isolation. Also, there’s the idea of “Ground Control” and what that means. Many of your main characters are in various states of being “ungrounded” (sometimes literally). Do you feel that these themes helped shaped the book as you were conceiving it (before the actual writing), or that they emerged as you began producing pages? I guess another way to ask that is, did you see the themes on your way in, or on your way out?

Stephen Harrigan: I knew I wanted to write a book about a woman astronaut caught between the pull of her own ambitions and the responsibility she feels toward those who depend upon her on earth, so I guess the theme was there from the beginning, though I didn’t announce it to myself as such. The word “theme” has always uncomfortably reminded me of stultifying classes in high school or college, in which a novel or a poem or a story was presented as something that needed decoding. If you could discover the theme, you could understand a piece of writing in some approved way. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I worried and fretted over the meaning of this book all the way through.

I have a day job as a screenwriter, and because screenplays are such relentlessly efficient narrative machines I’ve fallen into the habit over the years of constantly asking myself questions as I write: what is this book or movie really about? What is it that the character really wants? What is in his or her way? Those sorts of questions can be cripplingly didactic to a writer early in his career, when a certain amount of flailing about is probably necessary and healthy, but later on, when you’ve learned a few things about your limitations, it can be liberating. If you keep posing the right questions to yourself, you can begin to shape the story with a clear purpose in mind. You can see what’s crucial to the story, and what you don’t need to write after all.

Send Me is labelled as “fiction” on the jacket rather than, as is usually the case, “stories” or “a novel.” At first I thought this was just some sort of marketing strategy on the publisher’s part, but after I read four or five of the pieces and began to get an idea of how they fit together, I soon realized that the book was earning its unusual categorization. It’s not a collection of short stories, even though each of the chapters has a kind of stand-alone artistry, and it’s not a novel, even though the book has by the end the force of a sustained narrative. I’m such a literal-minded, one-chapter-after-the-next sort of writer I can’t imagine being able to tell a story this way, and I’m filled with admiration for how beautifully you’ve made this book work.

The way you’ve put it together—continually juxtaposing the past against the future, putting bright scenes of family togetherness in one chapter, then leaping ahead to expose the chilling dissolution of that family in the next—ensures that the reader is always following the fortunes of these people with a haunted awareness of what they are trying to escape from and what is in store for them. So to finally get to my question: Were you consciously focusing on the structure of this book all the way through and writing to achieve a specific overall effect, or did you write the various pieces as they occurred to you and then felicitously found the perfect order in which to link them?

Patrick Ryan: I think I would have the same reaction you did to seeing the moniker “fiction” on the cover (wondering if the book was simply unwilling to commit to being either a novel or a story collection), and I’m delighted that you found an overall sustaining sense of narrative in the book. Calling the book simply “fiction” was actually my idea, and I was surprised and very happy that my editor saw why I wanted to use the term and that she was in favor of it. My earliest conception of the book was of an interwoven series of narratives about a family—six main characters—whose lives constantly intercept and profoundly affect one another. I saw it as a book that would have a half-dozen overlapping arcs, as opposed to one dominant arc that a reader would normally expect from a novel. There were storylines I outlined and never wrote, of course, and some I tried to write and dropped. I played around with the order the parts might be arranged in, but I always wanted them to be presented out of chronological sequence.

To answer your question more succinctly, I did consciously focus on the structure of the book from the first day I started taking notes on it; I just wasn’t sure where all the pieces would land. Some of them, once they were written and revised, clearly announced themselves as wanting to be placed near the beginning or near the end or—as was the case with the longest piece, “Woman in a Fan Chair”—smack dap in the middle of the book. And some of the pieces I moved here and there to see how it would affect the overall narrative.

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18 March 2006 | author2author |