Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.
Today’s guest for the WHAT is Matt Mair Lowery is the author of Lifeformed, a YA Sci-fi series from Dark Horse Comics, illustrated by Cassie Anderson.
Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?
I do. Lifeformed came from a couple different ideas. The first was less about the actual story and more about the type of story or comic I wanted to have to read with my daughters. When I was growing up, the comics that spoke to me most were things like The Uncanny X-Men, that felt sort of dangerous and gave me some insight into being a person in general and being a teenager or an adult in particular, while also being stories full of action and adventure.
Back when I was first developing Lifeformed, the great Middle Grade/YA graphic novel explosion had yet to happen and there were a lot fewer choices out there for a story along those lines. Also, I wanted something my daughters could identify with and that I could identify with, and that we could read and discuss the ideas and themes of and such.
So, in Lifeformed, that thinking resulted in Cleo, our young hero/protagonist, a girl coming of age after her dad is killed in an alien invasion, and Alien Alex, the shapeshifting rebel alien who takes Cleo’s dad’s place and with whom she fights back against the invaders. So essentially, I imagined, someone for my girls to relate to and for me to relate to. The funny thing is that while I initially imagined I’d being seeing the story through Alien Alex’s eyes, identifying with him, the more Lifeformed I write, the more it’s Cleo that’s really in my head.
The second major origin point for Lifeformed is much simpler… my love of The Terminator movies. Cleo was in large part born out of the question “What if Sarah Connor was a little girl?”
Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?
The characters and general situation (the alien invasion) came pretty easily, but the plot itself was definitely a process. Lifeformed co-creator and artist Cassie Anderson and I at first just set out to make a comic for ourselves, but when our first issue made its way to Dark Horse Comics and we met with them, the format we’d envisioned initially (single issues, delivered monthly) changed and we pivoted toward the graphic novel format. This meant a complete story in under 200 pages instead of an ongoing, serialized story.
For the structure of this, since I’d never written anything of that length/complexity before, I leaned a lot on the hero’s journey, especially Dan Harmon’s “story circles” take on it and The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, basically taking all these small moments and interactions between Cleo and Alien Alex (the relationship stuff that usually comes easiest and had been in my head from the start) and figuring out where they belonged on Cleo’s journey from not-very-confident kid to alien fighter. And, of course, interspersing action scenes and such in a way that hopefully spoke to where Cleo was at a given point in the story. But anyway, the hero’s journey was definitely the skeleton/structure of the first book. I also received great help from our editors at Dark Horse in terms of focus and tone and approach to the format.
For the second book in the series, Lifeformed: Hearts and Minds (released September of this year). The whole thing arrived more or less fully-formed in my head. It takes place largely in my neighborhood in Portland, and after the initial idea I had of it being sort of No Country for Old Men for kids, I came up with most of the details on my regular runs through the area, so by the time I went to actually write it down it was all just sort of there. To me it’s much looser, a lot less structured, than Cleo Makes Contact. After so much time with Cleo and company in my head, at this point my approach is to just throw them into a situation or even a location and see how they react and then they mostly write themselves.
Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?
Always. I mean, maybe the overall plot holds up, generally, but once I start to get it down and it is there all concrete on the page, I’m instantly seeing things that just don’t work at all and things that work way better than I thought and send me down other paths. It feels sort of like it’s the first stage of editing, especially if it’s something I’ve had in my head for a while. As I write the first draft I’m throwing away ideas from the zero draft or whatever you want to call it that I had in my head.
Especially in comics, you can have very grand ideas, but you usually have limited space, and you end up trimming those grand ideas pretty quick once you realize how many pages and panels you have to make your story work. Also, in my experience so far, it feels like once I start typing, if something is working well, it takes on a life of its own and I want to lean into that. The best and most rewarding thing to me is when characters surprise me, and take the story in a different direction than whatever I might have laid out.
Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?
It feels like it comes in waves to me, at least lately, and the more I write the more ideas I have. If I get lazy and don’t write regularly, even if writing is feeling like a slog or something, it seems like the ideas start to dry up. The more I write the more it feels like fresh stuff keeps coming to mind. But I definitely seem to have periods of time where a handful of different story ideas will crop up all at once and I have to race to get them down, and then my brain goes into a sort of dormant mode. I usually just try not to sweat that and still work on something anyway so that when the wave comes again I’m ready. Also, since I’m working on comics, there are usually other aspects of projects I can work on, from design to promotion, so I can still feel productive.
How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?
Usually it’s just whatever I feel most inspired to tackle at the moment. Once something is done percolating and is good, it feels like I can’t say no to it and I have to start writing. Lately I’m thinking that waiting for the idea to come together and fully cook in a way that makes me feel like I have no choice but to spend the next week fleshing it out is the best way to go. Hold off until it feels right and undeniable and then run with that momentum.
I have 5 cats (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?
Phew, five cats is a lot. I admire and respect animals, but I’m not much of an animal person, so I don’t have a writing buddy in that way and would definitely find it distracting. The closest thing for me is music. The louder the music, the more productive I am. It’s also the thing that comforts me, so if I feel like I’m having an off day, it’s usually music that’s going to snap me out of it, or at least get me through. I certainly can’t imagine writing without it.