Issues of Character

First off, a little story about how I found this thing I'm going to talk about.  A couple months ago I was on my PT Dilloway Twitter account and someone retweeted a picture someone took of a couple of Transformers toys.  I thought it was cool so I followed that guy.  I tried to talk to the guy but he ignored me, even though it's not like he has thousands of followers or anything.  Still, I kept following because I'm not a fragile little bitch like some people.

Anyway, then he retweets someone who has been doing sort of an MST3K/Rifftrax thing on old Transformers comics.  I thought that was neat so I followed them.  And yes, they are a them, though singular.  Whatever.

This is Issue #20

They mentioned how by issue 28 or so, writer Bob Budiansky was showing signs of burn out.  And a lot of it is the toy company, Hasbro, was probably mandating that a bunch of new characters get shoved in.  Basically every new issue had to bring in some new characters like Omega Supreme, the Decepticon Triple Changers, the Throttlebots, or the Predacons.  And it was noted how much sharper Budiansky's writing was when he could just focus on one character, like issues focusing just on Ratchet or Skids.

I got thinking that really the same is true for me in most of my stories.  I always enjoy writing character moments more than other things.  Readers might enjoy sex scenes or action scenes, but they're not really that interesting to me.  Going back as far as the original First Contact in 1995, I was always more interested in writing the character moments than the battles.  With the Scarlet Knight series, I had more fun writing about Emma's personal life than the superheroics.  And with all the Eric Filler stories, setting up the sex scenes is almost always more interesting to me than the actual sex scenes.

Why is that?  Mostly because there's really not much of depth happening with action or sex scenes.  It's just mostly physical movement.  As a writer, that's not really all that exciting.  It all boils down to, He/She goes here, does this, stuff blows up.  Or, He/She sticks whatever in whatever hole and they get excited.

Again, as the reader that's the stuff you want, especially when most of the audience is probably under 18 like with the original Transformers comics.  As the writer, it gets pretty dull.  I mean it's basically just writing, "So-and-So fires weapon, shit blows up" over and over again.  It's got to be pretty boring for the artist too.

And really even writers of crap like a Transformers comic or gender swap book still want to think of themselves as real writers.  We like getting the chance to stretch our legs and do some real writing.  That's more exciting and challenging for us.

So as a kid you might think, "Wow it's so cool you get to write all these big battles" or whatever, but really for the writer that's painfully dull.  And so if you approach that person at a convention and say how neat that big battle in issue #28 was, the writer will probably at best just humor you until you go away.  Just like if you send Eric Filler an email about how great the sex in whatever swap story was or say how great it is that I get paid to write sex, I'll just say, "Yeah, great, thanks for reading."  Because I'd much rather talk about the real character moments.

I suppose there probably are writers who like that other stuff more, though when you have to do that for 40 issues or 200 books, let's see how much you like it then.