I’m sure that most of you have been asking where Joel is headed with the current comic series. He did not take the easy way out with a storyline that is all too familiar with the current reading audience. Anybody who knows what Joel is getting at has not posted on the message board. Please drop by and place your bets.

My stand up philosophy for the day is to ponder on the screen if we are more interested in the story or in trying to get there ahead of the author. Is it more fun to follow Joel’s lead or are we playing along with the home game and second guessing the writer? Joel has a definite gift for story telling. We’ve written together and I wish that I had grown as much as a writer as Joel has.

Any audience has a limit to its patience. You can only expect the audience to do so much of the work while you tell a story. Suspension of Disbelief is not the removal of rationality. An author can only keep the reader on the line for so long before he looks for a better worm on another hook. I will not say why readers are looking to eat worms.

The fact that the audience will go along with the game implies a willingness of the reader to play along. We want to know what is in the treasure chest in the haunted mouse hole. There is an allure to the journey that resembles going along on the quest. How badly do you really want to know? Where do you reach the line where the potential prize is not worth the work involved?

Alternately, is the quest not safer for us, sitting in the comfort of our easy chairs, wearing hideous pajamas, just following where the storyline goes? After a hard day of intellectual heavy labor, it is relaxing to sit back and allow somebody else to do the thinking and planning for awhile. It is like the trip of a roller coaster. There is only the illusion of danger and that is all the risk that we have the tolerance for. Just relax and follow to where the path leads. Somebody else will get the sore feet for you.

I lean toward being an active reader and you can tell that from my writing. My characters are like masks that I put on and walk around in the most dangerous parts of my mind. When you read them, it is like you are living somebody else’s life. But, the reader has to be more passive than I am because you are stuck with the character’s thoughts and the results of the character’s decisions. More passive writers give the reader more room for active reading.

You cannot step off of the path that I have written for you without writing your own story. That is how you can tell if you are going along with Joel or if you are trying to outwit him. Do you want to rewrite Joel’s story? What alterations would you make? It is completely acceptable to sit back and relax while Joel does the driving.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.