Draw Aloud

Far to the east, down in the pink sky, something has just sparked, very brightly.

(from Zak Smith's Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow)

A comic strip interpretation of a reader-submitted dream, from Jesse Reklaw's "Slow Wave"

Motivation

One step in the traditional revision process is the "talk aloud," where the writer will read their work aloud. The oral presentation of prose will often highlight flaws that are obscured in the written presentation, particularly flaws of pacing and tone. Even grammar mistakes are often caught by this talk aloud process (where ordinarily the reader might skip over or skim sections where errors might be found, it is impossible to "skim" a work aloud). In the peer setting the oral engagement of a speaker in another's work both contributes to a shared ownership in the piece as well as forcing a deeper exploration of tone and pathos.

If oral presentation of written text is useful for the revision process due the different affordances of orality, the visual ought to have a similar utility. Problems in pacing, inconsistencies in description, and problems of flow are all highlighted by sequential art. Just as the speaker in a talk aloud can't help but read sections that would normally be skimmed during reading, the drawer can't help but visualize the structure and content of prose in a draw aloud.

Task

1. Given a draft of a written work, compose a sequential art interpretation of the work. This work can either be a literal comic strip of the narrative of the piece, or merely samples from sequential parts of the narrative. The objective is ekphrasis, not slavish depiction.
2. Look for oddities in the comic. If it's a narrative piece, do characters and events abruptly appear or disappear? Are entities at certain parts of the comic drawn in ways that contradict later appearances, or later descriptions? Are there panels which are tonally very distinct from their neighbors? These oddities in the comic are often diagnostic of problems in the original text.
3. Revise your work.
4. Repeat the process, but with a peer reviewer as the artist. Where are the two comics in conflict (not merely different, which would be expected, but contradictory). The rhetorical appeal of the work may survive this change in medium.

Potential Pitfalls

The "Slow Wave" comic above solicts dreams from readers, and then attempts to draw comics representing the elements of those dreams. Even though by definition (barring commitment to some sort of Jungian metaphysics) there is no overarching narrative to the dreams of randomly selected readers. And yet, in Slow Wave, multiple comics will often form a cohesive (but not necessarily rational) narrative, with characters appearing in consecutive dreams. The act of placing the visual in sequence seems to provoke the sense-making project, and makes the creation of narrative easy, even in non-narrative spaces.

Potential Rewards

Habitually combining the visual with the written during the revision process will bring make the visual present to hand during the writing and revision process. Comics allow for temporal flows and visual depictions that would be impossible or at least very difficult with the written word alone. Incorporating the visual after the drafting process has begun, rather than before it, also keeps the focus on text as product, preventing some visual ideas from staying visual rather than making their way back to the text.