Art by Mike Huddleston
Jonathan Hickman is a comic book writer who specializes in massive world building projects like East of West, Avengers: Secret War and currently the run of X-Men (which begins here).
About a month ago he made a deal with Substack to produce content for them, and has started the development of a new book called 3W/3M, aka 3 Worlds, 3 Moons.
And basically what he and his collaborators are doing is showing us the process by which they're building the story as they're doing it. So for instance, last week he put out a series of posts about a certain meteor that's important to the story. And in the initial two he was sort of talking about what people did with the meteor once it fell to this planet--its very minerals, a house that was built around it. And then in the third he tells this seemingly unrelated story of a war that ends up explaining where that rock came from and some really insane things going on within it. The third post absolutely changes everything we've already read and sets the story down a whole new path with a lot more energy.
(This is a long way of saying, if you are interested in the craft of writing, you should consider subscribing to Hickman's newsletter. I was very skeptical of the whole idea of paying for a newsletter about a comic myself, but it's been tremendous.)
After those posts, Hickman followed up with a post explaining what he has just done from a storytelling perspective, which he calls "Mining Your Continuity".
Lots of good ideas to think about here.
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I get plenty of rope now because I’ve done the trick quite a few times, but when I was starting out at Marvel (and was very inexperienced -- and very new to ‘just writing’) I didn’t have any way to explain what I was doing story-wise, and while my act was amusing to the bosses, only my editor, Tom Brevoort, really got it and had to go to bat for me numerous times early on (probably more times than I know -- thanks, Tom!). And for a while there, I really couldn’t even explain what I was doing...
Then I saw Vince Gilligan (uh, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, X-Files) give an interview where he explained this process -- which I’ve looked for on youtube and cannot, for the life of me, find anywhere. So I suppose the possibility exists that he didn’t say what I’m about to say, and I misheard it, and have completely made all this up as a way of me figuring things out, but, you know, I WANT TO BELIEVE.
(Oh, so google told me that Vince Gilligan’s real name is George Vincent Gilligan, Jr. And his parents names are George Gilligan, Sr. and Gail Gilligan, so it’s like they’re from Smallville or something. Which, hilariously, is the same double-initials, naming convention that we’re using for all the royal families on Fayrii.)
Anyway, the process was basically him talking about how, instead of introducing new concepts and characters to your stories with new backstories and unrelated, or parallel, motivations, the thing you should do is ‘mine your own continuity.’
By that, he meant that when you introduce a giant meteor to your story -- that meteor’s history doesn’t begin with it crashing into the planet. It’s not just an inciting incident, and it’s not just a rock (it’s not just a gun, it’s not just a new bad guy, it’s not just a new love interest, it’s not just a cool car, etc, etc) -- it has to have a purpose. And its history should reflect the history of the story you’re telling. This has two-fold effect: One, you get a shiny ‘new’ toy to play with (new is good, but it often doesn’t matter in dense continuity [like, say, the X-Men] unless...), Two, you get a kiss of nostalgia when that new thing connects to an ‘existing story’ in a delightful way you didn’t see coming. This creates a feedback loop that resonates through your storyline making everything matter ‘more.’
You’re essentially folding the story back onto itself, over and over, creating a much stronger narrative (which is how they make Samurai swords -- I learned that from Highlander, which is also how I know who the Fabulous Freebirds are. It’s also probably a ‘why not both’ of that Mad Men episode, ’The Wheel’).
It’s also worth noting that, done correctly, it does a lot of the hard work necessary to eliminate coincidence in your stories. Which is priceless all by itself.
