Storyboarding
Research link of the day: Ancient Scripts. (T’Other Liz recommends OmniGlot.)
St. Ignatius didn’t give me as much help as I wanted, so I decided to try storyboarding. You’d think there’d be more links about it on the net, but I haven’t found all that many useful ones. Here’s the short list:
- Storyboarding by Crawford Kilian is actually about plotting fiction, not storyboarding it
- Storyboarding books (for film)
- Storyboarding with Ian McCaig (also film)
The net didn’t help much, but the basic concept seemed clear enough - storyboarding is making quick sketches of scenes from your story to visualize them for the camera (or for the writer with visualization problems). You don’t have to be able to draw (though I can) as long as you know what the squiggles represent. It’s a lot like going through the Writing Exercises, except of course without taste or smell.
So I dug out my old contè crayons and nupastels (this involved a search of the entire apartment and the basement storage area), and popped down to The Art Store for paper and pencils, and now I have some small sketches for the off-world gate scene in the Stargate novel I’ve been wanting to write for a while now. Of course I should be thinking about other things, but while I was editing Colony I started wondering whether I could convert it into a Stargate novel with Jack, Sam and Daniel taking the places of Chakotay, Torres and Janeway - and why I was slaving away at an old, unsuccessful novel when a new, promising idea was eating away at the muse. But I persevered and got a bit done on the ancient albatross…