#lettercol

From DC's Star Trek Vol 2 issue 8, 1989.

Hi Evan, I have been reading your work for years–I came in right at the end of Rice Boy and read Order of Tales and Vattu every MWF from beginning to end. And then I got a new phone and didn’t reinstall my feed reader and was dismayed/delighted to find I’d gone for nine dang months and didn’t even know 3rd Voice existed! I’m just now catching up, really enjoying the comic, and appreciating the space you’re creating around it. To my question/pondering: the way the information gets parceled out to readers is both one of the most compelling and frustrating things to me about narrative. I see with 3rd Voice you are leaning heavily on show-don’t-tell, rather than the ponderous info dumps that plague a lot of science fiction and fantasy. The trade-off for making a better story and more believable characters is that there’s a lot we don’t know as readers. Some of what we don’t know is known by the characters (such as what "new person" means in their social context), some is not known by them (such as the existential knowledge that Navichet is seeking), and some is a mix (like Spondule and Navichet’s backgrounds that they don’t disclose to one another—or us). For you as a storyteller, how important is the revelation of knowledge in the creation of the story? Do you see 3rd Voice relying a lot on the revelation of knowledge as a way of wrapping up the story arc(s), or is there just a lot of stuff that the reader is never going to know and you’re OK with that? I don’t have strong feelings either way; just seeing you work with this in a bit of a different way and I’m curious about your thoughts. Thank you, Emily * October 2, 2023

Firstly thank you for the comment on the “space I’m creating around” 3V; I am not exactly sure what you mean but maybe I do and maybe would like to know exactly what you mean.

This parceling-of-information has become an absolutely central part of how I look at invented-world fiction; I started nailing down certain principles (all extending basically from show-don’t-tell) years ago and am trying to still work with them as smart as possible. Vattu is built with the same approach in mind! A solution in that comic to the problem of avoiding Explaining is to keep things fairly simple, iconic, self-explanatory. 3V can foreground these questions of “what the world is” a little more comfortably I think because of Spondule & Navichet’s relationship to it, and because of it being a kind of Broken place with bigger questions therefore automatically implied.

I guess mostly I want to emphasize that the details of the setting and how everything fits together isn’t necessarily what the Story is About, and the disorientation built into this sort of storytelling is something that I’m aware of and that I think is Fun. So I mean a lot of the bigger stuff has been Figured Out / is being Figured Out on my end, BUuuuut there is a reason that I am telling the story from the point of view of two marginal idiots. This I guess connects to what I was saying in a previous lettercol about “Spondule writing” and “Navichet writing” in my process for this thing…

Hello Evan! I found you through Vattu and I’ve become a huge fan of your comic work and your way of storytelling. 3rd Voice has become one of my favorite webcomics and I’ve been hugely inspired by the way you reveal the world through its characters. I’m really into slow burn comics and 3rd Voice has been so fantastic with its pacing of answering questions and adding more questions so you are just constantly hooked and intrigued with the story. It’s seriously so cool! I’ve also really enjoyed seeing your sketches/concept work on social media and seeing how Xunditriggar’s went through a few iterations made me curious. Do you ever make last minute decisions when you get to actually inking a page/changing something story wise once you get to it? Or do you usually have everything down pretty solid once you get that far? (In my own webcomic I’ve had instances where once I got to physically drawing a page or starting a scene it’s hit me that “omg, this actually won’t work, this needs something else” and I was wondering if it’s mostly just an issue of me being a novice where that’ll go away with time/experience or if it’s a thing that’s around forever when creating) Thank you for your time and sharing your amazing work, Lexi * November 20, 2023

Thank you! Yes I think I approach it in similar way to you— I try not to have any element of planning be too rigid; everything should be able to shift to work better in the moment. In visual design stuff, I often leave a lot of detaily decisions to the inking stage. I have a pretty good sense of what parts of drawing I need pencil underdrawing to figure out, and what I can figure out in inks— so for this comic a lot of the process of drawing has been figuring out sort of aesthetic logics for that detail. But the big-picture stuff I think is generally worked out before I’m drawing the final pages.

There’s a lot of different axes along which people get better at this stuff! Being able to see that something you planned out isn’t going to work as you planned it IS a part of the skill here. Building your process around awareness of that can be a productive approach I think. With Xunditriggar in particular the big shift designwise was reworking his mask to have the mouth visible— I didn’t put this to myself as “this is a problem with the design that I need to fix;” it was more “having his mouth visible will give me some more tools to use here, why not.” No rules!

Dear Evan, When you did your video ’pitches’ for this project, you asked us to ’trust you a little’. I think I had that trust even before you asked. Even from the first time I saw your concept sketches of Spondule and Navichet on Patreon, maybe even before they had a name - these characters were speaking to you and there was a resonance of some kind. They already had life. It felt electric. It also felt like perfect timing as Vattu wound up. It was comforting to know we’d be going somewhere new after spending a decade with you exploring the world of Sahta & the Fluters & the Surin & the War Men & the Grish &c &c. Spondule and Navichet had life, no question, but The Corners - the world you’ve been building for this project - that remained unclear; not yet feeling like it had a form we readers could understand. This totally makes sense, and it’s really enjoyable to set out on a journey into a world one knows nothing about while its contours get slowly revealed through the keyhole of individuals’ experiences and perspectives - but there was friction too. People asked you, a lot, whether you’d keep telling this story in the context of Overside and I think breaking the news that you were leaving that setting behind for the time being, and moving into something new, created challenging conversations between you and your audience. There was probably, for many, a grieving process at leaving that other world behind when we wanted to know so much more about it. Personally, I trusted you from the start and have consistently felt that trust has been rewarded. I also trusted that you knew what you were doing in choosing to build a new world rather than move forward with the old one. But in terms of ’letting go’ of Overside: I hadn’t got there yet. I still wanted to know more, to explore the place I’d been reading about for so many years - even while I was really enjoying piecing together the fragments of The Corners you were laying out. I’m feeling different about all that after reading ’scene 34’. In such a short space the bond between Spondule and Navichet had become so visceral, so real. I’m fully attached now, the characters have worked their way into my heart. Meanwhile, Navi’s backstory - and the idea that a God could be tortured and abused - is so unfathomably deep that it’s hard to make sense of. To me this feels richer than anything Overside could have offered, and it feels - now - like The Corners has a life of its own. I suddenly care, very deeply, about this whole world. I also finally feel ready to let Overside go, to accept it as it is, complete and sufficient in the text of what you’ve already written. In this latest scene, it feels like you’re asking your audience some of what Navi is asking Spondule: ’Don’t you want to know what happened? Even if you can never get all the way there? Even if you only ever figure a fraction of it out?’ For my part the answer is yes. I can see this world in my heart now and I need to know whatever I can, need to share this journey you’re laying out. So one thing is I just wanted share that feeling with you. Another thing is a question I wanted to ask: does any of this resonate? Does it feel as momentous to you as it does to me? Obviously I don’t expect you to spoil anything but I’m curious how releasing this scene has been landing for you: whether there’s a sense of finally seeing the true depth of this thing you’ve been so tirelessly making. How does it feel to take on the uncertain and intensive labour of world-building - with no guarantees - and then, after quite a lot of working and waiting - see that world emerge, start feeling real, and begin its existence as a living thing? How does it feel to reveal all this to us? To share a glimpse of the beating heart of what you’ve been making after being so careful to keep your cards close? Thank you for making the things that you do. You’re one of the most powerful storytellers I’ve read and I can’t wait to come along for this journey, no matter where it leads or how long it takes. All the best! Klara * August 23, 2023

Firstly I apologize for breaking your formatting here—- know, O reader, that this letter was originally broken up with more tasteful linebreaks but I thought that wouldn’t work great with my website formatting. And 2 months to reply is a long time too ha

Thank you for kind words. The anxiety you identify that I and, apparently, some readers felt about working with a new setting is I think Exactly related to this notion of creation / revelation of a fictional setting (that you later identify). To me, the person making the stuff, it seems clear that Overside is not an actual thing to be Revealed. It’s a collection of little habits and ideas, and none of them were developed with much of a big-picture in mind, and none of them were developed with the benefit of Several Years of experience in planning and making stories of this sort. To me, it’s clear that there’s more potential in a new thing, built from smarter premises. BUT to a reader I understand the suspended-disbelief feeling that it’s a PLACE you want to see more of, and the ways in which it feels like “starting over” or abandoning a lot of potential energy, momentum. What I guess this has foregrounded to me is: the literary conceit of an “invented setting” is a really flimsy, post-hoc sort of thing. What we’re CONNECTING with, as readers of this stuff, is the interests, habits, aesthetics of the person or people making the thing!! Probably?!?!? Anyway this creation / revelation divide is in my head a lot in ways that will uh become clearer I think.

SO, to broadly address the questions towards the end of the letter: it is exciting to REVEAL this stuff, but I am (in a more intentional way than before) REVEALING it to myself too, as I’m making it. There’s all the background work that goes into it, and there’s a sort of restraint in trying to not give things away and to build up the gravity of that reveal, BUT the stuff doesn’t exist until the pages exist. I don’t know exactly how it’ll look and feel! It’ll be better and worse than my initial imaginings in a bunch of ways; it’ll feel more and less REAL in a bunch of ways.