Just letting you all know that a number of squids are moving to new houses or apartments. I have a giant pile of articles planned, and will have most of them ready to go by the time I have internet again (May 11th, ouch!).
I’ve also retired from my post as a Smackjeeves Administrator so I can devote the amount of time and attention to this place that it requires, as well as the time and dedication that our current project, METAL, needs to get off the ground.
Being serious about a webcomic requires a lot of attention, so I’ll be maing the necessary life changes over the next week. Hope to see you seeing us grow!
The following is the first in a series of six tutorials designed to help novice writers build a better story.
Writing is pretty easy, when it comes right down to it. All you need is an implement of writing, be it digital or manual, and a fair grasp of the language in which you want to write…and even the latter is becoming more and more negotiable. Sounds simple enough. Those are the mechanics of writing, it really is just that easy to write. Anyone can do it. Now the trick is to do it well. Anyone can ride a bike, but standing on the handlebars and spinning the front wheel while 16 feet in the air is a little rarer. Writing an effective and interesting story is very much like that, taking something mundane and making it extraordinary, striking awe in your audience by doing something commonplace in an uncommon way. How do you do this? As someone who has been writing and publishing for 20 years, I’m still looking for the answer to that, but let’s take a look at some very basic tips and tools to making your writing flow a little better and hopefully cause people to ooh and ah in the process.
Contrary to popular opinion, story writing is not just having an idea and putting words on paper, and too many people underestimate what is involved in doing it well. There must be a process. Now, this process can be bare bones or it can be painfully exact, but without following some essential rules, including a lot of preparation, you are doomed. To make this process more digestible, let’s break it down into its base components, the major food groups, if you will, of how to write well. For lack of better terms, we’ll call them Concept, Tableau, Plot, Technique, Composition and finally Review. In this first part, we’ll concentrate on Concept.
Concept is a very broad subject and is hard to pinpoint into specifics. It deals with general ideas rather than fine details, and is therefor difficult to discuss in, ahem, detail, so let’s talk in broader strokes. Also, a lot of the elements of Concept tend to overlap, making certain distinctions rather arbitrary. The important part isn’t so much in a step-by-step during the conceptual phase, but in finding a satisfactory and complete whole, building a solid ground upon which to create the story. It’s a good time to be wild and fanciful and let your mind wander into all manner of directions, since later phases need to be more definite. This is where you’ll throw everything onto the table, no matter how foolish, and then pick away the things that don’t belong until you have a functional direction. Think of it like establishing the ground rules of how you’re going to write the story.
The purpose to this tutorial isn’t to show you how to conceive of your story, no one can teach or tell someone how to develop their Concept, but it is intended to provide parameters you can follow while you do. As the writing process can be broken into basic elements, so can those elements, and Concept can be broken down, for our purposes here, as the following:
Premise
The premise of the story is usually simple…or as simple as you can make it. Using my comic Pictures of You as an example (because it’s easier and because I’m an egomaniac,) the premise could be described succinctly as “the disintegration of a close circle of friends”. A slightly more in-depth premise could be “Peter Morris reflects on his youth and how his old friendships fell apart”. Whatever the premise of your story and however you choose to describe it, this is the first building block of a story. Few writers have a problem meeting this step, but many forget that this premise is at the core of what they are writing, and that everything in the story should serve this end. If a writer finds themselves losing this most central focus, the story often becomes meandering and pointless.
Theme
Theme is similar to premise, but goes deeper and there is often more than one. In Pictures of You, there are many themes…humour, drama, foreboding/foreshadowing, friendships, relationships, youth, coming of age, betrayal, drugs and alcohol, rock and roll…the list goes on. It’s not always necessary to be so formal as to list your themes, but it is important to know what they are. Think of it like building a house with Lego.
Before you begin, you want to know what kind of Lego you’ll be using. You can use many different kinds of Lego (Space Lego, yeah!) or you can use only one kind, but it’s important to know how you’re going to fit them all together. If you use too many kinds, or if you start adding new kinds later that you hadn’t intended, the end result may be confusing and unwieldy. On the other hand, if you’re only using the eight-pronged red blocks, you run the risk of being boring and predictable.
The thing to remember when you’re starting out isn’t as much what themes you want to use as it is how they are going to fit together. If you want to write a story with such elements as alien nanotechnology, religious intolerance and the colour green, you should be aware of how those will play together. Themes that are too distinct can clash without forethought. Theme is too often underestimated during the writing process, and always to the writer’s detriment.
Tone
Tone is so closely related to Theme that it could be argued as a part of it, but it’s such an important and overlooked factor that I thought it deserved special mention. Tone, put very simply, is the way a story feels. Too often a writer will assume that a comedy should be light or a drama should be dark, but it doesn’t always have to be and breaking from that idea can bring a completely fresh angle to your story. In fact, presuming that any story element has an implicit tone attached to it is a mistake. Tone is a remarkable tool and is used too rarely to its full potential. For example, if you were to think of a story set in a hospital, the first thought might be that it should have a somber and reverent tone, but I could point a number of remarkable instances where surrealist tone is used, or tedious monotony or fast-paced tension or even positive optimism. Another example, a story about a boy and his dog would usually be depicted with a light-hearted innocence, but imagine what kind of story would emerge with a tone of paranormal creepiness or suspense.
Tone is often influenced by the other story elements, but when used effectively the tone can also influence them. Using a fresh and innovative tone within your story can provide avenues that may not occur with a more traditional one, leading your writing in different directions than originally planned. Whatever tone (or tones if you use more than one) you choose, make sure it is the right one for you, and above all, never lose sight of it.
Main Characters and Setting
Before you start every writer’s favourite activity of putting together your Character Profiles, all you need at this point is a basic knowledge of who or what your characters are going to be. You don’t have to know how tall Jimmy is going to be, nor do you need to know where Enid went to school or why Alejandro doesn’t like hats. All you need to know are the bare essentials. Will there be a single protagonist or many? Is the main character(s) male, female, other? Anything that is essential to know before beginning the story, you’ll want to know it here. If you have a giant stack of detailed character profiles already, that’s great and it will help, but it isn’t necessary yet. Often characters will be defined by the needs of the story as much as the story will be defined by its characters, and the process of detailing this will happen in due course. For now, all you need to know is what is imperative to the initial idea.
Setting also should be very basic. You don’t need to know that the story takes place at Vittorio’s Pizza Bonanza, opened in 1938 on Restaurant Street decorated with old photographs of Italy and checkerboard tablecloths. All you need to know is that it happens in a pizza joint, and even that can be overlooked if it doesn’t shape the story. Whatever city or town or even country is also not necessary unless it has specific bearing on the story. As with the characters, if you have these details, that’s good, but it’s fine if you don’t. Those details will get fleshed out later.
Message
What, if anything, are you trying to say with your story? Are you writing an analogy of western decadence set in the bunny cage at a local pet shop? If so, you should be careful to make sure that comes across. Messages, sometimes known as the moral of the story, can be tricky. You want the message to be clear, but you don’t want it to be so blatant that it overpowers or cheapens the story at large, or becomes preachy. Unless you’re just out to write a manifesto, be sparing with how you dole out the turpitude, and let it be subtle enough that the reader has to think about it to get it without being so subtle that they miss it. Of all the elements of Concept, Message is the most difficult to manoeuvre and will often not be fully manageable until the final stage of the process, Review, when an outside opinion can tell you how effective your efforts have been.
Now, a story doesn’t need to have a clearly defined message, but you should always know when you’re starting out whether it will, intended or not. What I mean is that a writer should be aware not necessarily what a reader will take away from the story, but what a reader can take away from the story. For example, if you’re going to write a story from the point of view of a paedophile, you should be aware that a message can be construed that paedophiles are actually okay dudes. This message doesn’t have to be intended for it to be gleaned, and it simply a cop-out to shrug off the responsibility if it happens. Writers should always be aware of what they are writing, and while I’ll never be the one to suggest that writers draw moral lines (I do so rarely), we should all be prepared for the repercussions.
Summary
A Summary is like a cheat-sheet for your story, encompassing all the basic elements of your conceptual phase in a short, concise burst. This is the clarity of your idea, the focus of what you’re trying to do. You don’t have to worry about the fine details here, but the broad strokes need to be addressed. Premise, Theme, Tone, Message and Main Characters should all be described here. And this, more than any other element of Concept, should actually be written down. It may seem unnecessary, you may feel that you have everything straight in your head, but any good writer will understand the difference between what makes sense in their head and what they can delineate on a page. You may know everything inside and out of what you want to do but still have trouble defining it with written words. There is also the benefit of being able to look at your ideas more objectively in a physical form, to look for glaring errors or just reassure yourself that you know what you’re doing. It also helps serve as a quick reference when you get into more detailed revision.
I’m going to make a bold statement here, but if you can’t summarize your story, don’t bother writing it. Summary is a clear and concise depiction of your idea, and if this isn’t something you can do, chances are your vision for the story isn’t clear and you’ll have no end of problems later. Whether you need to start from square one and better define the Concept or merely tweak what you have already can be discovered here.
Originality
Here is the tough one…is your story original? It’s a hard question to answer, especially to yourself, and it requires a lot of honesty and open-mindedness, not to mention a healthy dose of subjectivity. There are stories which are done over and over again and still manage sometimes to be original. Zombies, for example, is one of the most prolific subjects in modern western culture, yet there are still fresh takes on it produced with surprising frequency. A story about toys coming to life, however, has been done relatively few times but would almost certainly been seen as a plundered idea. There is no benchmark to define originality, that’s one of the worst things about it. You know it when you see it. Still, an author can be honest with his or herself about their ideas, and with the invaluable help of an outside opinion (which will be covered in detail in the Review tutorial), you can avoid looking like a talentless hack.
The point of all of this, the entire process of dealing with your Concept, is to make you think about the story you’re writing. The more you think about the story, the clearer your ideas will become and the more illuminated potential problems will be. You’ll know better what you want to do and what you don’t want to do, you’ll have the groundwork for the rest of the process and you’ll be able to speak more clearly about your project, all of which are invaluable. No writer has ever been ill-served by examining the basic elements of their story before beginning the writing process, and your work will always be better after you’ve done it.
If you are reading this, it is probably because you have the greatest idea for a comic ever, and you want to turn it into the most famous and lucrative thing ever achieved by mankind. Your story is going to revolutionize the industry and change the world. It is a work of art. “How,” you ask, your voice tremulous, “shall I capitalize on this? How shall I enlighten the masses with my grandiose vision?” Never fear! I will share my techniques with you, and you will be wallowing in fame and wealth in no time!
The Summary
Your first move should be to write up a bare-bones summary of the ideas you’ve come up with so far. Focus on the primary characters and the central thread of the story, but if an idea occurs to you, toss it in there - you can always take it out later. Point-form is fine, and if possible the summary should be completely stream-of-consciousness and largely incomprehensible to anyone but you. Otherwise, other (lesser) writers might steal your secrets!
Here is an example summary which is chock-full of writing genius:
As you can see, this format combines the meat of the story with handy little notes to oneself. It makes it easy to apply changes or place reminders for yourself, and it can be typed out quickly, with minimal headache. If you decide to post your ideas online for critique, you should definitely use this format, because it is what all the expert writers use. They will appreciate your thoughtfulness.
Critique
Next, you need critique so that you can figure out which parts of your story are the best and which parts are merely exceptional. You should show your story to close friends and ask for their input. Remember that talented writers like us can sometimes inspire jealousy in those less blessed! If someone gives you negative feedback, it is very possible that he is simply speaking out of resentment because he could never write anything as cool as your story. In this situation, it is acceptable to overlook his comments in favour of more objective, positive critique.
You may also wish to post your story summary online to invite critique from others. Bear in mind that internet forums are full to overflowing with bad writers! For every encouraging and helpful critique you get, there will be a dozen that are either open trolling or bitter envy disguised as “constructive” criticism. There is nothing wrong with ignoring these ignorant critics. I will share a special trick with you: if you wish to find out which users are honest, helpful, positive critics, simply begin angrily defending your story when someone criticizes it. The users that defend you or apologize to you for the actions of other users are good critics and can be trusted. Not many people know this little trick!
One thing worth remembering is that the internet is full of thieves. If you reveal any part of your story online, make absolutely sure to post a legal warning along with it! This should say something like, “this story is my property because I made it. Do not steal my story or I will hire a lawyer to sue you for my story back.” This will also earn you cool points with the pro writers (like me), because it gives off an air of experience and professionalism. There is nothing we respect more than a writer who comes to the table with all of his legal ducks in a row.
Fleshing it Out
Now you start “fleshing out” your story, which is not nearly as erotic as it sounds (unless you are writing an erotic story). This basically means that you will be going through your summary and tacking notes on wherever there is something missing. If you are not sure how the story progresses from one point (point A) to another (point B), just think up another, smaller story that starts off at point A and must end at point B. How it gets there is completely irrelevant. In fact, the more random and unpredictable this part of your story is, the better! Once the reader has finished laughing uproariously at your clever slapstick humour, she will have arrived at point B with a smile on her face, ready to bask in the radiance of your masterful plot.
Fleshing out also entails attention to detail. Put in little touches here and there that really bring the story to life. Does the main character have cat ears? Perhaps the ghost girl can’t hold her liquor? Does the main character have a perverted therapist who moonlights as a paranormal investigator? This phase of the writing process is a great place to use the ideas that have been kicking around in your head without anywhere to go. Did you once think of a really funny gag involving shoe polish and a panda, but you didn’t have any use for it? Use it to flesh your story out! Clever winks to the reader such as this are what really make a comic immersive.
Finally, while fleshing out your storyline, you will want to think about the major characters. You will need to give each of them histories and personalities before your story is done.
Character Profiles
Since your characters are an important part of your story, you will need to create profiles for them. A character profile describes the character and brings him or her to life. Your main character should have the largest and most detailed profile by far, since the story revolves around him. The other characters do not need to be nearly as detailed in order to be believable, since they don’t get as much attention from the reader anyway.
When writing a profile, you will need a few basic things. First is the name, followed by some basic information such as age, gender, birthplace, occupation, and possibly blood type or astrological sign. Below these you should write a paragraph describing the character’s appearance, personality, outlook, and background. Make sure to emphasize any bold and unique features, such as a strong sense of justice, unusual hair colour, or uncanny ability to master any technique more quickly than anyone has before.
As a token of my goodwill, here are two example character profiles:
Name: Joseph Maudlin Age: 20 Occupation: Artist Blood type: O Joe is a compassionate and caring guy. He is always willing to stick up for those who are weaker than him, and sometimes suffers for it. He is depressed because the world is full of cruelty and nobody cares about art anymore. He lives alone in a condo which he is able to pay for by selling his drawings. Joe is brave and independent but secretly longs for a companion who will always be at his side. Despite these qualities he sometimes comes across as a bit of a clown, but his exterior hides great inner strength. Name: Rose Blanche Age: 24 (died at 19, has been a ghost for 5 years) Occupation: Ghost Blood type: ectoplasm Rose is shy and introverted, but very emotional and capable of deep friendship and love. She is hesitant to trust people at first, but does so unconditionally once her trust is earned. She has an uplifting outlook on life and is always quietly sure that everything will turn out fine. She is often sad and lonely because she is a ghost. Rose can sometimes possess living people when her emotions become too intense.
Name: Joseph Maudlin Age: 20 Occupation: Artist Blood type: O
Joe is a compassionate and caring guy. He is always willing to stick up for those who are weaker than him, and sometimes suffers for it. He is depressed because the world is full of cruelty and nobody cares about art anymore. He lives alone in a condo which he is able to pay for by selling his drawings. Joe is brave and independent but secretly longs for a companion who will always be at his side. Despite these qualities he sometimes comes across as a bit of a clown, but his exterior hides great inner strength. Name: Rose Blanche Age: 24 (died at 19, has been a ghost for 5 years) Occupation: Ghost Blood type: ectoplasm
Rose is shy and introverted, but very emotional and capable of deep friendship and love. She is hesitant to trust people at first, but does so unconditionally once her trust is earned. She has an uplifting outlook on life and is always quietly sure that everything will turn out fine. She is often sad and lonely because she is a ghost. Rose can sometimes possess living people when her emotions become too intense.
As you can see, these descriptions focus more on the intangible elements of the characters in question. As a writer, you need to make your characters seem like real people that the reader could meet and talk to. The physical details aren’t important to you, because the artist won’t need your help with that and will mostly make it up anyway. You can just say, “this character is very beautiful and well-endowed. She should have long hair and look sort of sad but friendly most of the time, and also she is a ghost,” and that will be more than enough for any decent artist to create a vividly detailed image of the character. If your artist is unable to do this, or complains when you offer constructive criticism after the art is done, you should get a better artist. Your story deserves only the best!
Art
Now that you have all of the elements of your story in place, you’re ready to go! Simply have your artist take everything that is in your summary and put it in pictures, because that is what comic book artists are trained to do. If your artist wants a timeline or is asking for a script, simply laugh, because you are a writer, not a timeliner or a scripter! Tell your artist to do his job and stop trying to foist part of his work off onto you.
In addition, you will want to offer constant input to help your artist stay on the straight and narrow. Do not accept any guff about scheduling or free time; any comic book artist worth his salt is more than capable of completing a full-colour graphic novel in his off-time. If he is incapable of creating believable dialogue, tell him to leave empty word bubbles in the panels for you to fill in with your superior writing skills. That way, your characters’ personalities are sure to shine through, buoyed by your talent as a writer.
Done!
Congratulations! Your masterpiece is complete. Now all that’s left is to post your comic online, or get it published, or distribute it yourself. You are on the road to fame, recognition, and limitless riches! Feel free to write as many sequels to your comic as you like. A sequel’s artistic value is derived from the original it builds upon, so all of the sequels you write will be just as valid, and just as excellent, as your initial work. This is an easy way to get lots of fans and exposure, as well as money if you have found someone to publish your comic.
Your artist deserves some of the recognition, but everyone knows that artists are nothing without writers to tell them what to do. You may need to remind your artist of this if he becomes too uppity. In extreme cases he may leave, or you may need to fire him. This is perfectly okay, since, as a recognized pro writer, you will have no difficulty at all finding skilled, professional artists to work for you. Simply post on any comics forum, and you will have your pick!
With the advice I have given you here, you are guaranteed to become a pro writer like me. Maybe some day we will meet at a convention where we are both speakers on the same “how to become rich and successful and also sexually prolific” panel. Perhaps we will offer one another high-fives as we sip martinis and watch a bevy of attractive females vie for our attention. Truly, when you are a pro writer, the world is your oyster. Simply remember everything that I have taught you, and you will never have any trouble creating brilliant storylines for your comics.
The lightbox is an invaluable tool for any comic artist. Unfortunately, even the cheap ones are expensive. Here’s something I’ve found works well, is easy to assemble, and costs close to nothing (since you probably already have the materials laying around your living/storage area).
You’ll Need:
1. Drink the beer (or have a parent drink the beer). 2. Clip the lamp onto the flaps of the box and thread the cord through the handle hole. Plug into an electrical socket. 3. Put the pane of glass on top of the box. Depending on the type of lamp, you may have to turn it on first. Don’t look directly at the lamp. Don’t taunt it, either.
Victory! You are now ready to use the “lightbox”. Unfortunately, you can’t put much pressure on this setup, but it works really well for penciling in backgrounds, keeping proportions in check, etc. You may also want to tape the edges of the glass so as not to cut yourself, now that I think of it.
This is just a basic set up, feel free to go wild with the thing (and if you do, please let me know!). I find when creating a tool, it’s most helpful to remember its basic function stripped of any aesthetic qualities. This frees my mind up to consider options I might not otherwise.
The pinup. Pretty, interesting, usually higher quality than your actual comic and one of the first things that gets teasingly tossed around when discussing bad webcomics. Pinups have a time and a place–bonus art, gift art, your personal gallery, and even your professional portfolio, provided that your portfolio does not consist entirely of them.
It’s been a month since you started your comic, and your front page boasts that you update twice a week. Your story is long format, not panelled, so that’s a slightly taller order than one page a week. However, the 31st rolls around and all you have to show for your ’schedule’ is two character profiles, a cover, two actual pages, a fanart, a pinup and yet another pinup thanking your darling fans for a hundred page views. Something is wrong here.
If this scenario is at all familiar to you as a webcomic artist, especially in relation to your own works, then you may just have a problem. Here is a list of commonly seen variants of pinups, the places that you will commonly see them, and whether or not they are appropriate:
The Character Profile: You’re new to the webcomic scene, an you’ve just signed up on a free host. You decided to sign up before you had any pages because you didn’t want someone else to steal your comicname.freehost.com, and also you wanted to build up a little hype and get your site design done.
You don’t have any real pages that are done because designing an appropriate web page is hard, but you do want your potential readers to know that you are hard at work, and give them a little preview of what that work includes. So, you post up a few pages, with a picture of each of your main characters as well as information that you think your readers might be interested to know about them, like their favourite food and blood type.
How to Use: I am a firm believer in the idea that all character information should be presented on one page, set aside specifically to showcase your characters. A page that is separate from the rest of your comic. If you make changes to that page and add new characters, let your readers know in your author comments or RSS feed.
However, if you absolutely must, use them before you start your actual pages and the second that you have a real comic up there, relocate that information to a ‘characters‘ page.
How Not to Use: Do not post a new profile instead of a comic page, even if you’ve just introduced a brand new character. If you really feel you need to post a character page up with the rest of your comic instead of on your characters page, do so only between chapters or story arcs, so as not to disrupt the flow of your story. Disrupting your story is a no–it will annoy readers, especially during tense or cliffhanger scenes, and more fickle readers may just stop reading.
The Splash Page: You didn’t have time to draw a comic this week, but you don’t want to not post. Instead, you decide that your readers will be pleased of you toss up a pretty splash art instead, whilst apologizing and making excuses in your author comment.
How to Use: Again, I’d say never, but since there will always be exceptions, I personally believe that splash pages are acceptable on major holidays (Christmas, Hallowe’en, St. Patrick’s Day, etc.), but only if they are not replacing a regular update. Only post them as extras, and if you can help it, keep them separate from your comic–let people know about them in your news or author’s comics.
How Not to Use: While some readers might say ‘awww, how cute, you made a pretty piece of art,’ a lot of them are going to be wondering why you had time to make a ‘pretty art’ and not an actual comic page. Make pages your priority. If you know you need to update Friday, make sure your page is the first piece of art you finish, and don’t sit down to do a full page, full colour picture until that promised page is done, scanned, uploaded and ready to go.
The Fan Art/Gift Art/Guest Comic: A fan sends you a neat piece of art and you decide that you’re feeling lazy this week and throw it up there instead of a regular update. You sweeten the deal by plugging their comic in the authors comments.
How to Use: Fan art and gift art shouldn’t be posted with your regular pages. Put them on their own sub-pages and show them off in your updates and authors notes. Again, anything that disrupts the flow of the comic could potentially lose you readers. Guest comics, on the other hand, are fine if you use them correctly. If you do a strip comic, inserting them into your updates is easy and not jarring, especially if you write a gag-a-day; nothing is being interrupted, and it isn’t as jarring for your audience. Guest comics are much harder to pull off with long format comics, because serial comics are often telling a story from update to update. Adding a guest comic disrupts the flow completely.
Example: A great example on how to properly use guest comics is Sinister Squid’s own Gibson Twist. Every time he finishes a graphic novel’s worth of pages (about 200 pages of dedicated, on time comic pages) for his comic, Pictures of You, he writes a bunch of neat side stories and has other artists draw them. He plans far in advance to the point where he can tell readers who might not be interested when the regular pages will be updating again, so that they can skip them if they want to. This gives him a chance to work on the next book and take a rest.
How Not to Use: Art–sparingly. Or never. Guest comic–don’t use these too often, and if you do use them, warn your readers in advance and let them know when regular comics will resume.
The News Item: You just hit a thousand page views and want the world to know! You make a a pinup with some of your characters and a bit block-letter ‘Thank you!’ message and post in in place of a comic. Or, you just put up a cool ‘donate’ button, and want people to notice it, so you draw a pinup with info on how your audience can help you and post it in place of a comic.
How to Use: Even if you don’t post these in place of a comic and treat them as extra, off schedule information, they look really tacky. Do not post up a splash page for anything that can be conveyed in a news post or author’s note. Use these only in times of emergency.
Example: I used to work on a comic called RAnSOM. I posted twice a week, and in November, a week from my 21st birthday, I got a call at work from my mother telling me that, that afternoon, I was getting my wisdom teeth out and that I’d got a last minute appointment before her insurance stopped covering me on my birthday. I had exactly one comic in my buffer, and ended up making a crude announcement image that everyone would see to let them know that I would be pumped full of Tylenol 3 and in no state to make a comic for the next little while.
How Not to Use: Do not use this to announce benchmarks like page views, donations, your position on top lists, new t-shirts in your store, etc.–again, it disrupts the flow of your comic and makes your readers annoyed and/or unhappy. It can also end up looking like you’re pandering. If it can be conveyed in your news posts and author’s notes, leave it alone.
