Production Blog- Patience Is A Mighty Fine Thing

Making graphic novels, quite simply, takes forevas!  I talked a bit in my last post about how setting goals helps you set perameters for the project you are on.  It gives you time frames and a schedule you can keep and is attainable.  But then when you sit back and you look at the actual time it can take, it feels a bit like a kid waiting for Christmas!

I look at the production schedule for my book and see that my book will take upwards of seven months to complete from the standpoint I am currently at.  I have 102 pages that were remaining with the end of my first chapter.  I am planning on completing three pages a week in total (I could do more, but I have freelance responsibilities and a family…. and also I want to make time to draw for myself).  Let’s do the math and divide 102 by 3 and you see that it will take exactly 34 weeks to finish this book.   Deep breath.

To be fair seven to eight months to finish a book isn’t terrible!  It means that it will have taken me about 11 months to make this entire book!  That’s the rate a lot of professionals work at sometimes, when its their full time job!  But it still can cause you to lose heart a bit.  So how can you overcome that some?  Let’s look at a couple things every Storyteller should preach to their creative hearts.

1) Understand Patience In Your Work-
We’re building worlds here guys!  We’re not painting a canyon and some creatures in it.  We’re not jumping from place to place and letting our imaginations go wild just for the sake of it.  We’re building a place… a consistent place where things have to work together!  These things take time.  God maybe able to make a world in six days, but He’s been telling the story of creation since forever ago.  Stories take time to tell and we are putting characters in that world and letting them experience the world they live in.  It takes time.  It’s not a single piece of art.  It’s a story.  Tell yourself that over and over again.  And then some more until you can grit your teeth and stay with the story until its done.  If you want to be a storyteller, and not just an artist, you have to learn patience.

2) Also Use That Impatience To Your Advantage
If you want to be a professional level storyteller  I think it’s a good idea to keep things from people.  Meaning, I am working through my book right now and you might be wondering why not just share it with everyone like every other webcomics artist as I go.  Well first off I dont know that I making a webcomic anymore, I am making a book and the traditional models of webcomics for long form work just don’t work in my opinion.  But keeping things from your audience can be your biggest motivator!

I used to think that having an update schedule online kept me in line with finishing my work.  In the end I felt it made me super anxious.  Life happens and maybe this week I can’t get the page done by this day or that and in the end I just had to realize that it wasn’t conducive for me. Instead I realized that having no outside dates expressed to people motivated me more!  Because you won’t see it until I am DONE!  Like at all really!  And that makes me impatient and makes me want to work harder!  It’s a vicious cycle.

Think of your own workflow and ask yourself what helps you be more productive.  Then try to build that into your work flow! 

How do you manage patience with your project?

Also here is a preview for chapter 2!  This is the first page from that piece of epic coming your way!  Thank you everyone for stopping by.  I hope you are enjoying the comic and please share it around!