This is The Voice In Your Head Is Mine. The date is March 30th, 2021. If you're receiving this email and have no idea what's going on, well, fuck. I guess I blew it. Or maybe you blew it. Either way, you're here and this is Zac Thompson's weekly newsletter.
Good morning from the crisp mountain air of Vancouver, Canada. I’ve spent the last six weeks with my head in the sand, working on a secret project. The lift was incredibly high and the turnaround was fierce. I’m working with a team of entirely new people but so far the experience is a dream. I can’t really talk much more about it just yet. You’ll hear more about it in due time.
Since I last sent one of these, we’ve rounded the one year anniversary of the pandemic. I think this past year in quarantine was transformational for me. Don’t get me wrong, it was hard in places and the stresses (both personal and professional) have been overwhelming. Yet, as we near the end of this slog I can’t help but find myself more centered. I’ve had a life peppered by trauma from a young age and I’ve finally found real, tangible peace around all of it. It’s strange but the things that used to drag me down, make me doubt myself or my self worth have solidified into something neutral. I’ve defined my relationship to those parts of myself and evolved beyond it. I’ve done the incredibly hard work in therapy and it doesn’t feel like I have to keep diving into my past to make sense of myself.
So on top of everything, I’ve found some element of personal peace I wasn’t looking for. It’s culminated in redefining what I want from life in some ways. This applies broadly to my personal and professional goals. But it means there’s a lot of change on the horizon. Not the least of which is leaving Vancouver. I’ve been here for almost a decade. My life has radically changed in almost every conceivable way during that time. But as I get older and my writing career becomes sturdier (I just got into the Writer’s Guild of Canada! Woo!), I’m itching to set down some roots somewhere. Which is all a long way of saying that I’m moving this year, likely during the summer. And though that will be bittersweet - I’m looking forward to starting a new chapter. As to where I’m going - well, that’s better served for another newsletter.
This doesn’t mean I’m not writing comics anymore. Just last week I signed a contract for a new creator-owned title that is a little bit of a departure from my other work. It’s a historical horror-noir based on real Canadian history. So that’s been an interesting challenge in both doing the research and coming up with opportunities to work within a set of established events. On top of that, I’ve got a new book getting announced in the next few weeks that marks my return to a publisher I’ve worked with in the past. I’ve been building said book for over a year, having signed the contract right before the pandemic hit, so it’s going to be nice to share this one with folx. It’s a literal dream project with dream collaborators. Plenty on the horizon.
So, this week. We’re getting into embracing the uncomfortable in your writing, a nonfiction recommendation with Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility, a few Canadian indie films, and I Breathed A Body #3. What a treat!
Writing Craft
Embrace The Uncomfortable
This isn’t any sort of prescriptive writing advice. The truest thing I can say about writing is that the deeper I go, the more I realize I have to learn. I’ve been writing professionally for the better part of eight years. For most of that time I’ve poked at things that make me deeply uncomfortable. Most of the time leaving myself with this deep sense of unease, like I shouldn’t be putting these thoughts out into the world.
Unease has been a throughline for most of my career. You can go back to some of my writing at VICE and some of it is deeply cringey stuff. Some of my pieces definitely veered into absurd territory that I’m not entirely proud of today. But, I can truly say a lot of that was me figuring out my voice. One story that I wrote about my resentment of my disabled father helped me make sense of some of that trauma I mentioned above. I’m still proud of the finished piece (which you can read here).
This is all a long way of saying that I feel like I’m doing my best work when I’m operating on the basis that whatever I’m writing might make someone sick, or it may shock them in a way that invites further investigation into something (be it societal or introspective).
I know this is broad, but I think it can apply broadly to writing. I’m not saying you have to mine personal trauma in order to tell stories. You own the narrative of your life and you don’t owe anyone your story. But, I do believe that the things your exploring in storytelling can provoke a sense of unease for a variety of reasons. And if you provoke unease, it may inspire someone to take action that they otherwise wouldn’t.
I think you can do this in two ways.
Uncomfortable Characters.
Characters who defy expectation who act in ways that can be entirely selfish and defy conventional character arcs. That sense of defying what’s expected of a character can make me uncomfortable as a writer. The sense that you’re making an audience follow someone irredeemable while also asking them to empathize with that person is a tight line to walk. You’re bound to have readers stumble over something like that, because it’s so personal. Either you empathize with a damaged person or you don’t. Even if the story goes to great lengths to justify that sense of unease, it may not work. But in that discomfort comes friction, a different type of conflict that propels the story and the reader in a way that (perhaps) wouldn’t be there otherwise.
Catrin in Lonely Receiver is 100% this type of character. I really wanted to create a story about a character who goes through something conventionally relatable (a breakup) and use that familiarity to disarm readers into empathizing with an entirely selfish character driven by all manners of ugly emotions. As the story begins, she seems relatively well-adjusted. But as the story progresses you see just how often she dissociates from herself and her immediate reality. The story begins to contextualize some of the things you’ve seen already in a way that (hopefully) provokes a degree of introspection from the reader. Despite all her flaws, Catrin still deserves your empathy even if she’s really pushing the limits of what a “likeable character” looks like.
Uncomfortable Worlds.
The world is an uncompromising place filled with awful people doing terrible things (but you already knew that). We’re inundated with media and stories that remind us of these facts. So when it comes to crafting worlds, I think there’s a lot you can do to emphasize your themes with creative ways of showing the ugly underbelly of the world.
I think about this often, and I go back-and-forth about my feelings about this sequence, but in the opening of The Dregs #1 we very clearly showed readers a world where people were happily consuming human meat. For those who don’t know the series, we begin with a homeless man getting sized up, he’s sterilized, cut into pieces, and ground into sausages. Then he’s served at a swanky restaurant to a clientele of ritzy exclusive diners.
We went back and forth on this approach. Worried that the book was beginning with too much of a gut punch and a grisly set piece that could potentially ruin the tone of our noir series. But the end-result was something that made reader’s stomachs sour. They wanted to know more about a world that would resort to something like this. Which, as you read deeper you come to learn - it’s not much different than our world right now. This was by design.
If you build uncomfortable metaphors into the way your world works, the themes of your story can be strengthened by provoking the reader to try and make sense of the senseless.
Unease isn’t for everyone.
There is this tendency in writing to want to satisfy an imaginary audience. A sense that we must give readers something clearly expressed in black and white terms. It’s a well-worn story type in North America. People don’t like complicated moral arcs or the bucking of a traditional three arc structure.
There’s a lot of power in playing people’s expectations against them but it will invariably make you and your readers uncomfortable.
Step outside your comfort zone. You may not stick the landing every time but if you push yourself to explore things that feel taboo or make choices that feel like massive risks - your storytelling will be stronger for it.
Disability Visibility
Over the last few weeks I’ve had the immense pleasure of reading Alice Wong’s incredible Disability Visibility. The book is a collection of essays about disability rights from disabled writers. The topics covered are broad and embrace the intersectionality of the ongoing disability rights movement within the United States.
As I mentioned above, I grew up with a disabled Father in my life. He required constant care and attention. His disabilities are both visible and invisible, so my family was met with a wide-range of challenges surrounding his life and his well-being. Due to this, I’ve always felt particularly passionate about disability rights.
Alice Wong’s curation of contemporary essays is absolutely required reading. While some essays can be particularly difficult to read because they embrace the challenging realities of disability in America, others are positively awe-inspiring in their beauty and empathy.
The book is separated into four parts: Being, Becoming, Doing, and Connecting. Each with essays that empower a more nuanced understanding of disability and the changes that need to be made surrounding representation, rehabilitation, and accessibility. We’ve still got a long way to go.
But I’m trying to embody the change I want to see. My next comic features a disabled protagonist and will mark a concerted effort to include more narratives about disability in my writing.
I BREATHED A BODY #3
Out tomorrow!
Tomorrow marks the release of I BREATHED A BODY #3. In keeping with the themes of the newsletter, this book is designed to provoke people into that state of unease. This issue will be no exception. If you’ve followed the story from #1, this is the issue where we get into the beating supernatural heart of the series and reveal the Fungal God beneath the surface of everything we’ve seen so far.
I don’t want to give too much away. But a lot of this series is about how social media forces us to compartmentalize ourselves. When you spend so much time online, you almost develop a split personality wherein you’ve got a public face and a private face. We hardly ever acknowledge this disparity and often create boundaries around our online life that allow us to rationalize actions that may seem out of character in our personal lives. But that division is artificial and if we’re forced to examine ourselves in contrast to our online selves we may be confronted with some alarming inconsistencies.
How does Anne take responsibility for everything she’s done so far in the series? How does she reconcile herself?
Find out tomorrow in I Breathed A Body #3.
What I’m Watching
Three Canadian indie flicks for your eyeballs.
VIOLATION - A rape/revenge horror film set in the wilds of Quebec that’s new to Shudder (in everywhere but Canada 🙃). Violation is beautifully shot with a powerful central performance by co-director Madeleine Sims-Fewer. Though I didn’t love the sum of its parts once the credits rolled, I found a lot to love in the moment to moment of the film. There’s a powerful sense of disorientation within the non-linear narrative that captures the corrosive nature of truama. In the end, I found an over reliance on the tropes of the genre soured my enjoyment of the finished product.
COME TRUE - A dreamy sci-fi horror about the nature of nightmares. The first hour of this film is a brilliant exploration of sleep deprivation, dreams, and shadow people. It evokes the best of David Cronenberg but soaks everything in neon color palettes. But at some point the narrative drives itself off a cliff and diverges into completely unbelievable terrority. It ignores its central character in favor of someone far less interesting and breaks all the rules it laboured so long to create. I can’t recommend this one in good faith but I’m putting it in here in case people are curious what I thought about it.
THE KID DETECTIVE - A brilliant subversion of the detective noir genre that oozes style. It echoes a lot of Rian Johnson’s Brick but confidently exists as its own thing. It walks such a fine comedic line throughout. Both managing to be laugh out loud funny while also descending into incredibly bleak territory. It’s got a wonderful soundtrack by Jay McCarrol (from Nirvanna The Band The Show) and is anchored by a fantastic central performance from Adam Brody. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
TINY SCABS
A collection of things I think you should read.
The Ecological Imagination of Hayao Miyazaki by Isaac Yuen. A wonderful write up about the the environmental themes within some of Miyazaki’s film worlds.
Not everyone who reads Hemingway is a toxic bro. A great piece about the reactionary internet discourse that offers blanket stereotypes about certain authors and those who choose to read their work.
I just remembered that my hometown of Charlottetown, PEI had a man who wore a conehead and danced at most local hockey games. Here he is in action.
This week’s playlist (no Cotton Eyed Joe on here):
PEACE
Stay patient, the sun is out again and the weather’s getting warmer. Things are getting better even if it doesn’t feel that way just yet.
Z
Great newsletter! Thanks for sharing. Love the writing leesons/advice and I can't wait to read I BREATHED A BODY 3.