The Agent of Weird welcomes reader questions! If you want to ask what works for me when writing stuff about vampires, aliens and wizards, then head over to my Substack and drop a query in the comments...

“I'd be interested in reading your thoughts on emotional arcs versus plot-driven stories. Horror seems like a good place to go heavier on the plot and lighter on the emotionality, e.g. John Carpenter's The Thing.” 
Sweet Nightmares Media
It took me a while to really understand that plot and character are essentially the same thing. I’m pretty sure it was when I was watching the first season of Game of Thronesthat the penny finally dropped. I saw how an action taken by a certain character – like Jamie shoving Bran out of a window at the end of episode one – triggers the next beat of the story. In this case, the next beat is that Bran didn’t die as Jamie planned. This causes the next beat of the story in which everyone else must now decide how to react. Their actions will cause another character to react, setting up the next beat, and the next, and so on, cause and effect. And if the characters are drawn well enough, they’ll often come up with those beats for you...

A milestone in fantasy cinema that illustrates exactly why writing about magic requires a true sorcerer’s touch (contains very mild spoilers)

There’s a scene in Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves that says the movie knows exactly what it’s doing. Our party of roguish adventurers are drowning their sorrows in the local tavern, bickering over the best way to break into the bad guy’s vault. The barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez) grunts over her ale. “Can’t you just magic us inside?” The party’s timid sorcerer (Justice Smith) bristles at this. “Everyone thinks you can solve everything with magic, but you can’t! There’s rules!”
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Director-screenwriters Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, along with co-writer Michael Gilio (as well as the writer of this previous essay Too Much Magic: The Pitfalls of Writing Fantasy), understand that nothing breaks the spell of drama more completely than characters waving a magic wand at a story problem. It’s one of several reasons why Honour Among Thieves works so well. It has a geek’s understanding of the rules of the game, but a dramatist’s flair for storytelling. In other words, the movie plays like it’s being run by a really good DM.

The movie is another milestone in the wave of big-budget on-screen fantasy that’s been rolling for the last twenty years, ever since Peter Jackson’s still-magnificent Lord of the Rings trilogy and Warner Brothers’ charming-but-very-much-less-than-magnificent Harry Potter series. These blockbuster successes, along with advances in digital special effects and the rise of the internet, helped carry the fantasy genre out of the ghettos of fandom and into mainstream culture.

Created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss from the bestselling-but-not-terribly-well-known-at-the-time fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin, the first series of Game of Thrones arrived in 2011 and had clearly learned much from Jackson’s trilogy...

The award-winning author, scriptwriter and games designer talks craft, getting published and staying focused, as well as revealing his new creator-owned fantasy project 'Letters from an Unknown Land'

Hey, John! Thanks so much for agreeing to do this Q&A. Who am I kidding? I’m bloody delighted to have you do all the heavy lifting for this article! First off, can you please tell our readers who you are, what you write and what you’ve written?

I’m a writer, script-writer and sometime games designer. Basically, I write novels and short stories, scripts for TV, video games, and audio dramas, and just occasionally something involving the rolling of die and playing of cards. A lot of my work has been for Warhammer, including novels for the Horus Heresy series, but I’ve also done work for the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and novels for Arkham Horror, Sherlock Holmes, and sundry other writerly things.

So, what do you say at parties when people ask what you do? Do you do what I do and look at your shoes like a schoolboy caught smoking behind the bike-sheds and mumble ‘I write stuff…’?

I grin and say, ‘I’m a writer’. No sheepishness involved. That I get to do this is quite a surprise to me, and a huge privilege. Saying it aloud always gives me a spark of pleasure. As does the ‘What? Really?’ reply that follows.

And do you write part-time or full-time? Are you freelance?

I’m full-time, but have been part-time too.

How long have you been writing professionally?

[counts slowly on fingers…] About seventeen years.

And how difficult was it for you starting out?

​It was both tricky and not, to be honest. A lot of my experience of becoming a writer is that I did one thing and then another and another. It didn’t all happen in one go...

Anything can happen in a fantasy story. So how can writers prevent theirs from spiralling out of control?

Fantasy (along with the more fantastical strains of sci-fi) is hazardous terrain for storytellers. Fantasy deals in magic, which can manifest itself in countless forms, from the secondary worlds of Oz, Wonderland and Middle-Earth, to levitating nannies, goblin kings and gold-hoarding dragons. Magic is about miracles, mysterious forces or inexplicable events that cannot be ascribed to the laws of reason, nature or science.

Magic in fantasy isn’t always about escapism; it’s often about redefining the real world to better understand and overcome its challenges. Judy Garland’s Dorothy had to venture into Oz and defeat the Wicked Witch of the West so she could understand how to live happily in the real world of Kansas.

​Like language, like story itself, magic is protean. It can articulate anything the writer has in mind. Magic is kind of a big deal. The problem is magic is anathema to drama...

The 'correct' way to lay out a script for your comic book depends on what you're writing and who you're writing for. Find out what you need to bear in mind for the sake of you and your creative team.

This piece on how I format a comic script (and – most importantly – why I format it the way I do) was one of the most popular posts on this blog. But since writing it back in 2013, my comics scripting has evolved quite a bit. So it seemed only right that I update it.

For reference, I’ll be using the script for a Black Beth story published in Rebellion’s Scream & Misty 2020 Special with brooding black-and-white art by the incredible Greek artist Dani. I’d worked with Dani several times before, so do bear in mind that I could allow myself to be a bit less formal here than if I were sending this to an editor cold.

We good? Okay, let’s go…

Some General Thoughts

A comic script is ultimately a very hands-off way of writing a story – certainly when you’re writing ‘full script’ as I do for 2000 AD, and, well, pretty much every comic I’ve worked on over the last fifteen years. (The other general method of scripting a comic is ‘Marvel Style.’)

Getting to tinker with dialogue or sound effects further down the line is a luxury rarely afforded when writing full script. Once I’ve written the script, rewritten it and had it signed-off by the editor, I invoice the thing and start writing something else. By the time that script sees print as the finished comic, I’m usually so immersed in another story that I’ll have forgotten pretty much everything about the last one!

I might get to see designs, panel layouts or finished pages as they come in. I might not. Depends on the artist’s disposition, whether or not I’m in contact with them, and how tight the production schedule might be. I’ll often never hear from a story again until it’s been turned into a comic.
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Should that be the case, I always make sure the artist, letterer and editor have got everything they need from me in a single document. I’ll add hyperlinks to certain bits of reference, emotional directions for the characters, any notes about specific lettering, etc., just to make sure everyone’s got what they need to build the story without me...

How the tragic movie maniacs of The Black Phone and The Menu are all the more terrifying for having a hopeless method to their madness. (This piece contains mild spoilers.)

How much more frightening is the monster for whom you feel a measure of pity? This painting by the Spanish master Francisco Goya (1746-1828) will be familiar to anyone who has so much as flicked through a book on horror history in the last forty years. It was part of a series of private murals daubed on the walls of Goya’s hermitage outside Madrid, towards the end of a life that had rendered the painter deaf, embittered and traumatised by the ravenous horrors of Napoleon’s invasion.

The painting depicts the ancient Greek Titan Cronos (known as ‘Saturn’ in Roman mythology) gnawing on the remains of one of his own children, driven to cannibalism by a prophecy that said his offspring would one day usurp him. Originally untitled, the painting was later canonised by art historians as Saturn Devouring His Children. Goya painted it on the wall of his dining room.

Now, look into those eyes…

There’s no triumph in that stare, no demonic glee, no ‘Bwa-ha-ha-ha!’ Those eyes are helpless. This immortal Titan is an animal caught in Destiny’s trap.

Mexican maestro Guillermo Del Toro has cited this painting as a direct influence on the Pale Man he created for Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and I’m wondering if it had a similar influence on Scott Derrickson’s quietly brilliant horror movie The Black Phone (2021)...​

Are you a freelance writer slowly dying inside as you wait to hear back from editors about your latest story pitch? You’re not alone. Here’s how to stay sane when stuck between projects.

Freelancers have to master the art of living in a state of quantum uncertainty, of existing simultaneously within several different realities. I spent most of June and July this year waiting for editors and publishers to get back to me on pitches or to discuss future projects. I was peering beyond the gulf of summer (when it’s tough to get hold of anybody and even I have to take a little time off), and was chewing my fingernails at the sight of several months crammed with so many projects I may have been unable to complete them all. Yet those very same months were also completely, terrifyingly empty.

How so?

You’ve heard of ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’, right?

Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founding fathers of quantum theory, came up with a thought experiment in 1935. He was trying to explain how new scientific theories can be considered both correct and incorrect until the point in time where they can actually be proved or disproved.

He stated that if you sealed a cat inside a box containing a substance that could potentially kill the animal at any time, then you wouldn’t know whether the cat was alive or dead until you opened the box. Until then, the cat can be considered simultaneously alive and dead.
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While waiting for confirmation on their next project, the freelance author’s schedule exists in a similar state of quantum uncertainty...

The Tabletop Lair: When did you realize that you wanted to be a writer? Were there any pieces of media that were particularly influential?

Alec Worley: I always had comics and books as a kid, but it was Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy gamebooks that really snagged me as a reader. As a writer too! I think maybe it was that sense of telling a story that plays out as a result of choices made by the main character. That main character being me, the reader! I started writing my own gamebooks soon after, full of Hammer horror and illustrations copied out of comic books.

I got into RPGs soon after and got my hands on West End Games’ Ghostbusters at one point. I only played it once, I think. I had no idea how to run a comedy adventure without things going completely off the rails. Plus, all my players wanted to do was blast civilians in the face with an unlicensed nuclear accelerator!

Getting under your reader’s skin is about more than just showering them with blood and showing off your favourite monsters. Let me teach you the black arts of creating a truly disturbing horror comic

Why are so few horror comics genuinely scary?

The genre of horror and the medium of comics have had a fruitful marriage since the 1940s, when Prize Comics’ The New Adventures of Frankenstein thought to cash in on the success of Universal’s monster movies. Eighty years on and breakout series like The Walking Dead, Basketful of Heads, and Something is Killing the Children continue to spawn spin-offs and can’t seem to stop winning awards.

Horror comics are as popular as ever. Maybe this has something to do with the genre’s mass-media marketability, as creators look to hawk their horror comic’s IP as a low-budget movie or a TV show somewhere down the line. But just how many titles out there are giving readers that delicious ripple down the spine, that soul-freezing scare that haunts you long after you’ve put down the book, and leaves you jumping at every bump in the night?

​‘Scary’ is a subjective term, for sure. So before I go on, let me give a quick rundown of the comics that have creeped me out over the years...

Do characters really have a life of their own? Or is it all just marketing bunk and cultural mythmaking? Do writers really commune with the unseen?

According to his creator Robert E. Howard, Conan the barbarian – that primordial figment of masculine imagination – entered our world like he’d been real all along. In a letter to fellow pulp author Clark Ashton Smith in 1935, Howard wrote, “I did not create [Conan] by any conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me to work recording the saga of his adventures.”

In truth, the character’s evolution took several months, and had less to do with his author being ordered about by imaginary barbarians and more to do with what pulp editors were buying that year1. Howard may have been guilty of indulging in the kind of self-mythologising that we writers love, the sort of needy postering that confirms our popular status as visionaries, shamans, psychics, Moses receiving instruction from God.

That shit does wonders for building a writer’s brand.

​Over six decades later, those lines from Howard’s letter had been colourfully embroidered by a succession of editors, fans and adaptors, all of whom wisely chose to print the marketable legend.

“[Howard’s] alone one night and he feels this shadow overtake him from behind and he knows that CONAN is standing behind him with a large axe, and Conan tells him, ‘Just stay there and write, and if you don’t do EXACTLY what I tell you I’m gonna cleave you down the middle!” John Milius, director of Conan the Barbarian, 1982, quoted from Conan Unchained: The Making of Conan(2000)

It’s a tall tale of which Howard himself might have been proud, but there’s a definite truth to the phenomenon of fictional characters telling their writers what to do...