This Is Why People Make Long Series and Sequels

Focusing on What's Important to Your Project

The video above is footage of me:

1. Being challenged by character design.

2. Making progress.

3. Realizing how much time and effort I’m spending on characters for a one-off short story.

4. Despairing.

5. Accepting that I prefer short stories for their focused power in expressing an idea over the sprawl of long novels and series, and will be doing this again in the future.

And I am just kidding; I drew that series of expressions while working on this character for my upcoming story without any intention about that point about the effort of character design.

But I have been thinking about the inefficiency of putting a lot of effort into doing visual character design for characters that won’t see much use.

Which brings me to the title of this post: this is (one of the reasons) why people make long series and sequels.

If you can reuse characters or use characters for longer stories, you can save a ton of the upfront cost of time, effort, skill required to design them and jump straight into the rest of the work of telling a story.

And then on the narrative side of things, you also save the time and narrative space of having to introduce characters for readers to get to know them.

But at least at this time, I prefer and am more suited to telling short stories. On a personal level, the ideas I want to express with my stories so far are pretty crisp. And another thing is the fact that with all the visual work that needs to be done and how much space visuals take, graphic stories work better for shorter or more distilled narratives than pure prose can take on.

That said, there’s some balance to be had. If you think about prose short stories, and especially flash fiction, of course there isn’t much space to flesh out characters in much detail, either. And it’s not the point. The characters don’t need to be uniquely described snowflakes.

So, simplify and leave undefined the areas that are not important, that you’re not focusing on—the areas that spending time elaborating on would actually detract from the story you’re trying to tell, the point you’re trying to make—and fill in more on the areas that are important to the story you’re telling.

This is actually a key lesson to learn and practice in painting, sketching, illustrating, too. So, I’m going to take that to heart as I finish designing the characters and the visual style for my next story. It’s not only ok, it’s the right move to make, to let what’s not important slide while focusing on what is important. And wisdom is knowing the difference.

Steadily chipping away at my character designs! Got one side character left to do and then some minor characters to do a little exploratory sketching of before I head to digital to work out the visual style.

I’ll share some more pics once I’ve got that all done, before heading into thumbnail drafting.