perilsofrosella wrote:T, in the course of writing P&A and QUILTBAG, did you ever end up hating a character (creatively speaking)? If I'm not being clear, was there someone who was difficult to write, or that you wished you hadn't included at all?
Pretty much the only brand-new characters I found
easy to write (usually) were Hank, Leah, Chrissie and Jade. The other girls from LAZ weren't too bad, but Temperance, Michael, Bernie, Clarice, Marie and Ronnie felt like pulling an Ottoman uphill. As I've said elsewhere, I didn't do the hard work of getting to know them, and getting all the way inside their heads, that I did with most
Penny and Aggie characters (even relatively late additions like the cast of
Hot Lights). This is all relative, I should add: my struggles with
QUILTBAG overall meant that even Sara and Lisa were tougher than they had been. (I do feel like at least some of those characters were ultimately dragged to a fairly satisfying final moment in the series; I'll let you decide which.)
perilsofrosella wrote:Also, is there a letter that you wish you could "skip to", and write about?
Right now I'm just relieved not to have to fight this project any more: it was getting that hard. I was harboring a few ideas for most of the remaining letters which would've been fun for some pages, though in my current opinion, they were not enough to hang a chapter on. "I," in addition to a single intersex character, was to include some Rashomon-like narrative and the final planned appearance (not chronologically, but actually) of Penny and Aggie, who made plans to visit their respective best friends from high school on the same weekend. "L" would include the return of both LAZ and Lucy. However, realizing that I was mostly looking forward to bringing back old
Penny and Aggie material, and to the
general idea of an Asexual or Bisexual chapter, rather than any specific new characters or plots, ultimately convinced me the series had to go.
A bit of a digression: I regret that the letter theme got quite as much attention as it did, as early as it did. I think that if the chapters had been shorter and more focused, and if the series had been more conceptually rich like most of my best work is, the alliteration would've just seemed to
happen naturally all the time: as it is I think I managed to pull that "natural feeling" off sometimes but not enough.
The trick is to have enough patience to generate multiple natural-sounding dialogue options from the characters, until you have something which meets all your other requirements... and not to make those requirements too crazy: an "X" or "Z" chapter might've included an X or Z
in every strip without necessarily using it to
lead every strip. If I had to do "Q" over again, much as the challenge appealed to me at first, I might've loosened its requirements. I feel like
Fans' "Crossover" was an example of this kind of thing done right, with enough patience put into the dialogue to make the language play feel natural and fun, but impatience was kind of a theme for my work on this series.
I still think that using monograms and alliteration as literary symbolism is an interesting and under-explored device, but I'll probably have to give it a rest for a while after this, before bringing it back in a quieter way.
