As those of you who read my comics know, I don’t tend to write very many traditional linear narratives. In larger works, I also tend to steer clear of identifiable central protagonists. I like non-linearity, I like fragmented storytelling (including linked short stories), and I like ensemble casts.

As many of you also know, I’m currently working on a book with Shelli Paroline called The Trouble Is. Trouble Is is different from much of what I’ve done before. Oh, thematically it’s similar—a precocious girl, a spectral companion/competitor, an overwhelmingly incompetent (though well-meaning) parent. A lot of the same stuff I played with in Portraits of Nervous Children and Amy’s Picture Stories. But structurally, it’s a whole other beast.

You see, The Trouble Is is a linear narrative that tells a single straightforward story revolving around a clear central protagonist. There’s nothing experimental about it.

In other words, it’s a huge experiment…because I’ve never done these things before.

I felt much the same way about Panel One. Sure, that strip had plenty of formal play, and metafictional goofiness, the sort of stuff that gets a comic branded as experimental. But for me, those traits were my safety net—to me, the real experiment of Panel One was just the simple act of doing a daily humor strip. That’s the part I wasn’t sure I could pull off. That’s the part I was trying to gain a better understanding of.

But there’s one big difference; unlike Panel One, I really truly care whether or not The Trouble Is turns out to be good. I want this to be a good, fun, rewarding book. I want people to be glad they’ve read it. So it’s not enough to just play around with these traditional storytelling techniques; I have to actually succeed at them.

Now, I’m pretty confident I can do that. I’m pretty confident that I am doing that. But there have been some bumps along the way. My tendency toward ensemble casts gets me in trouble: I wrote in too many secondary characters (I’ve since cut one of them out entirely); I kept the protagonist’s Mom at the foreground of the story well past the point where she should have faded into the background (some reorganization of scenes has mostly solved that); and I haven’t kept my main character active enough in her own story, instead over-relying on the quirkiness of my supporting cast (this has improved, but I’m still working on it).

I’m learning a lot from this project. I’m becoming a better writer. And sure, after this I’m still going to want to do some crazy non-linear experiment—but I’ll do it better for having spent some time honing my abilities in basic techniques.

But just as important as seeing the value of practicing basic craft is this: WRITERS: LISTEN TO YOUR ARTISTS. They may not be writers themselves, but they still know what they’re talking about at least as often as you do.

Because, the thing is, while I’m sitting here pointing out the errors I’ve made in scripting this story, the bits that didn’t work or that went off in the wrong direction, I’m not telling you about problems I found. I’m telling you about problems Shelli found. And Shelli’s been great: she’s honest, she’s critical, and when she doesn’t like something, she lets me know. And sometimes I’m resistant. Sometimes what she’s telling me completely contradicts my own Great Idea. Sometimes I feel like she’s missed my point completely.

But then I go home and I mull over her comments. I sit with them a while. I think about what the consequences would be for the story if I took her suggestion, made a few changes. And usually I realize that the main consequence of taking her suggestion is that the story actually gets a little better. The characters get more interesting. The tone gets less glum. And then I start to realize that my original Great Idea was actually a Pretty Sucky Idea disguised as a Great Idea. And then I go back to my script and start revising, and improving, and reorganizing, and suddenly I have a much better book than I started with.

And that’s really the goal of collaboration after all—to make a really good book by taking the best parts of what each person has to offer. Not just by doing the part we’re good at, but by helping each other see when we’re not doing our own best work.

And that means always being honest.

And that means always listening to criticism given honestly.

So I’m sort of working on a novel. Not a graphic novel—an actually book-length piece of prose. I don’t know if I’ll actually finish it or if it’ll be any good when I do. You may never get to read it, and that may not be any great loss. But I’m working on it.

As of right now, the book is 41 pages, beginning to end. Obviously, that’s a bit short, but that’s typical of my writing method; The first draft of Parens. was only 45 pages, and it nearly tripled in length during revision. My first drafts tend to be the skeletons of my story, which I then hang layers of meat on until it’s fully realized. I also tend to have long stretches of ignoring projects between drafts—this draft of my novel was completed two years ago, and I’m only just getting around to reading and revising it for the first time now.

One of the reasons I was drawn to plays and comics and stopped writing prose fiction a number of years ago was my feeling that I could write some pretty good dialogue and interesting characters, but that I wasn’t that great at narrative description. Sure, comics requires visuals, but I just need to communicate those visuals to the artist—I don’t have to evoke them for the audience. Of course, one of the things I made myself do, once I started writing comics seriously, was create several silent stories that relied entirely on visuals—that was the origin of the Amy stories—so that I wouldn’t become over-reliant on the techniques I was already good at. I wanted to grow.

So now I’m writing prose fiction again. And I’ve noticed something interesting about how my writing has changed since I last worked in this form—I don’t write nearly as much dialogue as I used to. In a lot of my early stories the prose was just a bridge between sequences of dialogue. But now I’ve gone to the other extreme—I find I’m writing practically no dialogue at all in some of my stories. The current 41-page draft of my novel includes only 22 distinct lines of dialogue, including an instance of “oh.” The first, “I’m going to make some coffee” doesn’t appear until page seven, and is the last for several pages as well. And where I do insert longer conversations, the bulk of the dialogue comes very near the end, as the story is just about to wrap up.

What’s more, I’m actually enjoying the prose I’m writing—as I said, it’s been two years since I wrote it, so I don’t have that new project bias that makes writers love their most recent work. I don’t remember a lot of my details, so my rereading allows me to be surprised by what 31-year-old me did with this piece of writing. And I’m finding that my descriptions are more evocative than they’ve ever been, and funnier than I tend to give myself credit for. It’s still a very rough draft, of course—but I still like it. I’m happy with what I did, and am excited to take it further.

All my writing life, I’ve always felt that there is great value to working in more than one form—lessons that can be learned in one kind of writing that will benefit you in another. So much so that you can grow in skill in a form that you’re not even actively working on. My best achievements in one project always happen while I’m working on a different project. And I’m really pleased to discover that this has held true through my absence from prose.

Or, at least, that’s how it seems to me now. I could re-read this piece again next year and discover I hate it. I’ll just have to wait and see.