Formatting Fantasies

An author’s imagination can be limitless, but how he or she conveys the ideas of that imagination aren’t.  This truism came to me again as I was reading an old Calvin & Hobbes book.

Anyone who knows me knows I have an affection for Calvin & Hobbes.  It was my favorite comic growing up(replaced now by Zits), and I instantly related to Calvin.  I think inside we’re all whiny kids who want things our own way, and we approach the cruelty of the world by creating our own.  So I often go back to the Calvin & Hobbes collections for a laugh, or even just a wistful memory.  As I was reading the 10^th Anniversary Book, I came across Bill Watterson’s laments regarding the Sunday strip.

I won’t go into too much detail here – if you want that, buy and read the book yourself – but he was frustrated by the format of the Sunday strip, as it had to be laid out in certain ways, and it limited what he wanted to do.  After several long, protracted battles, he finally freed himself from those constraints, only to find his joy at that freedom tempered by the reality of it.  See, regardless of how he wanted to tell the story, he needed readers to still be able to follow it, so there had to be a natural path of progression.  Although more open to what he envisioned, it was nevertheless not unlimited.

That’s something that many writers need to remember as well.  For starters, few of us have the pull Watterson did to get folks to print our stuff in whatever format we want – fonts are limited, type size can only be so big or so small, and even pictures can’t be random.  So we have to shoehorn our vision into the format of a printed book most folks offer.  Further, our story needs a natural path for the reader to follow.  This could be solved if we could simply crack open our skulls and let the reader see completely into our imagination(and understand it), but that’d be messy, both literally and figuratively.  Our minds are a mess, understandable mostly only by ourselves.  We have to farm it and give it order so others can follow along.

Keep this in mind as you write.  That great idea you have means little to anyone but yourself if others can’t understand it.