May 9, 2023

Writing with pictures

I see things that others cannot. No, it’s not dead people. But, for the length of my professional life, the number one feedback I get goes something like this, “Matt, you need to take people on the journey. You skip from A to G and others can’t do that. You need to step them through your thinking, from A, to B, C, all the way to G.”

When I was younger, I thought it was an opinion. But, as I’ve grown, I’ve come to recognise it as a pattern. I’m not here to toot my own horn but sometimes facing up to those patterns is what helps us grow so I need to admit it – I see things that others cannot.

One of the things I’ve grown comfortable with telling myself is that I’m an artist and storyteller. I know how to tell a good story. I don’t mean the technical aspects because I don’t think that way (you know, 3-act structure, climax, conflict, etc). I mean, I can just tell someone a story.

Maybe it’s because my teenage years were spent engrossed in cinema and film (I was never a reader), but my default way of telling stories, I’ve realised, is through drawing them. I’ve tried to write them, and whenever I seek feedback its… underwhelming. People don’t seem to be able to get where I’m going with it. It’s too wordy, too didactic, too… unpolished.

But, every time I tell a story with some visuals, people are there for it. I get glowing and overwhelmingly positive engagement (and book contracts) when the stories I tell come with the visuals.

The advice you hear online is to ‘start with the manuscript’ and now I realise I’ve been fighting that advice for years. I keep trying to pump out manuscripts but they never land. A storyboard though? That’s when I get the reactions I’m looking for – when the person who engages with the work says, “I can see what you can see now. I couldn’t see that before.”

This reaction happens when I illuminate someone else’s text, too. The story the writer thinks they’ve told is still there, but the feedback I get is that I’ve added new threads of narrative, or ‘expanded the market’ or ‘expanded the scope’ of the work.

I’m not here to spend time congratulating myself, I’m here to acknowledge that there is not one way to ‘write’ stories and it’s taken me ages to have the confidence to change my practice to a way that suits me, not the way I hear it’s ‘supposed to work’ from others.

As someone who never read a lot of books growing up, writing stories (refining specificity of words, intellectualising it all etc) is not my sweet spot. I can work on it, but I don’t have the natural rhythyms and structure of children’s literature in my brain that make it a natural strength. Maybe it’s because of my love of and long relationship with cinema but what I know is that I think in images and I can see how the meaning of words can change when they’re sitting alongside an image. The job for someone like me is to be OK with that, and then show people what I can see – one thumbnail at a time.

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