Behind the Writing: Spider-man VS. Dracula

Blog No. 103

http://adventureworldsblog.com/2014/10/27/spider-man-vs-dracula/

Halloween happened! Halloween is one of my most favourite times of the year. Not only is the weather usually exactly what I like (usually), but dressing up, candy, and any excuse to have a good time, is right up my alley. This year I had another reason to be excited (as if I need one). Christian and I (and I think mostly Christian) came up with the idea to start a story together, than finish it on our own. We had talked about similar experiments before and Halloween seemed like the perfect time to give it a try. So that’s what we did. We came up with the basic idea of a couple of kids out trick-or-treating and each took it from there. Naturally they were dressed up as Spider-man and Dracula, and that’s where my title came from. I figured that lifelong enemies like that would end up fighting at some point, even if they are just kids.

My story (as is my style) was much more light hearted than Christian’s. That’s not to say that his wasn’t funny (it was, and you should go read it to see for yourself: http://adventureworldsblog.com/2014/10/20/a-halloween-story/). But like many of Christian’s stories, it is legitimately creepy and the ending will give you chills ­– so I warned you. I didn’t know any of that until we were both finished and we sent each other our stories for editing. (I assumed, but that’s not the point). We were completely in the dark as to where we took the story, and that was all part of the fun. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do with our two characters. Writing the opening was fun and easy (not as all as difficult as I though writing with someone would be) but then what? With most of my stories I just write what comes to mind. I find that when the majority of my writing is done by hand, that works well. When I try to do my writing on the computer, I find that plotting out the story helps me move forward. It’s an odd discovery, but I’ve learned to work with it.

I wrote this one by hand, so it was all done on the fly. The characters told me who they were and where they were going. I knew the basic idea from the prewritten opening, but after that, it was a fun romp and dire hunt for candy and a lot of sass-mouth. It’s fun (most of the time) to let the characters lead your around. When they have strong personalities and even a rudimentary goal, the story progresses easily and dialogue flows like water down a mountain. When the characters aren’t well defined or don’t have an objective or ambition, it’s like writing instruction manuals in another language. While Christian and I created the two main characters together, we left the majority of their personalities to be discovered on our own. I think we had something pretty strong in the opening though, because, while my characters were much more extreme versions, we took them to very similar places.

Maybe it was just a coincidence or maybe we have been spending too much time writing together? The concept and execution were really fun though, even if it was just two writers. We had (and have) a bunch of those ideas floating around and it was good to get to one of them finally. It was a moderate success (as in it wasn’t a failure) so hopefully we’ll have something else fun in the new year. If we’re lucky, we will get some more authors involved and try something bigger and better. For now, I’m happy that we had a couple more stories on the blog and tried something different.