Not neatly numbered, but numbered, and clear enough to read off the shelf: I filled the first notebook of the year last night. These are Moleskines, the spines marked with a Pentel white pen. They get stuffed with notes, notions, outlines, journalling, photos and printed matter pasted on to the pages with Pritt Stick or Scotch adhesive dots. They all get stacked on a shelf in the office for easy access, and each of them has an index in the front of the most important things within, and a note of the months the notebook spans.
Weirdly life-improving thing. I have a Lamicall gooseneck phone holder clamped to a shelf and bent over so the holder is to the right of and flush with my external monitor in the office. Which means, when a notification goes off, I can just look up instead of picking up the phone from wherever I’ve left it in here. The lockscreen essentially becomes a personal news ticker. When I have to leave the office briefly to make coffee or grab food or whatever, it stays in the holder instead of being stuffed into a shirt pocket. This is interesting to me because it breaks me of the whole “must have phone at all times” thing. I could put on the Apple Watch and still be connected during those five- or ten-minute spaces away from the device, I suppose. But, a month into using the holder, I find I usually don’t bother.
The Lamicall I have is currently sixteen quid in the UK (link) and this looks like the US one (link). It’s a five-minute set-up. And using it shows me exactly how much I acclimated to touching a phone at all times. Bad.
I’ve been asked before about the nature of what we call in comics WFH: Work For Hire. This is when one is hired to work on characters owned by the hiring company. The company owns whatever work you do outright, in return for payment: the old Marvel payment voucher used to assert that they owned all rights to the work “in perpetuity, throughout the universe.” The contracts may still state, as they once did, that Marvel Comics is the legal author of the work.
I entered the comics medium as creator and writer of original works. I had been invited to pitch a Batman piece to Archie Goodwin, which I did because Archie fucking Goodwin asked me to my face to write something for him, and Archie was a legendary writer and editor and when he asked you to do something you did it and tried very hard not to disappoint him.
(Archie once also said to me that one secret to longform superhero comics writing was that they were structured like soap operas, only with fight scenes instead of love scenes.)
Some people happily spend their entire careers in WFH, delighted to write the superhero characters they grew up with and to extend the arc of their stories. Some of us walked into it backwards and had to make adjustments. There are values to working in that area: it pays actual money, it sharpens your technical chops, it’s operating in relatively common culture (any issue of X-Men sells more copies than most novels I read), and you get to play around a bit.
So how do you approach something created by someone else, probably re-created by other people a dozen times, that you don’t own? If you’re a TV writer doing an episode of STAR TREK or LAW AND ORDER, you have a ton of guardrails and you obey and enjoy them. In comics, things are always a lot looser and more ad hoc, and one of the ways to think about it is F FOR FAKE.
The story goes that Orson Welles was hired to edit the footage of a documentary shot by a guy called Francois Reichenbach about a great art forger called Elmyr. Now, editing is its own kind of authorship, its own art and language – subordinate to the original piece, sure, but editing can change everything about and around it. As Welles got to work, so the story goes, he discovered he could do a better job by adding some things. At some point, the biographer of Elmyr whom Reichenbach interviewed on film was discovered to have produced a hoax biography of Howard Hughes. And then things took a turn. Welles grabbed Reichenbach, Gary Graver and Oja Kadar and turned Reichenbach’s footage into a film essay on fakery.
He was still doing the job of turning Reichenbach’s material into a film, mind you: technically, he was still as much a hired hand as anyone writing Batman.
F FOR FAKE is in fact one of my favourite Welles films. It’s warm, clever, mischievous and relaxed. He shoots footage of his own crew. Whole scenes are set around a dinner table as Welles holds court and contextualises the material. It’s as close to having dinner with a happy and garrulous Welles as we’ll ever get. It’s also full of Welles’ interests, obsessions, and personal mythology.
Reichenbach’s material is still in there. Reichenbach’s original intent – a film about Elmyr and forgery – is still in there. Welles serves the underlying material, but he expands it, grows it, adds something of himself into it. He did what he saw as the best possible work-for-hire job by transforming the material he was given into a form he felt was more true to itself and to him.
Taking the work done by other people and infusing it with your interests, obsessions and your notes for experiments. So, yes, you’re experimenting with other people’s money. But since that money is buying your material outright, and they have the right to make you clean up your lab and produce something closer to their desires in the event you produce a three-balled monstrosity, it’s a fair exchange.
In Welles’ case, he makes F FOR FAKE: perhaps a minor work in his oeuvre, but a wonderful experiment in filmic lyric essay. And he did it off a work-for-hire job.
So there are ways into work for hire, ways where you can do the job of repainting a house you don’t own, experiment and learn a whole bunch of new things on their dime, sign your work, apply your new skills and discoveries to your own work later and get shit done with your creative soul left intact.
It can be hard to gain perspective on work for hire, if you find yourself in that position. Maybe this will be useful. Or maybe I just found you a good film to watch.
Old foldaway Bluetooth keyboard may be dead, but the even more ancient Logitech bluetooth keyboard – actually a keyboard case I bought for the iPad 2 that now serves as a podcast “radio” in my office — is still alive. That gives me a couple of options for writing on my phone. Which nobody likes doing, but sometimes, for some things, it’s the nearest fast viable tool at hand.
I’m putting this down now so I can revisit it mid-year and end of year.
This is a list of the current tools I use to get work done.
NOTEBOOKS: Always a classic black-hardback Moleskine ruled pocket notebook as my main zibaldone-style notebook. I fill between two and six of these a year. Field Notes notebooks are used for specific projects that have been broken out of the main notebook. I keep a daybook in the office, a lemon-coloured LEUCHTTURM1917 A6 hardback notebook, the obnoxious yellow of it and the pen guaranteeing I can’t lose the damn thing.
PENS: My new daily driver is the Pentel EnerGel XM BL77 0.7mm. I keep a few Sharpies around, and a couple of Pigma Micro 03 pens in black at 0.35mm. The daybook is matched with a LEUCHTTURM1917 Drehgriffel Bauhaus Edition Ballpoint Pen, that I’ve taken the ballpoint out of and replaced with a G2 gel pen refill. As the name suggests, it is in fact a revival of a Bauhaus design, which gives me pleasure.
DESKTOP APPS: it’s simple. Microsoft Word, Final Draft, Chrome, Gmail, Google Calendar.
STREAMING: these count as tools. MUBI, Prime Video, Amazon Music, Netflix, Curiosity Stream, BBC iPlayer, Eastern European Movies, ARTE.
WHITEBOARDS: one big one, four small ones, held up with Command Hooks. I can see my entire business at a glance just by lifting my head, because they’re all mounted on the wall in front of me, over the monitor
LAPTOP: an old ThinkPad T580 bought in 2018 running Windows 10 and plugged into three Western Digital external drives and an Asus 21.5 inch external monitor that I bought in 2014. This is not interesting, but it’s worth noting all these things are still running. At least two of those external drives were bought in 2013/4.
iPhone 14 Pro: I hates it. It’s too big, it’s not responsive, its wi-fi reception is lousy, Shortcuts remains arcane, Siri isn’t great and speech-to-text still doesn’t like my voice. But, in fairness, neither do I.
PHONE APPS: for work, it’s Signal, Zoom, Google Calendar, Wikipanion. I have WhatsApp, but that’s family and friends – unlike the UK government, it seems nobody I work with uses it. The only things I write on the phone are text messages and emails, and I prefer to save the latter for the desktop where possible. I read on it too much, of late. I’m looking forward to that little pocket-sized AI assistant that I can ask questions of and get useful answers back.
AirPods Pro: workday earbuds for phone calls, walks, listening through work materials.
Echo Buds 2nd Gen: the outdoor earbuds – superior noise cancelling and a firmer fit than the AirPods, which makes them suitable for gardening work. Though the fit isn’t quite as firm as the 1st Gen Buds, which were perfect. These are the ones I wear first thing in the morning when I’m drinking my first coffees outside, as they screen out the howling of the chickens demanding their breakfast.
Apple Watch 3: I started wearing smartwatches in the days of the Pebble Steel, and, in the times when I need to stay connected, I like not having to pull out my phone every time it pings.
iPad Pro 2020 12.9 inch: this is for reading documents in the evenings and doing Zoom calls downstairs in comfort.
Kindle Paperwhite: I have two. One lives in the bedroom and one lives downstairs or in a travel bag. I frequently use the Send To Kindle functions to send text documents to them for review.
PRINTERS: HP Envy Inspire 7220e printer/scanner/copier, Instax Link mini-printer.
I feel like I could reduce this more, but I’m not sure how. Leaving it here for now.
Widows and orphans is actually a term from typography, a system to ensure a paragraph isn’t split across two pages. I borrowed the term to describe for myself what is one of the worst processes in writing for me.
When you’re asked to write a piece at a certain page count – like the one-page pitches I turned in today – you need to hit that count. A page-and-a-bit pitch makes you look like a slob at best, and an idiot at worst. When they ask for one page, you give them one page.
The first draft is almost never one page long. So it’s widows and orphans time.
Those paragraphs that end up with one word on its own on a line? That word’s an orphan. You need to rewrite that paragraph so that there’s not one word on its own taking up a line, because you need to buy back that line’s worth of space. This is usually a technical thing – clean up a few lines and the orphan will be back in the family. If you’re lucky, capturing your orphans will be enough to get you inside the page break and you won’t have to make any widows. But you’re a writer, so you’re never that lucky.
Widows, because sometimes you must kill your darlings. That one sentence you really like, that does its job in the piece perfectly? You know it’s too long, right? You have to find another way to say that, that uses fewer words and operates more efficiently but still has style and snap. Sometimes you have to make a lot of widows. Sometimes making the widows takes longer than it did to write the original document.
But when someone calls for a certain length, you’ve got to run the widows and orphans on it. All day. All week, if you have to. what it teaches you is to revise and revise again, and find a balance between energetic language and clear concise language.
And then sometimes you say fuck it, reduce the type size by one point instead, and go and have a drink.
Pitches filed, B round of rewrites done and sent, DEPT MIDNIGHT 104 locked and off to final mixing.
Next up, full outline writing, roughing out the next scripting job. Very productive in the first week back at work. Let’s see how long that lasts, haha
When I’m building a story idea, I’ll often use placeholders for names of people and places. AAA, BBB, etc. Because choosing the right name for a character or location can take time, and in the first instance I just want to establish the shape of the idea. If I stop to find the right name, I’ll lose the storytelling energy, and I want that energy to carry me to the end of the story idea in one go if at all possible. So now I’m facing my notes on a full outline and it’s full of AAA and GGG and NNN, and this is the bit that can take the time. The wrong name will break a piece. Spider Jerusalem in TRANSMETROPOLITAN wasn’t Spider Jerusalem until after I sold the series – he had the wrong name for some weeks after that, and the piece didn’t lock together until I pulled that name out of a notebook I kept when I was nineteen.
I always start a brand new notebook on January 1, regardless of whether or not I’ve filled the last one. Previous ones get dated and numbered on their spines with a Pentel Micro Correct white pen and put on the shelf.
Very wasteful, sometimes. I doubt I’m going to fill the one on the left before the end of the year. (Although, with a non-cranky printer, I can go back to printing things out to paste in it.) I’ve been working on projects that get broken out into separate, dedicated notebooks. But I like to start the year with a clean book. Sometimes I’ll even give up on one notebook and start a fresh one on July 1, just because I feel stale and congested and need a fresh start.
And now I look at my shelf – where the hell is notebook 2022-1? Did I take it out to refer to previous notes and forget? That’s why they’re up on the shelf – I refer to old notes all the time, and each notebook has a numbered index on the front page. Otherwise, all the ideas would get lost. Of course, an entire notebook getting lost doesn’t help….!
Tools: Pilot G-2 07 black pen, Scotch permanent adhesive dots, Pritt stick, Instax mini printer, HP Envy printer. Kindle Highlights lets me save useful bits of books I’m reading: I can access them from the web and copy them over to print off.
(I still have a Canon Selphy, but my partner took over its use.)
