A Little Cognitive Dissonance
What you need:
Paper
Post-It Notes
Pen or pencil
A human mind and body
Instructions:
Make a short list of your most contradictory traits and feelings. Things you enjoy that you know you shouldn’t, people you love that also drive you crazy, things that “fill your bucket” in one way, and empty it in another.
Pick one and write a sentence about it that leads readers to believe you feel only one way about your chosen subject. Then, right at the end of your sentence, throw in your contradiction.
Divide your sentence up over the number of panels you plan to use but don’t write it in yet. Draw your images and adjust your text as you go to allow for a nice rhythm, moments of silence, and to avoid unwanted image/text redundancy.
Example:
Quick thought:
I had a teacher in art school once tell me that all artists have between 1-3 core subjects for their entire careers. At the time, I found his claim preposterous, but now I think he was right. When I look at my work as a whole I see the same 2 or 3 themes running through nearly all my stories, and one of the themes that comes up again and again in my work is contradiction. Why did I get a gym membership for three months but only go twice? Why did I get a third coffee instead of going outside for a walk? Why did I stay up so late to watch that horrible movie? I knew it was horrible, and I still did it! What the goose? For me, contradictions fall into the rare category of things that I actually find interesting about myself.
And, thankfully, I am such a deeply flawed human being that I don’t think I will ever run out of them.