'Cause, um, that happens to me literally all the time. It happened in full force a few hours ago when I looked back at stuff I wrote in eleventh grade, but I'll get to that in a little while.
Sometimes characters get fleshed out first, other times the plot comes before anything else. A lot of the time, I'll get really vivid scenes in my head for particular moments, and I won't figure out how to put them together until much later. I guess that's the fun part - finding out how to string together the "big stuff" and make it interesting.
But it's like when you look at concept art for movies, cartoons, or video games. The art style in Steven Universe changed so much from pilot to subsequent episodes, and there are Disney art books that document the journey a story takes from sketches to the final movie. Everything changes, nothing's really too set in stone, and from outline to final draft, every writer's story goes through changes.
I'm a pretty firm believer in saving copies of those original drafts and drawings, if you like to draw stuff to go along with it. (Looking at old drawings is a whole other topic I've probably talked about in blogs before, whew!) 'Cause if you're bored and uninspired on a rainy day, you can always read them and cringe your f*cking eyeballs out!! :D (GUESS WHAT I DID TODAY, HEH HEH.)
Back in eleventh grade, my bad English teacher made us keep journals to write in for the first few minutes of the class. It was only for like two months, but she'd put a writing prompt on the board and we'd have to make a short story out of it. It was pretty frickin' cool, but man, I could totally tell that I just wasn't feelin' it most of the time.
ANYWAYS. This was, like, January-February of 2012. Lo and behold, that was also a time period where I was kind of getting a very loose grip on what Generation Why Bother was going to be, a whole year and a half before I even wrote the damn thing. (It was also ripe time for me to nip some big problems with that story in the bud, but I'm a f*cking moron, so there's that.)
Long story short, at that point, I only had a few clear things in mind. One of them was the part near the end where Andy has an existential crisis or whatever. Two days in a row, I manipulated the prompts to my liking, and, well, ended up with an early draft. Here's that crap, with the spoilers hidden in white text. (Ya know, in case anybody cares about spoilers.)
Prompt: “Look, someone has to make a decision. Now!”
Andy teetered on the edge. He looked down at his hands – the same hands that had created a worldwide sensation, the same hands that had saved countless lives. He was an anonymous hero in more ways than one. But one of his heroic acts had gone too far and became more significant than the more tangible one.
This was Chicago – the windy city – his hometown, his place of birth and likely his place of death. He stood on the roof of his apartment building, his dirty old sneakers hanging off the lip of the edge. And he still stared at his hands.
“Andy, I didn’t mean it like that!” Anthony shouted behind him, desperate to keep him safe. “All I said was that you need to focus more on saving the world and less on drawing your little cartoons.”
“And what if they mean more to me?” he said back in a low voice.
“Look, someone has to make a decision. Now! It’s either you pick your stupid comics, or you pick being a real hero and help,” Anthony growled. His fists were clenched so hard he could feel his nails digging into his palms.
Andy turned around, his back to the city. “I need to save myself sometimes, too. Maybe drawing superheroes all the time is my way of doing that – sorting out someone else’s head so I can sort out my own.”
“You’re not a hero,” Anthony countered, “at least, not right now. You were a hero to me way back when. And now? Get it together.”
“Alright then,” Andy sneered. “Then just watch me fly.”
He stepped off the lip of the building, lunging to the city streets he’d known all his life.
***
Prompt: “As soon as I opened the package, I knew it was a horrible mistake!”
“As soon as I opened the package, I knew it was a horrible mistake,” Andy explained. “’Cause right in that box was a bunch of art supplies. It only fueled everything. It got me into the mess I’m in right now – I made it with my own two hands.”
This guy was the artist behind the world’s most popular comic at that time – Johnny Cool and the Dudes – and the mastermind behind that superhero: Johnny Cool. And there I was, standing in front of him, only realizing minutes before that the guy who had saved me was the guy who had penned my favorite comic book.
“I always got art supplies for Christmas and crap. Paper, pencils, cheap-ass paints, erasers, you know. But my fifteenth birthday was different – I got an actual drawing desk. It sounds stupid. I mean, why couldn’t I function without one? Duh. But it’s different. I never got praise for doing cartoons. And that day, it was like my parents wanted me to for once,” Andy went on.
“How was it a mistake…?” I asked.
He pointed at me and grinned. “I’ll tell ya why, Oshie boy. It made me wanna draw everything over and over and that’s how Johnny was born, that’s how I got picked up by BC Comics, and that’s how everything just suddenly got better.” He chuckled. “And I guess that’s how I met you, in a way.”
- - -
Boy howdy, Anthony sure was a dick. I mean, even more so than he ended up becoming. Andy ended up only living with his dad in the end, and lord knows he wasn't supportive of his art, heh. And there are a few more things that changed that I won't ramble on about.
B)