But What I Really Want To Do Is Direct!

Note: Management apologises for over-use of footnotes. But not really.

It’s not on TV Tropes, but it should be: a rising young star in the acting world is interviewed about his success, and he blathers something about process, and the craft, and the tricks he uses to get into his characters head. In the classic form of this trope, this explanation is a bunch of free-association gibberish that leads you to believe his ability is purely accidental, and that he is so utterly clueless about how he does what he does that you begin to wonder how he manages to do anything at all. And at the end of that long-winded explanation, when you have given up any hope of actually making sense out of anything the actor has said, he says “but what I really want to do is direct.”

In this trope, the phrase is an expression of hubris: the assumption that if you can act then you can obviously direct, if only you had the chance. In the most common form of the trope, it’s patently obvious that the actor would be a terrible director, because he is, quite frankly, an idiot. In more sophisticated versions of the trope, the actor in question might actually be a competent director, but everyone assumes that because he has uttered those fateful words, he is an idiot. In either case, the phrase carries with it a level of stigma: the actor is overreaching. He is already a successful artist, why is he trying to be something else? How arrogant do you have to be in order to try to find success in more than one area of the arts, anyway?

With that in mind—in full knowledge of the hubris and the overreaching nature of the trope above—I would like to take this opportunity to say “but what I really want to do is write.”

This March will be an important milestone for Help Desk: at the end of March it turns fifteen. Sure, I don’t publish on what normal folks might call a “regular schedule,” but that’s why God invented the RSS feed. ¹

Help Desk isn’t a world famous webcomic, and it hasn’t magically made me rich, or famous, or irresistibly attractive to women,² but it is ridiculously fun to do and I intend to keep doign it long after I have run out of ideas simply because I like doing it.³

And yet…

And yet, I’ve never really thought of myself as a cartoonist. Well, that’s not entirely true: I consider myself a cartoonist because as I publish a web comic, and web comics are published by web cartoonists.⁴ But comics are a visual medium, and I don’t really enjoy producing the visuals in my comics.⁵

It’s not that I dislike looking at visually appealing comics: I enjoy viewing other webcomics where the art is spectacular, and am admittedly a little envious of the talent that goes into creating them… but I do not enjoy the act of drawing. It’s laborious, time-consuming, and when I’m finished it never comes close to being worth the time I put into it. In my world the pictures are a means to an end: I make do with whatever images I have on hand in order to let me focus on the actual gags, which is why ambitious projects bog down and stall.⁶

(Some people have suggested that I should try to find an artist willing to do the pretty stuff while I focus on the writing. I don’t think that would work: most artists are, quite reasonably, interested in getting a certain amount of return for their work, whereas my ability and drive toward turning a profit is tepid at best.)

“But what I really want to do is write.”

However mired in tropistry⁷ that may be, it is unequivocally true. I’ve wanted to write since I was ten, when I read the Lord of the Rings for the first time, and thought to myself “I want to write something like that.”^{8 9 10} In my twenties I tried without success to finish something, and in my thirties I succeeded, but failed to actually publish anything. Writing and webcomickry have been competing for my attention for at least a decade, and the competition between the two has become more pronounced in the last five years.¹¹

Writing is something I spend a lot of time and effort on that, for the most part, goes unnoticed by the world at large… because as I’ve already mentioned, I haven’t been published. The reasons why range from “it’s just not good enough” to “I’m sorry we lost your manuscript”¹² to “we’re really not looking for something like that right now” and have culminated in a level of contemplation (and navel-gazing) that’s probably obsessive and ultimately unhealthy.

To a certain extent I felt I was living a triple life: Technical Writer by day, Web Comicer by night, plucky and resolute would-be novelist by other parts of the night. ¹³ And it doesn’t even take into account my life as a musician.¹⁴ Throw in a two year old daughter, two dogs, a cat, and an extraordinarily patient wife and you hav ea life that’s a bit complicated. And it actually comes up to four lives, not three.¹⁷ and I have hit upon a solution that will solve all my problems ¹⁸ once and for all.¹⁹ Well, it will at least attempt to merge the life of writer and cartoonist into a bizarre hybrid life form that could exist only on the World Wide Web. ²⁰ In short,²¹ I will opening a new branch of EvisceratiNet called Unexplored Horizons where I will publish fiction. It will go live sometime in January, and I’ll post more on the specifics—the good, the bad, the ill-advised—later this week.

Because what I really want to do is write…

1. Also I would like to officially thank Aaron Diaz for single-handedly making the Law of You Must Absolutely Without Question Update Your Webcomic Every Day Or Else utterly irrelevant.
2. Kids, the Internet might get you rich or famous, but the only pheromones it produces are a byproduct of you sitting in front of your computer for a week without bathing, and that is definitely counter-productive.
3. Take that, Jim Davis.
4. “I cartoon, therefore I am a cartoonist.” Thank you Descartes.
5. No, the irony is not lost on me. I promise.
6. Though I must also confess that from time to time City of Heroes also plays a role.
7. If “tropistry” isn’t word it should be.
8. “Only with fewer meals where they talk about doing all the interesting things that we don’t actually see in the book, we just see the part at the meal where they talk about doing it.”
9. “And less walking. Dear God, less walking.”
10. I do not recommend trying to read that book at the age of ten, no matter how precocious the reader may be.
11. And five years ago a new MMO called City of Heroes was released, which didn’t help matters much.
12. Long story.
13. And relentless defender of justice in Paragon City/nefarious villain of the Rogue Isles in City of Heroes.
14. Which I am not going to get into right now.
17. Five, if you count City of Heroes. Seventeen if you count each alt separately. Yes, I might have a problem.¹⁵
    

    I need to simplify a little. Fortunately the Internet is great for making things simple ¹⁶Lie!

18. Lie!
19. LIE.
20. In D&D they call it “multiclassing.”
21. Too late.