Alison Bechdel & Jessica Abel, pt. 2

People are talking about Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, a "graphic novel" (it's really a memoir) that's poised to take the mainstream publishing/literary world by storm. I asked Jessica Abel, the creator of La Perdida, to talk with Alison about their respective creative processes so we could learn...well, exactly the sort of things that get covered in today's exchange.

Jessica Abel: How did you go about structuring Fun Home? I was deeply impressed by the waves of revelation, the way you'd, for example, return to the scene of your father's death over and over, from different angles, asking different questions. You reject mystery early on, telling us the major "plot points" without fanfare: your coming out, your father's secret life, his early death. But then you go away and return over and over, teasing out new levels and new insight. Though the voice is insistently reasonable, the repetitions start to make us feel the obsession, the possibility that this is a spot where you (or "you") remain stuck, trying every possible angle to push out and escape that moment long ago. As the same scenes played out over and over in slightly different ways, I was forcibly struck with a sense of the completeness of your view of the structure of the book—and perhaps that's mistaken, but it really felt as if you had looked at the whole of the work as a kind of poetic structure, perhaps, or some other meta-form.

Is this meta-form or poetic structure deliberate, or did you simply let the book evolve as you worked? Did you have the whole thing thumbnailed and planned before starting the art? What is your process like? Was this a radically different experience from making a strip? Could you, possibly, have told this story in weekly installments? What effect did your history of thinking in weekly bits have on the way you worked on this book?

Alison Bechdel: I laughed when you said you consider your own method unteachable if not inadvisable, because I feel pretty much the same way about mine. In fact, referring to the way I approached this project as a "method" at all is a wild exaggeration. Though toward the end, I did start to get a handle on what I was doing.

I spent a very long time on this book—seven years from start to finish. I started by just writing. I had a bunch of core memories that I knew instinctively were a part of the narrative, but I didn't know how or where they fit. I realized pretty early on that a simple chronological structure wasn't going to work. I had too many things that I wanted to say about each event. I had this constellation of ideas surrounding my father's death that I wanted to investigate—my parents as fictional characters, creativity as a form of compulsion, how my life and my father's life fit into recent gay and lesbian social history, things like that—so it became clear that my organization would need to be thematic. The linear story turned into a spiral, circling back over the same events as I explored each idea in turn.

Eventually I hit a wall working only with the words. I needed to start conceptualizing the story in actual pages, so I cut and pasted all my word processing files into Illustrator, a drawing program. In Illustrator, the story became a graphic story—even before I’d done much actual drawing. I could map out my panels, rearrange and reshape them, edit and move chunks of text around. I had this tremendous freedom of movement which enabled me to start putting everything where it needed to go.

Some scenes really needed to begin on a left hand page, for example, so they'd surprise you when you turned the page. Other scenes needed long panels, or big panels, which could only fall at a certain point on the page. So I started nailing down points in the story like that, then desperately editing and rearranging to make the rest of the story flow around them.

Alison Bechdel: I loved working within these kinds of constraints. Like the way you describe fitting your story into multiples of 8 or 16 pages, massaging, and shortening as you went along. At first, switching from writing a comic strip to writing a full-length book was overwhelming to me, like getting out of prison must feel. But then I discovered all these comforting rules and strictures that started boxing me in again in a soothing way.

In lieu of thumbnails, which would have taken me a lot of time, I just wrote little descriptions of what each image would be, like stage directions. This is the first graphic novel Houghton Mifflin has published, so they treated it like any book, which meant it had to go through a standard editing process. I didn’t want to waste time on drawings that I'd just end up having to change or move or delete. So I gave my editor, Deanne Urmy, my laid-out pages, with narration and dialogue and short image descriptions. Then she edited the manuscript. I'd never really been edited before, and it was thrilling to have another person scrutinize my work so closely. I don't think just anyone could have looked at my drawing-free pages and visualized how they would work, but Deanne was really good at it. And then because I hadn't actually drawn much at that point, it wasn't a major operation for me to incorporate her edits.

So I had a lot, but not all, of the book written and laid out before I started drawing. I was drawing the early chapters and writing the later chapters simultaneously for a while. But yes, I very much had a sense of the complete book as a unified structure, and I don't think it would have been possible to write it serially.

I'm not sure if that's what you mean by poetic structure, or meta-form. But it did occur to me as I was working on this book that graphic storytelling is very much like poetry in that it matters where things fall on the page. It's sort of a combination of a poetic form with a lot of constraints, like a sestina, and a concrete poem that creates meaning by not just what it says but how it looks.