Writing Excuses 20.51: Howard Tayler's Personal Writing Process

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Writing Excuses 20.51: Howard Tayler's Personal Writing Process 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-51-howard-taylers-personal-writing-process

Key points: Schlock Mercenary for 20 years. Write dialogue boxes, (print) pencil, and ink! Think about the story and picture it in your imagination, pencil in composition, then ink. Adapt and jettison! Spiders have soup. Rebuild for disability. Satisfaction instead of productivity. Make the process serve you. Index cards to fight brain fog. 

[Season 20, Episode 51]

[Howard] In September, 2026, Writing Excuses will host an in-person writing retreat aboard Voyager of the Seas, where attendees can learn their craft and connect with fellow writers for a week along the coasts of Canada and Alaska. You can learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats. But I'd like to tell you about our scholarships. Scholarships are available. Applications are due by December 31st, 2025. Visit www.writingexcuses.com/scholarships. But don't delay, the deadline is coming right up. Recipients of these scholarships, the Writer of Color scholarship or the Out of Excuses scholarship for writers with financial need will receive full retreat tuition as well as travel assistance for our 2026 Alaskan cruise. Please, share this post with the writers in your life. The rules and application instructions are posted at www.writingexcuses.com/scholarships. And all scholarship applications are due by December 31st of 2025. Our scholarship program has introduced us to some outstanding writers and we're excited to meet this year's recipients.

[unknown] [Japanese] Lenovo no Christmas sale... [singing Lenovo Lenovo]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 20, Episode 51]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Howard's personal writing process.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I get to drop the word magnum opus when I talk about Schlock Mercenary. Because I made it for... My name's Howard... I made it...

[laughter]

[Howard] For 20 years. I made it for 20 years, and for that whole time, I wrote comics the same way. I... And this process is one which, no lie, every time I've described this to another cartoonist or another comic person, they've looked at me, and then taken a couple of steps back in case whatever that thing I have is contagious, because it was just so weird. What I would do is write in Microsoft Word, except I was writing in landscape mode instead of portrait mode, and I had pre-laid each document with four big text boxes that were empty, that were just panels. And I would grab the corners of them and resize them if need be. And then I had some other little text boxes with the various comic fonts that I was using in them, and I would drag a text box into the panel and begin writing dialogue. In that voice. And when it was done, I would grab another text box or I would duplicate the first one, and do another line of dialogue. And the whole time I'm doing this, I am imagining the faces and the poses and the backgrounds and whatever of what goes in the panels. And so it was a very visually oriented approach to creating a comic strip, to creating a script. I had to have the pictures in my head and I had to have a place on the page where I could imagine them being. The places where the process gets weird is that the output of this was an eight and a half by 14 laser printed sheet that had the panels the size they were going to be, that had the fonts and the text the way it was going to be, and I just penciled and inked right on that, and drew dialogue bubbles around it, and then scanned it and sent it off to the colorist.

[Mary Robinette] Wow, you are crazy.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I don't do comics, and that sounds like madness. That's great.

[Mary Robinette] I was an art major in college, and that is whack-a-doo.

[Howard] It is...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Whack-a-double-doo.

[Mary Robinette] Ooh!

[Howard] It is... And the biggest problem with it, which... It's one of these things where you think I will never need this, I will never need to have my work translated for other languages or anything like that. No. The art and the text and the dialogue bubbles are all in the same layer. There's no translating. If translation won't fit in the bubble I drew, well... It won't fit. But, I work fast. I could script a week of comics in one sitting. I could pencil a week of comics in like 90 minutes. Just plowing through the pencils really fast. And then I got to do the part that I loved, which was turning on some relaxing music and setting the pencils in front of me and inking. So... Was it Kevin Smith... was it Clark's where somebody talks about inkers are just tracing? Oh, I'll ink an outline around your corpse. Whatever. Inking is so relaxing. And it's the point at which... My pencils are loose and terrible. But it's the point at which I look at what I put on the page before and make the final decision about which lines are good. And my whole process centered around these three stages in which, one, I'm really thinking about the story and really picturing what has to happen, and then I'm doing this composition with pencil and trying to figure out how these pictures work, and then, three, I'm relaxing and finishing it. Inking, for me, was the reward. And, yeah, that process was weird, but I did it for 20 years. Every last Schlock Mercenary original is print... Is laser printed with hand ink on it.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I'm going to say, that I've also heard you talk about, is that even though your process felt the same, your craftsmanship got significantly better with the course of that. Like, I have seen Season 1 of Schlock, and your art is... Present.

[laughter]

[Howard] The way I described it for science fiction fans...

[ooh]

[Howard] The way I described it for science fiction fans is the only way for my early artwork to suck any harder is for us to raise the ambient atmospheric pressure.

[Mary Robinette] We have had this conversation and it's not... Like, it is doing the job that you needed it to do. But what happens with your later art is that it is... It's not just doing the job that it's supposed to do, it is elevating the story at the same time.

[Howard] I learned a lot over the 20 years. And what's fascinating to me, from where I'm sitting right now, is that for everything I learned about telling a story more effectively, about writing dialogue that more closely fits the voice of a character now that I understand them, about composing panels so that the eye is drawn where the eye needs to be drawn, all of these things that I learned, they fit within the original process. The original process did not change. All that changed was the content that I was putting into it.

[Dan] Well, I wanted to ask if you ever thought about changing that process? Or, I guess a better question is, you clearly didn't change that process. As you became a better artist, as you became a better writer, what was it about that specific part of the process that you felt like, nope, this I really want to keep it the way it is?

[DongWon] I just want to back up a second. Let's start with how did you develop this process? Right? I mean, was this completely sui generis, you just sat down day one to do Schlock and that's how you did it or...

[Howard] There was a page online, no longer available, it was Bill Amend of Foxtrot talking about how he created comics. And he would lay out the panels first, and then he had a ruler lines, and then would hand write where the dialogue went, and then he would draw the characters. And I tried that, before I was actually creating a strip. I tried handwriting, and because I am not a trained artist, I was holding the instrument wrong. I developed hand pain almost immediately. And I realized if I have to hand write the story I want to tell, I'm not going to tell it. I gotta find another way to do this. What if I write the text on a computer? Well, how do I feed this page where I've drawn the... Oh, wait, I can have the computer draw the panels. And that aha! I basically took Bill Amend's process and thought, well, I can just do all that early stuff on the computer, and then draw the pictures. But, to Dan's question, several times I considered changing it. And I flirted briefly with I'm going to put the dialogue in later, or I'm going to pre-lay the dialogue on a template version up here above me, and then draw on all blank panels, and then lay... So that I know where the dialogue's going to fit. And every time I did that, I had panic attacks about this is going to make me less productive, there's going to be a learning curve, and my paycheck now depends on me putting out a comic... Me putting out a comic once a day. I could make...

[DongWon] You couldn't change horses midstream. Yeah.

[Howard] I could... With that process, I think my record was three and a half weeks of comics created in one week. But I needed to be able to do that because...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Sometimes people get sick.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] People need to take a week off. I... At one point, I had a 70-day buffer, and then I went and drew a deck of Munchkin Starfinder for Steve Jackson Games. And after taking a 3 week Balkan...

[Mary Robinette] Balkan ex... Yes.

[Howard] Cruise...

[laughter]

[Howard] I mean, I was away from home between the cruise and the World Con and Gen Con, I was away from home for a month, and didn't make any comics during that time. Because my process allowed me to work far enough ahead that I could do that. There were also times, Dan, where I looked at upgrading Microsoft Word and realized, oh, wait, wait, wait. If they break the text box feature, I'm a dead man. So I'm going to go over to this other computer and install the new Microsoft Word and see if it will do what I want it to do. And I reached the point where the new version of Microsoft Word no longer did things the way I needed to do them. It started rounding corners of the text boxes...

[oh]

[Howard] And I couldn't find a way to fix that. And so my work computer was then locked to that version of Microsoft Word.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Well, something that I want to flag, because I think it's useful for the listeners, and then we'll go to break, is that the way you started is that you saw someone else's process, and you adapted it for your needs and you jettisoned the pieces that didn't work. So, this is, I think, a really good metaphor for the things that we're talking about for our listeners, is, like, we're describing our process for you. You hear another writer describing their process. It's not the process that makes them, it's the way the process works with your brain, that interface. And jettisoning all the parts that don't work for you, including, like... Including parts of your own process. If you are afraid of upgrading, if that is going to get in your way, you don't have to move up. I know people who still, like... What, WordPro, or some... Like, things that don't... Like, programs that don't exist, that still need floppy disks.

[Howard] I think into the early 2000s, spider Robinson was writing on a Mac Classic in WordPerfect for Macintosh, and it was on a computer that couldn't connect to the internet.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, the point of all this is, as we've been talking, make sure that you are thinking about the pieces that you're like, ooh, that sounds fun and interesting. And now we could probably take a break.

[Howard] Yeah. We're going to go for a break. And when we come back, I'm going to talk about my new process and mention spider.

[Mary Robinette] [largely inaudible] One of my favorite things to do when I'm writing is to talk to subject matter experts to kind of get new ideas, or just to dig into a topic more deeply. So, I was watching MasterClass, and they've got this class by John Douglas called Think Like an FBI Profiler. And just in the first few minutes, when he was talking about being a young field agent, story ideas just like started to unfold in my head. A lot of times, as a new writer, you don't know where to go to get access to subject matter experts, someone who can tell you this kind of story or introduce you to the sort of skills that this Thinking Like an FBI Profiler is introducing me to, and MasterClass offers that. With MasterClass, you get thousands of bite-sized lessons across 13 categories that can fit into even the busiest of schedules, like, if you're in a hurry. It turns your commute or your workout into a classroom. With audio mode, you can listen to MasterClass lessons anytime, anywhere. Just like you listen to us. Plus, membership comes with bonus class guides and downloadable content to help you get even more out of each lesson. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head off to masterclass.com/excuses for the current offer. That's up to 50% off at masterclass.com/excuses. And, yes, I am going to say it one more time. And, yes, I am going to say it one more time. Masterclass.com/excuses. And then maybe you too can think like an FBI profiler.

[unknown] [Japanese] Lenovo no Christmas sale... [singing Lenovo Lenovo]

[Howard] I have a new process, but first I'm going to tell you about spiders. You know how when you chase a spider around with a broom, he's like really, really fast. This is assuming you're the sort of person who will chase a spider rather than just leave it alone. They're really, really fast until all of a sudden, they're just not. That's because spiders don't have circulatory systems, they have soup. And once their muscles have run out of fuel, they have to wait for brownian motion and osmosis to recharge. And I have, thanks to Long Covid, chronic fatigue, and post-exertion malaise... Which means that when I run out of fuel in my muscles, it takes me forever to recharge. I am like a spider. And so my new process is built around me banking as much energy as possible in case the universe comes after me with a broom, and I need to move quickly. Because I can move quickly. It's just that I will move quickly and then I'm done. Since 2021, when we recognized that I had... I now had a disability. We actually had to acknowledge, yep, Howard now has a disability. I have been rebuilding everything. My whole life. I have a techno-cane that is essentially a walking stick with a little mini arm and a magnet on it that will hold my phone. Because once I taught my stick how to carry my phone, my phone would teach me to always carry my stick. And that sort of mindset, at every turn, I would rebuild pieces of my life in order to be able to get work done. And what I have found lately is that writing actually takes way more energy than I thought it did. I sat down to write... Oh, I'm trying to remember what it was... Oh, it was a... I was going to give a talk in church. And I sat down to write it, and as I started writing, the monitor I wear for my heart rate started sending me alerts, saying you've been in your overexertion zone for 2 minutes, for 4 minutes, for 8 minutes, for 24 minutes. I'm like, what is happening? I am in a zero gravity recliner, just using my brain and my fingertips to make the words. Why is my heart doing this thing? And the answer is, I don't know. I don't need to know, I just need to know that it happens, and I need to be aware of the fact that after this writing session, I'm going to need help feeding myself. And so my new process is a lot like... Yeah, a lot like the old process, except I'm not using Microsoft Word and drawing squares in it. I sit down at a computer to write, but I have to bank my writing time against all of my other activities, because it comes with a cost.

[Dan] So, now that you are done with Schlock, I am interested, in order to continue this discussion, to know what kinds of things you're working on. Are we still talking about cartooning? Are you moving more into prose? What is this a process for?

[Howard] That is a question that I wish I had a definitive answer for two and a half years ago.

[laughter]

[Howard] Because the definitive answer I have today is I wish I had a definitive answer two and a half years ago. The current thing I am working on is a bonus story for Schlock Mercenary. And I will have made mention of this... Maybe I did make mention of this, talking about the process of needing to pull up the panel borders and needing to pull up the scripts and needing to do the pencils and move back and forth between those stages in order to know exactly where the words go. And some of that is probably an outgrowth of the original process, which had the words right on the pages. I have gotten much, much better at comics in that I can look at a page... I can write to the page turn, I can write to the crease. I can draw the eye through the panels the way I want them to be drawn. I'm really quite good at it when I have the time to do all of this. And I'm doing a 13-page bonus story, and it's going to take me 3 months to finish it. Whereas a healthy person who can put in more than 4 hours a day at this would finish an entire 24 page comic book inside of a month. The prose projects... I have several on the back burner. I have lots and lots of voices in my head demanding other stories. And I have a process for tracking that, which is create a document in Scrivener, fill out a few cards really fast, writing down everything that's in my brain, save it, close it, move it out of the way so that I can work on what I have to work on now, because I can't multitask the way I used to be able to. There are lots of other stories I'd like to tell. I love horror. I love it. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There's something that you... You were... As you were talking, I was struck by two things that I just kind of want to point out to people. That one of the things that you will have to do over the course of your career is redefine. For whatever reasons that is. Whether it's because, as we heard with Dan, things that you thought were going to take off didn't take off, whether it's depression, whether it's life circumstances, moving across country, whether it's physical disability. But I think that's one of the traps that we all fall into is defining our process by how productive we are. And I think what you were talking about doing is focusing on the satisfaction of the thing that you're good at. And so I think that if you redefine in your own brain how will I be satisfied at the end of this work period...

[DongWon] Yeah. I really love that, because there's a way of thinking about process in the way of, like... I don't know, like product management books that are, like, your workflow has to be X, Y, Z to maximize efficiency at this Factory. But that's not how a creative process works.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's not how making art works. And, at the end of this series about personal writing processes, looking back at what everyone said, but I'm especially noting in yours, Howard, is in rebuilding this process, the question you figured out how to answer is how to make the process serve you, not the other way around.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? You're not trying to fit into a workflow that you designed in there to make the most comics in the smallest amount of time. It's okay, these are my constraints, these are my goals, what can I do to optimize... And it's actually been, like, fascinating watching you do this over the years of, like, finding these technological solutions, physical solutions, process solutions that let you do the thing that you wanted to do. Not the way you used to do it, but it's never the way you used to do it. Every project is new and different.

[Howard] Finding the thing...

[DongWon] Sometimes more radically than others.

[Howard] Finding the thing that is stopping me or slowing me down and going after it aggressively to kill it, destroy it, flatten it, smooth it out, shove it to one side, whatever, because there are things that I want to do. And if there's things that are keeping me from doing them, I'm going to make them go away. There was an episode of... Actually, it was a big portion of the season... Of Altered Carbon, Season 2, where an AI character has been brain damaged and someone tells him, you know what you should do? You should just make notes at the time you think of things, and leave notes for yourself. And the AI ends up with this whole interface in front of him of little note cards and he'll stumble for an idea and then he'll look down and realize, oh, yes, this thing. This is the thing. And I looked at that and had an epiphany, and told Sandra, keep index card stock here and stock here. I need pens in both places. And one of the first things I do in the morning now is I'll pull down an index card, and I'll just start writing a list of the things that I want to do today. And sometimes the list is there in order to do... I suffer from brain fog. It's possible I suffer from brain fog. So that I am carrying that piece of paper with me downstairs, and when I get downstairs, I can look at it and say, oh, that's right. That's why I'm in this room.

[laughter]

[Howard] I do not love that that's the thing that I need, but I am solving the problem.

[DongWon] I think a lot of us need that for a lot of reasons.

[Howard] I am solving the problem in that way. And index cards, I think, brings us around to the homework.

[Mary Robinette] I'm excited to hear the homework.

[Howard] [sigh] okay...

[Dan] Your homework is...

[Howard] Your homework is...

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Howard...

[Howard] Take a stack...

[Dan] You're a spider, I'm a puppy, what are the rest of the hosts?

[laughter]

[oh]

[Howard] Oh, goodness. And what you're going to do is you're going to write a scene about that.

[Howard] No. You're going to write a scene about whatever you want to write a scene about. Take a stack of index cards, and for each beat of dialogue, each thing that would, in your imagination, be one panel of a comic strip, I want you to take an index card, draw a couple of stick figures... Stick figures for the characters who are in the scene, or maybe just smiley faces or frowny faces or angry eye faces or whatever. Doesn't have to be good art. On one side of the index card, you draw that little picture, and on the other side, handwrite the dialogue, maybe even with a little arrow pointing to which person's mouth it comes out of. And then set that card down and write the next bit of dialogue. And treat an entire scene like you are hand creating a comic book. And this is not to create a process for you. This is to break you out of whatever process you're currently using and help you visualize doing things in a completely wrong... Maybe right, but probably completely wrong way. And see if it shakes something useful loose for you.

[Mary Robinette] I don't normally tag on to homework, but I'm going to mention that I was just on a panel with James A. Owen, who illustrates and writes, and he said that he storyboards... Does a storyboard for all of his chapters, and that if he has a chapter or a scene where he cannot think of an interesting image, it is a cue to him that there is a problem with that chapter. And with that... You are out of excuses. Now go draw and write.