comic artist

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

Here's my issue with that mindset, I have always thought that in any creative endeavor, there aren't actually "rules" to any of it. There are, instead, tools that one can use to accomplish whatever specific goal they have in mind for creating that thing in particular. It frustrates me that I see this all the time in both writing advice and advice for visual art, that you should NEVER do x y or z, because it's just not good.

There's hardly any explanation as to why these techniques are supposedly bad, and if there is, it's even rarer to see it acknowledged that using those techniques can undermine your efforts to accomplish certain goals with your work in particular if you even have them.

The techniques people have found and named are tools for you to use, that's it! You wouldn't use a can opener to hammer a nail in. It would probably be a pain in the ass! But that's not to say that can openers are useless and you should never use them ever or you're committing a grave sin! If I'm opening a can and you look at me with disgust for reaching for the can opener, I'm going to realize you don't know anything about what I'm trying to do or what the tool I'm using is for. So much of the artistic process is learning what tools you can use and how to use them best! It's not as simple as being told, "Do this, not that." It's so important to learn how to assess for yourself what you're using and why!