I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but it turns out that obsessively writing a graphic novel over the course of a month means that you need to take a few days when you’re done to put life back in some kind of order.

I never knew that.

In fact, I learned a lot of things working on my Nanographicmo project. When I started, I knew next to nothing about the actual process of writing a comic, or even how to use some of the software I had. “How bad could the learning curve possibly be?” I thought.

Not so bad that I didn’t finish, but I thought I would share some of the most important things I learned durning the month of November, 2010.

1. Play to your strengths.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I am not an artist. I can draw a crude interpretation of a stick figure. So actually drawing a graphic novel was out of the question. I do have some experience with Photoshop and GIMP, so I figured I could just manipulate existing images. I knew that there were a lot of public domain and creative commons pictures out there, so no big deal. I figured that my writing could carry the book.

2. Your strengths can be weaknesses.
I am a writer. I developed the story to showcase words, not anything else. The story in my head was very, very talky, and it took about five seconds to figure out that it wasn’t going to work.

So, instant, on the fly rewrite it was. Writers have a saying, “Show, don’t tell.” I was originally using writing techniques for short fiction. It was obvious in the first page that I could show with the images, so my usual tactics were utterly useless. I had to learn an entirely new writing style as I was doing it, while mercilessly churning out content.

It was rough. Next time (assuming I forget how harrowing the first time was and decide to do this again), I’ll know about creating thumbnails for pages, and how that will really help out with pacing.

3. Pacing is my enemy.
I’ve always struggled with properly pacing a story. This challenge was tough in that I had only 48 pages to tell it. And I had no idea how much of the story I could tell on a page. There are parts of TRANSLUNAR that drag on for far too long, and parts (especially the last few pages) that deserved more time. Thumbnailing pages would have helped me pace it better, because then I would have had a solid idea of how the story progressed across the pages and panels.

4. Writers are all a bunch of bastards…
…from the artist’s point of view. Every panel of every page I knew what I wanted to see. A few times, I was looking for appropriate images to modify, and I asked my partner for help. BUT I COULD NOT DESCRIBE WHAT I WANTED IN ANY USEFUL WAY.

Seriously, I have a large lexicon. I understand artistic terms, like foreground and focus and negative space. And yet I found myself thinking and saying “I want a rocketship thing that looks kewl.” I imagine that working in collaboration, a good writer allows the artist a lot of room to use their expertise, but certain things have to look certain ways for story reasons. And I can’t describe them.

It’s something I know I need to work on. And I will. But while writing TRANSLUNAR, the second most common thought I had was “Why do artist no just murder the writer? Or do they, but they get off because it is TOTALLY JUSTIFIABLE!”

5. Everyone needs a Ben.
My friend Ben is a pretty quiet guy. He’s unassuming, and doesn’t tweet unnecessarily. But he is a madman when it comes to proofreading. He caught a number of typos in TRANSLUNAR, usually within minutes of a new page being posted. He makes me look a lot less dumb. Thanks, buddy.

6. Find a support group.
I cannot stress this one enough. If not for the people egging me on, I would have dropped this project on day three. I was lucky enough that Calliope (who organized nanographicmo, and who we all owe a debt of thanks to) created a twitter hashtag, #nanographicmo, that let us find each other pretty easily.

Without them, I would have degenerated (deeper) into madness. Every time I was thinking about throwing in the towel, someone would say something encouraging. Not in the sense that they were talking to me directly, but the energy level was so intense that I couldn’t help but push myself. When I admitted my desire to quit, or my frustrations, people helped me work through it. In turn, I tried to push them. I hope it helped. And those of you still working – YOU CAN DO IT!

7. Check your links.
When I posted the downloadable version of TRANSLUNAR, I made a typo. This meant that no one could get it. It was more embarrassing than the time I misspelled a word in a Facebook update complaining about bad spelling.

8. Show your work.
As a writer, I have a lot of stuff laying around. Most of it has never been read by anyone.

I put TRANSLUNAR on the internet. I tracked the number of people who were looking at it. At this point, it’s been looked at by over 200 people. That may not seem like much, but to me, it is a readership I never imagined possible. I know the odds of becoming a published author, they are not good.

But I also know that a bunch of people read my thing. It’s been putting a smile on my face for days now.

Thanks.