In this series, "Process", I'm going to attempt to convey how I personally go about the business of creating a comic book. This is mostly an exercise for myself, rather than for anyone else - there are many, many other How-To pieces that explain the mechanics of comic creation far better than I ever will. However, I think I may have a unique perspective on the whole creation process, and I'd like to share them.
This first piece is about stories: how I come up with them, and how I build them.
First of all, I am a compulsive storyteller; I draw on just about everything for inspiration, from movies to nonfiction books. Anything even vaguely exciting can spark the storytelling process. Thus I have a near-infinite well of storylines at my disposal.
But what makes a good story? What makes a story I want to tell? For me, it's the uniqueness of perspective. All the major storylines have already been done; all the major plots, at least in general, have been explored over and over. The point is not to try and reinvent the wheel, because wheels are wheels are wheels. Make a circle out of some material, and you have a wheel. The point is to create a unique perspective on the wheel itself.
Let's take, for instance, zombies. Goddamn zombies. Zombies, zombies, zombies, over and over, world without end, amen. I think the real current zombie phenomenon was kickstarted by 28 Days Later, which set the formula: human bioengineering has created a supervirus that makes zombies, who then infect humans by biting them (NB: I actually liked 28 Days Later a lot). This sets up hard moral choices involving whether or not to kill your little daughter who is bitten but not turned yet, etc.; you also see humanity at its best and worst in terms of the apocalyptic situation. Bam, done. Wash, rinse, repeat. You could argue that the general "zombie apocalypse" formula was established by the George Romero's Night of the Living Dead way before 28 Days Later, but the result is pretty much the same. Since then we've seen an explosion of the living dead in movies, games, books, everything, a genre that seems defined by its own antagonists: beat it to death, and it just keeps coming back.
Okay, let's say I've been drafted to write a zombie story (God forbid). What am I going to do? I could try varying the setting: Zombies on a ship! Zombies on a plane! Zombies in space! But that ain't gonna do it for me. How about we change the mode of delivery? I'm going to use a premise from an old Stephen King story, "Home Delivery". The zombies are created not by a supervirus, but by an interstellar object (literally, Wormwood) made of a mass of flesh-eating worms. They attack an investigating space shuttle, which then crashes, causing the worms to fall to earth and reanimate the corpses in the graves. In order to spread, the worms use the corpses to attack the living and consume them.
So there you go! Already we have a new angle on the subject. Suddenly my interest is piqued.
Okay, now for characters. Your usual group is a ragtag band of survivors trying to eke out a living in the apocalypse, if you don't keep up you get left behind, blah blah blah. Boring. The Walking Dead is currently shepherding this idea through its long, agonizing death throes, quickly running out of ideas for keeping it fresh.
So I'm going to do this: I'm going to reinvent the zombie-infested world in a way that's at once more realistic and allows more comfortable parameters (You're going to see the word, "parameters" crop up a lot here - as a storyteller, I'm not about wide-open worlds; I'm about limitations. Limited stories are much, much more interesting. Even your epics - Lord of the Rings, for instance - work best when you're looking over the shoulders of two little hobbits, rather than watching massive armies smash into each other). So I'm going to confine the outbreak: one city, where the government has set up some kind of containment system that actually works. The worms have infested large numbers of people and corpses, but not even spaceworms can live forever without food. The outbreak is looking to die out.
End of story, right? Not quite. Now we start a process I like to call, "riffing". A lot of this comes from experience - you have to work that storytelling muscle before you can lift narrative weight like a pro. So here goes: the effects of these outbreaks on society are immense. A global recession has sunk in. More government dollars to containment mean fewer dollars for welfare. Once vibrant cities are sinking into poverty and crime. The existential horror of the worms has also caused a change in the zeitgeist, and people are tempted, in a gothic-horror kind of way, to submit to the "change" and live forever. The worms, meanwhile, have learned how to refine their methods, to keep their living victims more natural; they are becoming clever. Slowly they are learning how to outsmart the cordons, as an ever-increasing arms race ensues; a few "agents", here and there, manage to break through. They create cells of "The Changed", who, like terrorists, try to recruit the disenfranchised to their cause and destroy obstacles to their power. This is a natural progression, an evolution (at least in the world I'm creating), that allows the story to reach a breaking point. Pressure is building from all sides, the narrative is starting to bottleneck, and it will only take one act - say, a coordinated attack on the containment system in one city - to blow the story wide open.
So how is the government responding to this threat? Well, they need counter-agents. People who can track down "Changelings" and terminate them with extreme prejudice. Enter our protagonist, "Agent 26" (or whatever). He's charged with defusing what's rumored to be a huge attack planned on the cordon at Containment Sector 225 in...I don't know...Los Angeles. He's got to figure out the who, what, where, and how before it's too late.
Now here's a danger: I don't want this to turn into 24 with zombies: Agent 26 screaming, "Where's the bomb?!" and blowing the kneecaps off a Changeling while an invisible timer ticks away. So I'm going to bring in another element: Noir. Agent 26 may be a government spook, but there's no reason we can't treat him like Philip Marlowe. Noir protagonists are haunted by a sort of existential despair. Morality is much less important than Solving the Case - they'll use any means within their particular honor code. They drink hard, gamble too much, and play around with dangerous dames, telling themselves it's for the sake of the case when really they're just trying to keep the night at bay.
This brings us to a salient point, which is...well...THE POINT. Of the story, that is. What, really, are we trying to convey here? I can tell a Philip Marlowe Fights Zombies story any day of the week until my face turns blue, but what does it matter? It'll be just another stupid crossover, something you can throw in the dumpster as soon as you read it. Somebody might get a giggle out of it, in a stilted Pop Culture Smirk sort of way (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, anyone?) but ultimately, who the hell cares.
No. As I write a story, I keep one half of my senses on the words, and the other half tuned to a sort of nebulous feeling that's slowly gathering around it. The Point is not something I have in mind before I start writing, although I will need it if I'm ever going to finish the damn thing. So The Point of my story, I think, will be this: "Why fight anymore?" Agent 26 is constantly asking himself this question as he hurries to track down the Changelings. All he sees around him is a world sliding into oblivion. People don't seem to care anymore; certainly his government agency is rife with bureaucratic absurdity, cynicism, and corruption. Like the Baltimore Police Force in the TV series The Wire, they exist to bust bad guys, not to solve the problem of crime. The business of busting heads is very, very lucrative. Those who get sucked into the system - "infected" by it, so to speak - turn into monsters, or at least minor imps, in their own right.
Contrast this with The Changed. They're also fighting for their survival, but they are new on the scene, "newborn", so to speak, and so are hungry for life. They have purpose and initiative, they're the brash underdog, and they offer an amazing life insurance policy - i.e., eternal life. What's not to like (except for space-worms eating your brain, that is)? I guess the mechanics have shifted from Zombie to Vampire (I mean, who the hell wants to be a zombie?), but I think that's okay. My story has already transcended the zombie genre. Now it's a story in its own right. Anyway, the temptation to just give up and surrender to the threat is a real one, even if Agent 26 doesn't always take it seriously.
Okay, so we've got pretty much everything we need; but let's examine the story arc. This is a short story, so I'll need to start off quick and with a bang. Let's drop Agent 26 into an encounter with a Changeling. Already we have a microcosm of the macrocosm, illustrating the story's setting: a dark night, in an alleyway, with Agent 26 fighting a mysterious man who vomits worms. Of course Agent 26 wins the fight, no doubt utilizing special Worm-Fighting tech. We then have a moment to examine his character, maybe by the throwaway line he utters. Now we take the excitement down a notch: we send 26 back to his headquarters to file his report. We get to meet his bosses and co-workers, and get a sense of the degeneracy of his agency. Then he's cut loose to go home.
Sending Agent 26 home, we get to pull back and look at the city through the windows of the El Train. We see, for instance, the shimmering bubble of the energy shield cordoning off Sector 225 in the distance. We see the slums that have taken over the city. We meet the bitter dregs of humanity. We might see a brick wall, tagged with graffiti - "Change is Good", with a symbol representing the worms. As in all good Noirs, 26 narrates. He gets home, pets the cat, pours himself a slug of bourbon, watches happy reruns on the TV until he passes out.
But lo! A sylphlike dame appears at his door! She's the daughter of the governor, and her brother has gone missing, last seen in the company of a known Changeling. Agent 26 tells her to give it up, it's a lost cause; but she presents evidence that her brother, a biologist, has somehow found a cure for the common Spaceworm. This, plus Agent 26's last shred of pity for a crying girl (or lust, probably), convinces him to go on the hunt without giving his agency the full details.
So there we have it: Setting, Conflict, Setup. Now for the action to begin. This is where things get tricky, because we have to adhere to both the Noir structure and keep our story elements from feeling arbitrary. Zombie-making spaceworms have to be essential to the story, not just window-dressing. (Also note that I'm shamelessly following an established story structure - Noir, in this case. It's a skeleton. All skeletons are basically the same; you, as the author, give it muscles and guts and a brain, and breathe life into it. Don't be afraid to use an established story structure!)
Where to next? Well, main characters aren't all-knowing: they need information. Enter the Snitch. Snitches might be big operators or they might be small fish; regardless, they're generally amoral, and always give their information for exchange, either for money or a favor. Let's make our Snitch extremely horrible. He's a dealer in the black market for "fixed" Changeling body parts; that is, they're animated by worms but somehow aren't able to infect anyone. He's playing on the fascination with the undead to create his own lucrative black market. He knows where the scientist-brother was last seen, and promises to keep Agent 26 informed on the latest developments. In return, he wants Agent 26 to shut down the operations of his biggest competitor, Nicky the Ghoul. Address in hand, 26 goes out to the scientist-brother's last known haunt.
26 follows the address to an hotel in a relatively high-end neighborhood (a chance to show how the better half live in this new world - pretty much as they always have, actually). He picks the lock on the apartment, and upon entering finds that Mr. Scientist has been living rough for over a month. The place is pitch dark and in shambles, with papered-up windows; the bed has been shoved over to create space for an impromptu laboratory. Stacks of fevered notes are interspersed with newspaper clippings. It becomes obvious that he was not only feverishly trying to find a cure, but on the run from somebody, although it isn't clear who. He was working on a supposedly fixed Changeling body part, which comes alive and attacks 26, although he destroys it. He wonders how the worms inside, which are rendered braindead, managed to wake up and try to infect him.
One of the items in the room is a slip of paper with a phone number. Agent 26 impulsively dials it on the apartment phone, and when greeted with the clotted voice on the end (who thinks it's the Scientist), asks for Nicky the Ghoul. The voice becomes panicky and hangs up, confirming 26's suspicions. He's now got at least one good lead.
Already we're thick into the story. The danger here is to let the characterization and point of the story get swallowed up in the labyrinth of the Noir structure, which is extremely plot-heavy. The way to get around this is to keep the tone consistent. In our case, the events of the story need to reinforce the sense of despair, to agree with 26's cynicism. But it is essential that he not just go along with the pessimism - he needs to fight it. Otherwise, he's not a character, merely a cipher. His internal conflict should mirror the external conflict; he's trying to shore up the bastions of his crumbling humanity just as humanity is trying to contain the Changelings. There is a temptation to do this through the narrative monologue, but that gets wearying fast; we need to see a disagreement between his ironic comments and his little, moment-to-moment actions. Maybe he throws a blanket over a freezing bum on impulse, even as he thinks about how it's "every man for himself" - a compassion-is-dead speech. Anyway, just remember that the two parallel conflicts - internal and external - are what keep the story alive and interesting.
Onward! Agent 26 has to delve more deeply into the Changeling body-part trade. He does some internet research, and finds that they're not only curiosities - like strange pets - they're also used in folk medicine as longevity elixirs and aphrodisiacs; fetishes for cult rituals; and inevitably, perverted sex (Noir is great for exploring the vile corners of human desire). It's a multimillion dollar industry, and is growing exponentially.
Agent 26 receives a call. It's his chief at the agency; he needs to come in immediately. On arriving, he's ushered into a small room. Sitting next to his chief is the governor, smiling. He thanks Agent 26 for his help, and tells him that his son has been found, and there's no need to pursue the case anymore. Agent 26 smells a rat, but there's little he can do. He goes back home and considers his options. This is the point in the story where he's most tempted to give up and let things take their course. His reverie is shattered by a frantic knock at the door.
It's the Governor's daughter. She's a mess. She tells Agent 26 there are men after her, Changelings she thinks. After calming her down, she tells him that her father was visited by a "corpulent man" last night who told him his "associates" were unhappy with Agent 26's case. The huge man passed the Governor a suitcase full of money, and the Governor agreed. During their conversation, the fat man mentions that the Governor hasn't been down to the docks lately, and he's starting to feel "neglected".
The daughter saw and heard all this on the house security system. She'd run over here as quickly as she dared, but she was sure the Changelings were following her. Agent 26 deduces the fat man was Nicky the Ghoul.
Agent 26 is a sucker for a sad dame (of course) so he agrees to get her to a safehouse with fake ID's and all. There follows a slow, tense cat-and-mouse car chase, with Agent 26 using every trick in the book. He finally gets the daughter to the safehouse, where they share a quiet moment, and she expresses her gratitude, and then they...
Well, do they or don't they? The question of whether or not the characters become romantically entangled is an intriguing one; in this case, I think it depends completely on the characters themselves. Is the daughter really going to throw herself at Agent 26 out of sheer gratitude? Unlikely. In Noir, everybody's got an angle, even the most seemingly innocent. Or are they two lost souls looking for any port in a storm, struggling against the inherent awfulness of the world? Or, is the possibility of romance all in 26's head, and he realizes the daughter is nothing more than a silky dream-cloud? This is one instant I think we can leave ambiguous for now. No reason to force the point. Maybe we can wait until the characters are actually designed, and we know how they tick.
So finally 26 goes off to confront Nicky the Ghoul. He finds an abandoned warehouse by the docks; he sees trucks driving back and forth, a door open, lights on inside. No guards. Something weird is going on. Agent 26 eases his way into the main room, weapon at the ready. There's Nicky the Ghoul, fat and repulsive, clearly in a panic; Nicky and his henchmen are upending huge crates of Changeling body parts into an incinerator. They are surrounded by bodies, men shot in the head. Agent 26 interrupts the party and starts asking questions.
Nicky, with nothing left to lose, explains that he was being coerced by Changelings to keep the Governor under control; he and his boys finally got the drop on them. Even worse: the "fixed" body parts were becoming "activated". Through the black market, Changelings were flooding the underworld with worms that would then infect the populace. He hands 26 a letter, telling him he'll want to read it.
Suddenly the warehouse erupts in gunfire. Agent 26 is forced into a gunbattle alongside Nicky the Ghoul. It turns out that the Snitch and his gang followed 26 to Nicky's hideout. Agent 26 realizes that they are already Changed, and are trying to stamp out Nicky and 26 before they alert the whole city. A tank of chemicals catches fire and explodes, knocking a crate of parts all over Nicky.
Nicky, outlined by fire, worms burrowing toward his brain, says, "You see this? This is what they want! All over! But I tell you one thing, my friend - I'm dying human!" He then blows his brains out and falls backward, consumed by the flames.
Agent 26 escapes out the back way, ducking his pursuers. Once safe, he opens the letter. It's from the Brother to his sister, care of Nicky the Ghoul. It says, "If you are reading this, I've already been caught. I've found the cure. Go to my apartment and open the safe -" it ends with the combination number.
26 hurriedly calls the sister to warn her, but it's too late. She says (in strangely placid tones) that she's found her brother, and he needs to come to such-and-such a place immediately. Agent 26 realizes it's Game Over. He drives, despairing, to the address.
It's an abandoned lot, about a mile outside the Containment Zone. 26 shows up, and there's the daughter, standing next to a shadowy man, and smiling inexplicably. She runs up to kiss him. He shoots her with his Worm-Destroyer. Then he confronts the Brother.
Since his Change, the brother had been helping the Changelings coordinate their attack. He pulls out a remote detonator and presses it. Off in the distance, a series of explosions rock the Containment Zone, and the shield-bubble fizzles out. The Worms are loose. The invasion has truly begun.
The Brother offers to Change Agent 26. Everything's lost, humanity's doomed; why not? Why not live forever, with no worries, no fears? We see a montage of the Agency, the tenements, everywhere; people with Infected eyes and worms coming out of their ears and nose. The Conqueror Worm has taken over the world. Why not? Come, join us. He holds out his hand, as if in offering, and a single worm snakes out invitingly.
But Agent 26 says, "Nah," and shoots him. Like Nicky, he still wants to die human. He pours gas over the bodies and burns them. Then he drives back to the Brother's old apartment, and finds the safe. Inside is the Cure. It's only a small vial, a tiny amount against the scourge, but it's 20 cc's of hope. Our story ends with Agent 26 walking out into the strange new world, vial clutched in his hand.
Cool! I was making that up on the fly, although I had to go back when an idea occurred to me. It's pretty rough, but I think it's a great start - we can iron out the details when we get to the Storyboarding segment. As a veteran storyteller, I have an instinct for figuring out what goes where; it happens automatically. If you're just starting out, I'd suggest reading Orson Scott Card's How to Write for Science Fiction and Fantasy, one of the most useful books I've ever read on the storywriting process. You'll get all you need about plot structure (Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denoument) in much better detail than I can convey.
Next up, we're going to talk about Character: how I come up with them, and how their appearance and attitude are going to influence the story we've developed.
Rick Out.
This first piece is about stories: how I come up with them, and how I build them.
First of all, I am a compulsive storyteller; I draw on just about everything for inspiration, from movies to nonfiction books. Anything even vaguely exciting can spark the storytelling process. Thus I have a near-infinite well of storylines at my disposal.
But what makes a good story? What makes a story I want to tell? For me, it's the uniqueness of perspective. All the major storylines have already been done; all the major plots, at least in general, have been explored over and over. The point is not to try and reinvent the wheel, because wheels are wheels are wheels. Make a circle out of some material, and you have a wheel. The point is to create a unique perspective on the wheel itself.
Let's take, for instance, zombies. Goddamn zombies. Zombies, zombies, zombies, over and over, world without end, amen. I think the real current zombie phenomenon was kickstarted by 28 Days Later, which set the formula: human bioengineering has created a supervirus that makes zombies, who then infect humans by biting them (NB: I actually liked 28 Days Later a lot). This sets up hard moral choices involving whether or not to kill your little daughter who is bitten but not turned yet, etc.; you also see humanity at its best and worst in terms of the apocalyptic situation. Bam, done. Wash, rinse, repeat. You could argue that the general "zombie apocalypse" formula was established by the George Romero's Night of the Living Dead way before 28 Days Later, but the result is pretty much the same. Since then we've seen an explosion of the living dead in movies, games, books, everything, a genre that seems defined by its own antagonists: beat it to death, and it just keeps coming back.
Okay, let's say I've been drafted to write a zombie story (God forbid). What am I going to do? I could try varying the setting: Zombies on a ship! Zombies on a plane! Zombies in space! But that ain't gonna do it for me. How about we change the mode of delivery? I'm going to use a premise from an old Stephen King story, "Home Delivery". The zombies are created not by a supervirus, but by an interstellar object (literally, Wormwood) made of a mass of flesh-eating worms. They attack an investigating space shuttle, which then crashes, causing the worms to fall to earth and reanimate the corpses in the graves. In order to spread, the worms use the corpses to attack the living and consume them.
So there you go! Already we have a new angle on the subject. Suddenly my interest is piqued.
Okay, now for characters. Your usual group is a ragtag band of survivors trying to eke out a living in the apocalypse, if you don't keep up you get left behind, blah blah blah. Boring. The Walking Dead is currently shepherding this idea through its long, agonizing death throes, quickly running out of ideas for keeping it fresh.
So I'm going to do this: I'm going to reinvent the zombie-infested world in a way that's at once more realistic and allows more comfortable parameters (You're going to see the word, "parameters" crop up a lot here - as a storyteller, I'm not about wide-open worlds; I'm about limitations. Limited stories are much, much more interesting. Even your epics - Lord of the Rings, for instance - work best when you're looking over the shoulders of two little hobbits, rather than watching massive armies smash into each other). So I'm going to confine the outbreak: one city, where the government has set up some kind of containment system that actually works. The worms have infested large numbers of people and corpses, but not even spaceworms can live forever without food. The outbreak is looking to die out.
End of story, right? Not quite. Now we start a process I like to call, "riffing". A lot of this comes from experience - you have to work that storytelling muscle before you can lift narrative weight like a pro. So here goes: the effects of these outbreaks on society are immense. A global recession has sunk in. More government dollars to containment mean fewer dollars for welfare. Once vibrant cities are sinking into poverty and crime. The existential horror of the worms has also caused a change in the zeitgeist, and people are tempted, in a gothic-horror kind of way, to submit to the "change" and live forever. The worms, meanwhile, have learned how to refine their methods, to keep their living victims more natural; they are becoming clever. Slowly they are learning how to outsmart the cordons, as an ever-increasing arms race ensues; a few "agents", here and there, manage to break through. They create cells of "The Changed", who, like terrorists, try to recruit the disenfranchised to their cause and destroy obstacles to their power. This is a natural progression, an evolution (at least in the world I'm creating), that allows the story to reach a breaking point. Pressure is building from all sides, the narrative is starting to bottleneck, and it will only take one act - say, a coordinated attack on the containment system in one city - to blow the story wide open.
So how is the government responding to this threat? Well, they need counter-agents. People who can track down "Changelings" and terminate them with extreme prejudice. Enter our protagonist, "Agent 26" (or whatever). He's charged with defusing what's rumored to be a huge attack planned on the cordon at Containment Sector 225 in...I don't know...Los Angeles. He's got to figure out the who, what, where, and how before it's too late.
Now here's a danger: I don't want this to turn into 24 with zombies: Agent 26 screaming, "Where's the bomb?!" and blowing the kneecaps off a Changeling while an invisible timer ticks away. So I'm going to bring in another element: Noir. Agent 26 may be a government spook, but there's no reason we can't treat him like Philip Marlowe. Noir protagonists are haunted by a sort of existential despair. Morality is much less important than Solving the Case - they'll use any means within their particular honor code. They drink hard, gamble too much, and play around with dangerous dames, telling themselves it's for the sake of the case when really they're just trying to keep the night at bay.
This brings us to a salient point, which is...well...THE POINT. Of the story, that is. What, really, are we trying to convey here? I can tell a Philip Marlowe Fights Zombies story any day of the week until my face turns blue, but what does it matter? It'll be just another stupid crossover, something you can throw in the dumpster as soon as you read it. Somebody might get a giggle out of it, in a stilted Pop Culture Smirk sort of way (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, anyone?) but ultimately, who the hell cares.
No. As I write a story, I keep one half of my senses on the words, and the other half tuned to a sort of nebulous feeling that's slowly gathering around it. The Point is not something I have in mind before I start writing, although I will need it if I'm ever going to finish the damn thing. So The Point of my story, I think, will be this: "Why fight anymore?" Agent 26 is constantly asking himself this question as he hurries to track down the Changelings. All he sees around him is a world sliding into oblivion. People don't seem to care anymore; certainly his government agency is rife with bureaucratic absurdity, cynicism, and corruption. Like the Baltimore Police Force in the TV series The Wire, they exist to bust bad guys, not to solve the problem of crime. The business of busting heads is very, very lucrative. Those who get sucked into the system - "infected" by it, so to speak - turn into monsters, or at least minor imps, in their own right.
Contrast this with The Changed. They're also fighting for their survival, but they are new on the scene, "newborn", so to speak, and so are hungry for life. They have purpose and initiative, they're the brash underdog, and they offer an amazing life insurance policy - i.e., eternal life. What's not to like (except for space-worms eating your brain, that is)? I guess the mechanics have shifted from Zombie to Vampire (I mean, who the hell wants to be a zombie?), but I think that's okay. My story has already transcended the zombie genre. Now it's a story in its own right. Anyway, the temptation to just give up and surrender to the threat is a real one, even if Agent 26 doesn't always take it seriously.
Okay, so we've got pretty much everything we need; but let's examine the story arc. This is a short story, so I'll need to start off quick and with a bang. Let's drop Agent 26 into an encounter with a Changeling. Already we have a microcosm of the macrocosm, illustrating the story's setting: a dark night, in an alleyway, with Agent 26 fighting a mysterious man who vomits worms. Of course Agent 26 wins the fight, no doubt utilizing special Worm-Fighting tech. We then have a moment to examine his character, maybe by the throwaway line he utters. Now we take the excitement down a notch: we send 26 back to his headquarters to file his report. We get to meet his bosses and co-workers, and get a sense of the degeneracy of his agency. Then he's cut loose to go home.
Sending Agent 26 home, we get to pull back and look at the city through the windows of the El Train. We see, for instance, the shimmering bubble of the energy shield cordoning off Sector 225 in the distance. We see the slums that have taken over the city. We meet the bitter dregs of humanity. We might see a brick wall, tagged with graffiti - "Change is Good", with a symbol representing the worms. As in all good Noirs, 26 narrates. He gets home, pets the cat, pours himself a slug of bourbon, watches happy reruns on the TV until he passes out.
But lo! A sylphlike dame appears at his door! She's the daughter of the governor, and her brother has gone missing, last seen in the company of a known Changeling. Agent 26 tells her to give it up, it's a lost cause; but she presents evidence that her brother, a biologist, has somehow found a cure for the common Spaceworm. This, plus Agent 26's last shred of pity for a crying girl (or lust, probably), convinces him to go on the hunt without giving his agency the full details.
So there we have it: Setting, Conflict, Setup. Now for the action to begin. This is where things get tricky, because we have to adhere to both the Noir structure and keep our story elements from feeling arbitrary. Zombie-making spaceworms have to be essential to the story, not just window-dressing. (Also note that I'm shamelessly following an established story structure - Noir, in this case. It's a skeleton. All skeletons are basically the same; you, as the author, give it muscles and guts and a brain, and breathe life into it. Don't be afraid to use an established story structure!)
Where to next? Well, main characters aren't all-knowing: they need information. Enter the Snitch. Snitches might be big operators or they might be small fish; regardless, they're generally amoral, and always give their information for exchange, either for money or a favor. Let's make our Snitch extremely horrible. He's a dealer in the black market for "fixed" Changeling body parts; that is, they're animated by worms but somehow aren't able to infect anyone. He's playing on the fascination with the undead to create his own lucrative black market. He knows where the scientist-brother was last seen, and promises to keep Agent 26 informed on the latest developments. In return, he wants Agent 26 to shut down the operations of his biggest competitor, Nicky the Ghoul. Address in hand, 26 goes out to the scientist-brother's last known haunt.
26 follows the address to an hotel in a relatively high-end neighborhood (a chance to show how the better half live in this new world - pretty much as they always have, actually). He picks the lock on the apartment, and upon entering finds that Mr. Scientist has been living rough for over a month. The place is pitch dark and in shambles, with papered-up windows; the bed has been shoved over to create space for an impromptu laboratory. Stacks of fevered notes are interspersed with newspaper clippings. It becomes obvious that he was not only feverishly trying to find a cure, but on the run from somebody, although it isn't clear who. He was working on a supposedly fixed Changeling body part, which comes alive and attacks 26, although he destroys it. He wonders how the worms inside, which are rendered braindead, managed to wake up and try to infect him.
One of the items in the room is a slip of paper with a phone number. Agent 26 impulsively dials it on the apartment phone, and when greeted with the clotted voice on the end (who thinks it's the Scientist), asks for Nicky the Ghoul. The voice becomes panicky and hangs up, confirming 26's suspicions. He's now got at least one good lead.
Already we're thick into the story. The danger here is to let the characterization and point of the story get swallowed up in the labyrinth of the Noir structure, which is extremely plot-heavy. The way to get around this is to keep the tone consistent. In our case, the events of the story need to reinforce the sense of despair, to agree with 26's cynicism. But it is essential that he not just go along with the pessimism - he needs to fight it. Otherwise, he's not a character, merely a cipher. His internal conflict should mirror the external conflict; he's trying to shore up the bastions of his crumbling humanity just as humanity is trying to contain the Changelings. There is a temptation to do this through the narrative monologue, but that gets wearying fast; we need to see a disagreement between his ironic comments and his little, moment-to-moment actions. Maybe he throws a blanket over a freezing bum on impulse, even as he thinks about how it's "every man for himself" - a compassion-is-dead speech. Anyway, just remember that the two parallel conflicts - internal and external - are what keep the story alive and interesting.
Onward! Agent 26 has to delve more deeply into the Changeling body-part trade. He does some internet research, and finds that they're not only curiosities - like strange pets - they're also used in folk medicine as longevity elixirs and aphrodisiacs; fetishes for cult rituals; and inevitably, perverted sex (Noir is great for exploring the vile corners of human desire). It's a multimillion dollar industry, and is growing exponentially.
Agent 26 receives a call. It's his chief at the agency; he needs to come in immediately. On arriving, he's ushered into a small room. Sitting next to his chief is the governor, smiling. He thanks Agent 26 for his help, and tells him that his son has been found, and there's no need to pursue the case anymore. Agent 26 smells a rat, but there's little he can do. He goes back home and considers his options. This is the point in the story where he's most tempted to give up and let things take their course. His reverie is shattered by a frantic knock at the door.
It's the Governor's daughter. She's a mess. She tells Agent 26 there are men after her, Changelings she thinks. After calming her down, she tells him that her father was visited by a "corpulent man" last night who told him his "associates" were unhappy with Agent 26's case. The huge man passed the Governor a suitcase full of money, and the Governor agreed. During their conversation, the fat man mentions that the Governor hasn't been down to the docks lately, and he's starting to feel "neglected".
The daughter saw and heard all this on the house security system. She'd run over here as quickly as she dared, but she was sure the Changelings were following her. Agent 26 deduces the fat man was Nicky the Ghoul.
Agent 26 is a sucker for a sad dame (of course) so he agrees to get her to a safehouse with fake ID's and all. There follows a slow, tense cat-and-mouse car chase, with Agent 26 using every trick in the book. He finally gets the daughter to the safehouse, where they share a quiet moment, and she expresses her gratitude, and then they...
Well, do they or don't they? The question of whether or not the characters become romantically entangled is an intriguing one; in this case, I think it depends completely on the characters themselves. Is the daughter really going to throw herself at Agent 26 out of sheer gratitude? Unlikely. In Noir, everybody's got an angle, even the most seemingly innocent. Or are they two lost souls looking for any port in a storm, struggling against the inherent awfulness of the world? Or, is the possibility of romance all in 26's head, and he realizes the daughter is nothing more than a silky dream-cloud? This is one instant I think we can leave ambiguous for now. No reason to force the point. Maybe we can wait until the characters are actually designed, and we know how they tick.
So finally 26 goes off to confront Nicky the Ghoul. He finds an abandoned warehouse by the docks; he sees trucks driving back and forth, a door open, lights on inside. No guards. Something weird is going on. Agent 26 eases his way into the main room, weapon at the ready. There's Nicky the Ghoul, fat and repulsive, clearly in a panic; Nicky and his henchmen are upending huge crates of Changeling body parts into an incinerator. They are surrounded by bodies, men shot in the head. Agent 26 interrupts the party and starts asking questions.
Nicky, with nothing left to lose, explains that he was being coerced by Changelings to keep the Governor under control; he and his boys finally got the drop on them. Even worse: the "fixed" body parts were becoming "activated". Through the black market, Changelings were flooding the underworld with worms that would then infect the populace. He hands 26 a letter, telling him he'll want to read it.
Suddenly the warehouse erupts in gunfire. Agent 26 is forced into a gunbattle alongside Nicky the Ghoul. It turns out that the Snitch and his gang followed 26 to Nicky's hideout. Agent 26 realizes that they are already Changed, and are trying to stamp out Nicky and 26 before they alert the whole city. A tank of chemicals catches fire and explodes, knocking a crate of parts all over Nicky.
Nicky, outlined by fire, worms burrowing toward his brain, says, "You see this? This is what they want! All over! But I tell you one thing, my friend - I'm dying human!" He then blows his brains out and falls backward, consumed by the flames.
Agent 26 escapes out the back way, ducking his pursuers. Once safe, he opens the letter. It's from the Brother to his sister, care of Nicky the Ghoul. It says, "If you are reading this, I've already been caught. I've found the cure. Go to my apartment and open the safe -" it ends with the combination number.
26 hurriedly calls the sister to warn her, but it's too late. She says (in strangely placid tones) that she's found her brother, and he needs to come to such-and-such a place immediately. Agent 26 realizes it's Game Over. He drives, despairing, to the address.
It's an abandoned lot, about a mile outside the Containment Zone. 26 shows up, and there's the daughter, standing next to a shadowy man, and smiling inexplicably. She runs up to kiss him. He shoots her with his Worm-Destroyer. Then he confronts the Brother.
Since his Change, the brother had been helping the Changelings coordinate their attack. He pulls out a remote detonator and presses it. Off in the distance, a series of explosions rock the Containment Zone, and the shield-bubble fizzles out. The Worms are loose. The invasion has truly begun.
The Brother offers to Change Agent 26. Everything's lost, humanity's doomed; why not? Why not live forever, with no worries, no fears? We see a montage of the Agency, the tenements, everywhere; people with Infected eyes and worms coming out of their ears and nose. The Conqueror Worm has taken over the world. Why not? Come, join us. He holds out his hand, as if in offering, and a single worm snakes out invitingly.
But Agent 26 says, "Nah," and shoots him. Like Nicky, he still wants to die human. He pours gas over the bodies and burns them. Then he drives back to the Brother's old apartment, and finds the safe. Inside is the Cure. It's only a small vial, a tiny amount against the scourge, but it's 20 cc's of hope. Our story ends with Agent 26 walking out into the strange new world, vial clutched in his hand.
Cool! I was making that up on the fly, although I had to go back when an idea occurred to me. It's pretty rough, but I think it's a great start - we can iron out the details when we get to the Storyboarding segment. As a veteran storyteller, I have an instinct for figuring out what goes where; it happens automatically. If you're just starting out, I'd suggest reading Orson Scott Card's How to Write for Science Fiction and Fantasy, one of the most useful books I've ever read on the storywriting process. You'll get all you need about plot structure (Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denoument) in much better detail than I can convey.
Next up, we're going to talk about Character: how I come up with them, and how their appearance and attitude are going to influence the story we've developed.
Rick Out.
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