"Mood for Love" Part 1: The Script
Around the middle of May I started preparing my submission for the Short Story Contest hosted by Webtoon. It's a goal of mine to publish a story on their platform so I thought this contest would be a great way to develop experience in making webcomics.
The parameters of the contest were to create a 3-5 episode story about love. I had written a poem a few years back that I had always wanted to illustrate so I decided to write 3 more poems and develop them into a series about a love and forgiveness.
I had no intention of entering the contest to win it. I just wanted to see if I could even complete and publish a short webcomic. The pressure of a deadline kept me from overthinking my process, so instead of carefully thinking out every step, I just dove into the project headfirst.
I had a rough idea of the steps I needed to complete, and I had 1.5 months to complete them before the deadline, July 1st. So basically I chopped up my task list and set tiny deadlines over the 1.5 months to make sure I'd be on track for the final deadline.
Here was the rough timeline I charted out
Week 1: Writing and Revising the script
Week 2: Episode 1
Week 3: Episode 2
Week 4: Episode 3
Week 5: Episode 4
Week 6: An bonus week for catch up/ unanticipated events
^ I'm really happy I had enough insight to include that bonus week in the schedule because I 100% needed it
Deadlines are wonderful because they force you to finish what you start. That's pretty much the only reason why I got my script done for my short story series. My issue when it comes to writing is that I bail too fast. I start out strong and motivated, but as soon as that motivation starts to wane, I get really distracted, close the laptop, and end up not opening the laptop again. My deadline, however, was having none of that flakiness, and I had to push myself to keep writing as if I were doing a physical workout, even though the whole core of my being wanted run into the soothing arms of Netflix.
What I discovered is that if you hang in there, your energy picks up again and you get another motivated spurt, and the cycle continues. Whenever, I started to hit a slump, I just started writing anything that came to my mind because I knew if I stopped writing, that would be it for the day. So writing nonsense was my way of weathering my mental storm until the skies cleared and good ideas started to shine through again. As hard as it can be, appreciate your bad ideas - I have a sneaking suspicion that they're actually the catalyst of all my good ideas.
My last obstacle around my script was asking for feedback. I have a great fear of inconveniencing people, and asking peers to review to some potentially subpar poems seemed like it could fall on the spectrum of inconvenience. Yet I know that getting feedback is essential to a creative process, so I choked back my fear and reached out to some friends asking if they'd like to review my poems. I figured that if I gave them the option to say no, then that could clear my conscience of "wasting" their time. Most people I asked said yes, and of course, their feedback brought the poems to a new level in the revisions so inconvenience or not, it was worth reaching out to my friends. (Thank you again to Liam, Tiffany, Rebekah, Catherine, Amanda, Kyle, L, Rafa, Stephanie, and Max for their genius brains and insightful suggestions)
So the scripts were locked in, and I was still on schedule! Time to start Episode 1…
Lessons Learned:
Weather your creative slumps by generating nonsense until your creativity picks up again. Whatever you do, DO NOT BAIL
Ask friends for feedback. If they can't do it, trust that they'll tell you