Last week Sarah A. Hoyt gave us a fantastic blog on the difference between short story and novel writing.  This week, in honor of New York ComicCon, we're talking comics, leading off with the man, the myth, the legend, Keith R.A. DeCandido.


Just how many words is a picture worth, really?

by Keith R.A. DeCandido

Back in the mists of prehistory when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (okay, it was the 1990s), I edited a line of novels based on Marvel's superheroes. Over the course of 45 novels and seven anthologies, I hired a good number of comic book writers who had little to no experience writing prose.

            One of the first things I realized was that these guys tended to a) not always get point of view (because comic books, like television and movies, are omniscient thanks to the visuals, so it wasn't anything they ever had to consider before), b) sometimes have difficulty in differentiating character voices (perhaps relying on where the word balloon was pointing…), and c) have their dialogue all end in exclamation points, resulting in stories filled with characters who all sounded like they were being played by Brian Blessed.

Keith R.A. DeCandido is currently writing several four-issue Farscape comic book miniseries (most in collaboration with series creator Rockne S. O'Bannon) and a StarCraft manga series, in addition to the reams and reams of prose he has been perpetrating in a variety of media universes, most notably Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, World of Warcraft, CSI: NY, Supernatural, and (again) StarCraft. He is also a brown belt in Kenshikai karate and a cohost of the podcast The Chronic Rift. Feel free to annoy him at his blog at kradical.livejournal.com.

Here are some awesome reads for the wonderful long weekend we've got coming up.  I've tried to link not only to excerpts from the novels but to the authors' websites in case you want to learn more!

GALE FORCE, seventh in Rachel Caine's amazing Weather Warden series of urban fantasies for Roc

SOUL OF FIRE, the second novel in Sarah A. Hoyt's epic Magical British Empire series for Bantam Spectra

THE WILD ROAD, the latest paranormal romance in Marjorie M. Liu's blockbuster Dirk & Steele series from Leisure Love Spell

HELL WEEK, sequel to Rosemary Clement-Moore's award winning PROM DATES FROM HELL from Delacorte

SOUTHERN FATALITY by T. Lynn Ocean, the first fabulously funny Jersey Barnes mystery from St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books

DANCE OF THE WOLF by Karen Whiddon, a dark and atmospheric paranormal romance for Silhouette's Nocturne line

Keith R. A DeCandido's "A Gutted World" in Star Trek: Myriad Universes: ECHOES AND REFRACTIONS from Pocket Books, a collection of "what if" Star Trek tales that might have been

 

Where do I start with an introduction to Keith R.A. DeCandido ( kradical)?  Hmm, Keith is a long-time friend, a great poker buddy (more whiskey!), a wonderful writer (once called the second coming of Peter David, oddly since Peter is still with us…) and a helluva percussionist. 

He's written original fiction as well as tie-ins and novelizations for Star Trek, CSI: New York, Spider-Man (see, Keith, I got it right here), Farscape, Young Hercules, Starcraft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I've included here the cover for his CSI: New York novel forthcoming in May to go along with the interview below:

Q. What does the R.A. stand for?  Radical Author?  Resident
Assistant? Really Abstract?

A.  Sure, all those things!

Actually, it stands for my father's first name and my mother's maiden
name. Kind of a joint tribute to them that brung me, as it were.

Q. You've written tie-ins for everything from CSI: NY to
Spiderman.  How much fun is it to play in other people's
worlds?  How does it differ from writing other fiction?

A.  (Pssst: It's "Spider-Man." I'm gonna tell Ty on you...)

I enjoy it immensely. Almost every tie-in I've written, I was a fan
of before I took the assignment, and the ones where I wasn't, I
became a fan as I worked on it. Getting to write characters I've
enjoyed watching or reading for years is always a thrill.

As for the second question, in many ways it's exactly the same, as
the needs of a story are fairly universal: you need a beginning, a
middle, and an end, and so on. The differences are mainly that you've
got an established universe and characters -- but that doesn't
necessarily make things easier, because you have to hew to that
universe and those characters. If your Picard doesn't sound like
Patrick Stewart, your book will likely fail.

Q. What do you find the hardest about writing - the plotting,
pacing, characterization?

A.  The crippling poverty, mostly......

Seriously, the hardest part is to avoid falling into traps like
overuse of cliches or unnecessary details about things I know very
well but the reader doesn't give a damn about.

Q.  How do you renew yourself while keeping up such a bruising deadline pace?

A.  I sacrifice a virgin on the roof of my building on the full moon.
That, and I also do a lot of editorial work, which is a good way to
cleanse the palate, as it were, between writing gigs, while still
doing something creative that makes money.

I also play percussion professionally and practice karate (currently
a brown belt), which are both things that help with the whole
renewing thing....

Q.  What's the coolest thing you've ever been able to do and call "research"?

A. Take a trip to Key West. The research was initially for an original
novel that never went anywhere, though I was able to use a lot of
that research for SUPERNATURAL: BONE KEY.