Fantastic Metropolis

Jeffrey Ford: Please describe your foray into comics—how it came about, some of the differences between producing effective scripts and effective fiction, the experience of working with your collaborator, Liz Hand.

Paul Witcover: My foray into comics took place about ten years ago. I’d love to do more, but the opportunity hasn’t come my way. It originally came to Liz, via a friend of ours who worked at DC Comics, Rob Simpson, a great guy. When Liz called to tell me that she’d been offered the chance to pitch a comic, I shamelessly horned in on the action. I’ve always loved comics, read them obsessively as a kid and amassed a huge collection, which I foolishly sold in my teenage years when I was desperate for ready cash, and then rebuilt. I’ve got a thousand or so here at the house in Delaware, mostly mainstream stuff, DC and Marvel, though I no longer read them regularly, for the same reason I don’t play D&D anymore. But there is amazing stuff going on in comics, or graphic novels, or whatever the hell they want to call themselves. It’s weird, but comics are now a more respected art form than either science fiction or fantasy!

Liz and I had collaborated on short fiction before we did the short-lived comic that became Anima. We’ve been friends for a long time, and our tastes in just about everything, from fiction to music to art, are remarkably similar. So collaborating with Liz is really like collaborating with another me, who happens to be a much better writer and has a wilder imagination as well. No down side there!

As Sin City has so vigorously demonstrated, if any doubt still existed in anyone’s mind, comics are a cinematic rather than a literary medium. So writing for comics is essentially writing for film: you produce a script, not a story. And the dynamic elements of a scene, its visual possibilities, must always be foremost in your mind. You are telling a story with images, not with words. I was helped immeasurably in honing my comic-book style by the first Sandman collection, which contains one of Neil Gaiman’s annotated scripts. Going through that frame by frame was a graduate school lesson in writing for comics. Understatement, or no statement, can be a powerful tool in comics, but in fiction it’s generally less effective, unless you’re trying to do a Raymond Carver kind of thing. I’d like to see some comic books made of his work, come to think of it. Anyway, Liz and I would switch off halves of the comic from issue to issue. We’d plot the thing together in a rough way, then I’d write, say, the first half of the script and send it to her. She’d go over that, make suggestions, and then send it back to me with the second half of the script. I would then review her suggestions, make whatever changes seemed advisable, and then make suggestions on her half. We never once had a significant disagreement, and we both had a great time. It paid pretty well, too!

Jeffrey Ford: Waking Beauty is a wonderfully original tale; really striking in its themes and imagination. What gave rise to it? And what was your experience in writing it—was it carefully plotted from the start or did the story occur to you as you typed, extemporaneously?

Paul Witcover: Waking Beauty began as a story I was working on for class; this was back in 1991, when a combination of frustration with my career, or lack thereof, and writer’s block had made me desperate enough to go back to school. I came up with the idea giving the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty a feminist spin. The story took on a life of its own right from the start, and my writer’s block was swept away, never to return—or so I thought at the time.

Soon it was clear that this was not a story, but a novel, and that it wasn’t a fantasy as I’d originally thought, but a piece of science fiction masquerading as a fantasy. I had to design a world, a history, a religion, a culture, mythology, all of which I did by riffing off (or, if you prefer, ripping off) things I remembered from childhood, interests and obsessions I’d had, things I’d loved unreservedly, like Tintin and his dog, Snowy, and things I had a more complex relationship with, like the Roman Catholic Church. I knew what the ending of the novel was going to be in a very rough sense, but how to get there, and what happened along the way, all sort of grew up organically out of the forward progress of the narrative. Often something I had written would necessitate going back to layer in more details of the Hierarchate’s immense back-story, which would in turn imply plot details still to occur. I don’t know if you write this way or not, Jeff, but it’s not the most efficient way of constructing a story! Yet the sense of being swept up in something already existent, that I’m not so much creating as uncovering, was and is the coolest thing about writing for me, and that was true in spades with Waking Beauty.

Jeffrey Ford: How would you describe your new novel, Tumbling After?

Paul Witcover: On my website I call it: “a novel about growing up, about playing games, about what is and isn’t real. It’s a novel of sexual awakening and magical transformation.”

During the writing, I thought of it as the anti-??Waking Beauty??: a fantasy masquerading as science fiction. And where the structure of my first novel was a spiral that looped inward only to exit its own singularity, this one I saw as a Moebius strip from which no escape would be possible. But that doesn’t necessarily mean no change is possible in its endless iterations. I don’t like to impose a particular reading on my fiction, and I hope that readers will come to different conclusions about what happens at the end of Tumbling After, and beyond.