In a recent author interview over in the #SaturdayScenes community, I mentioned I once aspired to become a cartoonist, and how I even put sample packages together for submission to various agencies. If you think querying is tough, try sending large padded packages of your cartoon doodles!

In the end, as you might guess from the attached samples, that was a doomed-to-fail effort. My SuperFam comic strip would not appear on newspapers or other accredited publications. In short, my artwork doesn’t cut it. And my penmanship isn’t much better. Maybe my jokes are OK, but one strike is enough to get you out in the cartooning game. But I did learn a few things that I carry forward to my writing today. Isn’t it great how your life experiences, failures and all, don’t go to waste?

Here’s what I learned:

1. Get into your story without pause. Daily cartoons, especially, with three frames? Nope, no chance for descriptions, long character introductions, overblown setups. You gotta jump in. The monochrome samples hopefully give you a glimpse–especially that first strip–of getting right into the story. I won’t tell you what the premise or concept is. If you get it, I got it right. If you don’t, I suck. That’s how I try to write my first few paragraphs of each chapter, especially that tough first one. Jump in, hang on.

2. Use your words sparingly. Especially in those dailies, 3-4 frames, and you’re done. Not much room in those balloons for a lot of verbosity. Short words are better than long ones. I realize now I was tweeting before Twitter became totally cool. (Was Twitter around in 2008?) Twitter aside, we should use them words as proficiently and efficiently in our writing. I like to think of my words as bullets I must use to hit a target. I only have a limited supply, so I best not be wasteful and fire only those that are needed to hit the bullseye–and nothing else.

3. Tell the story efficiently and with an express goal in mind: the punch line in the case of a comic strip. First frame setup, middle 1-2 frames build-up, and then, pop. Admittedly, some of my punchlines are weak, but that was what I was trying to do: make the punchline pay off for the reader. Sort of like building to a cliff hanger at the end of a chapter, perhaps? Or the climax in your story?

4. It can’t just be interesting in the last frame. You have to have something compelling (perhaps even funny) in the middle frames, too, maybe even in the first one. This is especially true of Sunday strips where you have more frames, and hence more room for development–but also more danger for flubbing. Similarly the middle of a chapter or your story can’t be blubber. It has to have purpose and hold your reader’s interest.

5. Dialog has to snap! You have to have tension. You have to reveal character traits in what they say and how they say it. Granted, in a comic strip I can draw facial expressions to show some of that, but the words matter, too. Ditto for dialog in my fiction.

6. No one strip tells the whole story. I realize now that when I was drawing these strips, each had a self-contained bit of the overall story, with a form of resolution, but none of them told the entire narrative. I was learning about serializing a story! And as it turns out, that’s how I’m writing these days. Cool, huh?

7. A strip is a hungry thing! While I was trying to make it as a cartoonist, I acted as if I was involved in a for-pay fulltime effort. Producing 6 dailies and one Sunday strip for 3-4 month chunks is a monster task. You pretty much have to work every day. Some days you crank out 3-4 strips, some days you keep tossing crumpled paper. In some ways I think writing fiction is easier. In others just as hard. Either way, discipline carries the day. You have to keep producing.

And there it is. My failed cartooning campaign, and how it transformed my thinking about writing. And here they are, those comic strip samples I sent along only to receive rejection in return.