26.3.12

The tragedy of invisible epic writing and the boy who woke to find he was made of rats...

Today I'm all about ripping off Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and relocating it to 1920s Yorkshire for a beautiful body horror picture book experiment. Imagine being a little boy who wakes up one morning and finds that he's made of rats. I did and thus wrote a tale titled "The Boy Who Woke Up and Found He Was Made of Rats." It's tragic. I'd be crying if I hadn't had such a good time writing it.

It's very similar in spirit to yesterday's blast in that it has a sense of the macabre about it and runs along more unconventionally in terms of structure. Looking at it, there isn't much in the way of text and there are a significant number of pages that are simply illustrations. Writing picture books - funnily enough - mainly revolves around writing pictures, telling the artist what to draw and not actually writing prose itself. This story, and others I've spawned this month, thus read more like TV/film scripts or comic scripts. It's all me describing what we're meant to look at and trying to help the hypothetical artist envision what's on my mind. If you looked at the final picture book and thought "what did this guy actually write?" on paper it amounts to a total of 18 sentences of prose. Let this serve as a reminder there's always more to things than meets the eye...

It's a shame in a way because I get such a kick out of writing epic, elaborate descriptions that will never be seen by anyone apart from the artist (who doesn't exist so, yeah, seen by no one). The best stuff is the unseen stuff. Really, the world is full of behind-the-scenes geniuses who will never be appreciated. It's almost as tragic as the tale of Arthur Whisker who woke up one morning to discover that "below his neck his entire body had transformed into a writhing rodent confusion..."

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