BIO – How I Accidentally Became A Writer

When I was growing up, I loved story. That’s not a unique statement because I think nearly everyone loves a good story. It’s in our blood. How else do you explain our appetite for so much entertainment, even our conversations with each other are essentially stories we tell each other. And we all know good story tellers who intuitively know how to edit out the boring parts of their lives to get to the good meat of the conversation and present the good stuff. We also know of people who are in love with their own story but don’t know how to tell it very well, or meander through off-topic details and bore us. Both the good story teller and the bad storyteller went to the mailbox only to find a pile of bills, but one makes hearing the story a joy and the other bores us to death.

I fell in love with Disney movies, TV shows and great books and anything I love, I  love doing. So I came into telling stories without knowing I wanted to be a story teller. I thought I wanted to be an animator and a comic book artist. But what I really wanted was to tell my own stories. It just took about twenty years to figure that out. I’m a slow learner.

G.K. Chesterton said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” I started telling stories through comics and animation and my stories were pretty bad in hindsight. As an artist, I was always able to nail the look of my characters and I knew to make their personalities interesting. But making a character and setting them into a good plot are two different disciplines. A good character is like a car with nowhere to go. When you give that car somewhere interesting to go, you have something beautiful.

My basic story structure ideas were gleaned from my culture, it’s actually much older than that, but it largely comes from the over arching idea that everything has a beginning, middle and end. The way we put those three components together is the spine of any story. Here are a few links on breaking down my story thoughts:

Basic Story Structure in Under 5 Minutes


Basic Story Structure with visual

That is a pretty formulaic view of story, and it’s not quite a science. There is always lots of room for innovation, but I use structure to keep me out of trouble and to give me some place to start. No matter if I’m writing story or painting a picture, when I begin by throwing out the rules I don’t get transcendence, I get mud.

Here’s an image of my last graphic novel script, strewn across my living room floor with post it notes marking dialogue notes. I can follow a perfect structure and there is still a lot of fixing to do. Those 3″ x 5″ note cards in front of the fireplace are the basic three act story structure broken down into major moments:

Aside from the rules and regulations of story, I found there is always something going on underneath the words. It’s what I call the why of story. It’s this why that makes us feel anything because without the why it’s just a bunch of words. All of us can write words, but it’s the why that gives them more impact and can touch our soul or subconscious to make us feel things. To circumvent the mind and get past the watchful guards of the audience’s gates is part of what makes storytelling so powerful.

“But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.” -C.S. Lewis

While I’ve studied the why of story for years, I tried to boil it down to the basics in under five minutes. This is my goal for most of my writing notes, because I get bored from ten hour lectures on story, I want to get to the point! Here is the quickest overview I could manage on the big why:

The WHY of Story in Under 5 Minutes!

You’ll often hear me rant about the three act structure. In reality, the three acts are the minimum requirement of a story. There are four act structures and I’ve seen eight act story structures. There are two act plays. But one thing all of these different act structures have in common that they have a beginning, middle and end. I believe this is the true act structure regardless of how many breakdowns we choose to reverse engineer into them.

I also see them as three different stories. Each act has a job and 90% of the good stories I’ve read follow this breakdown. Here is my explanation:

Why 3 Acts are 3 Different Stories

Any time I read a book, my mind naturally starts slamming story into categories. That could be me just practicing confirmation bias, but the pattern keeps arising. Another of the patterns I see is that a main character has a problem, but usually has a separate but related need. In my early writings I made the character’s problem and need the same, and it telegraphs too much information to the audience and it loses dimension. Here is my breakdown on problem vs. need:

Problem vs. Need

I started drawing before I had memory of it. My mom remembers me always drawing, even when I could barely walk. I find art a great relief, but it is an exhausting medium to master. I’ve been blessed to have this many years to figure out how to draw and I feel like I’ve only just begun. Story is not unlike any other art form, I have a lot to learn and it is frustrating to see how far off I am from mastering that medium. I assume I’ll still be learning how to write when I’m 80. I’m a lot closer to mastering everything I need to know about driving than I am at mastering artistic things like marriage, painting, writing or even video game design.

For more research on my mass media entertainment, check out my IMDB page:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0855066/

I give lots of live instruction while working in my studio on my Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/dougtennapel/

To read my stories, please pick up one of my books on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Doug-TenNapel/e/B001K7Z214
And finally, check out my official website here:
http://dougtennapel.com/

BIO- May Update, remastering GEAR while Making a Koi Pond

For over twenty years I’ve been making graphic novels, but none brought quite the kind of joy as my first one called GEAR. It was originally published by my pal Rob Schrab’s Fireman Press but later got picked up by Image comics, where we hammered together some colors for it. Now, after twenty years, we got a chance to tidy up some of the art and colors (Some of the pages were so abstract that readers couldn’t follow the story) and it’s coming out well thanks to my colorist, Katherine Garner! Here’s one of the newly recolored pages in all its glory:

Some of you may not know it, but pre-orders of books deeply effects the overall sales. Amazon has some of the best pre-order tracking and they market accordingly, so if you’re a fan of my work, or are curious to own a spanking new copy of GEAR, head over to my Amazon page and preorder the new copy before it comes out this July:

https://www.amazon.com/Doug-TenNapel/e/B001K7Z214

One of the long term problems with being an artist and an “inside boy” is that my body just withers into nothing. As I get older, I’ve had to exercise regularly to maintain my energy at the art table. It’s like life told me I couldn’t just be in the studio forever or I would wilt. So I started going to the gym regularly, and even the gym is pretty abstract when you think about it. We don’t generally do hard labor, but we want our bodies to look like we’ve done hard labor so we go to the gym and do hard labor, we don’t go outside and dig ditches.

To counter this, I give myself big outdoor projects to sculpt my backyard into a paradise for the Beloved Mrs. TenNapel. This month, I started building a koi pond which at first broke my back, but now my strength is catching up and I’m digging ditches with a purpose! I’m trying to post regular updates on my work and you can follow along by joining the live feeds from my facebook channel here:
https://www.facebook.com/dougtennapel/

While some of you have followed my youtube channel, I also started a Vimeo channel which has quite a few tutorials you might like. Subscribing helps, but no pressure… I just want the little movies I make to be seen. I try to keep the information tight and easy to watch in under five minutes:

https://vimeo.com/dougtennapel

Finally, if you want to learn more about my entertainment career outside of comics, you can look here:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0855066/

BIO – Teaching Drawing for Free

It’s been my dream to be an artist, not to teach art. Yet I serve on the board at Lipscomb University and taught courses at Houston Baptist University, plus I’ve lectured around the world about character design. If I didn’t want to be a teacher, why am I always teaching?

Before I answer that, please visit my Youtube channel where I offer free drawing tutorials (among other things). It’s not professionally produced, but it’s the kind of information I wish I had as an up-and-coming artist:

https://www.youtube.com/dougtennapel

To be an artist is to be both a perpetual student and teacher. If you’re not learning, you’re like a dead carp floating downstream. When I got into animation, it was a constant schooling experience of both learning and teaching every day. When I worked on Attack of the Killer Tomatoes in 1991, I remember we would freeze on a frame of Wiley Coyote and talk to each other about what Chuck Jones was doing. When I worked for Mike Dietz at Shiny, it was a constant back and forth about what we were doing and how to do it. There was no ego. Nobody ever told me how to draw a hand to make themselves look good. When an artist teaches another artist, it’s always out of mercy to the poor struggling guy or gal keep from making the same mistake for years.

All four of my kids dabble in drawing. Here’s my 16 year old’s recent class project:

I offered her instruction on how to measure proportions and encouraged her to be as exact as possible. She gave me the usual teenager “I know, I know.” But I noticed her using the technique. I couldn’t help but teach and she couldn’t help but learn. I showed her a technique of cutting a one inch hole in a white sheet of paper and placing that hole over the source photograph so she could isolate the gray value and make a more accurate assessment of what was going on in just one little area, then duplicate that exact panel onto her drawing. She said, “I know. But I’m really going for that.” Yet, her drawing’s values got much more accurate after that talk. Those were the only two little things I snuck in while she spent hours on the drawing.

My 11 year old son drew the Colosseum, and my 12 year old daughter is doing a watercolor of Spiderman. They aren’t as voracious as I was at their age, but they are drawing with better principles than I was. I doubt if they will choose art as a profession, which is almost a relief to me. But art will always be a part of their lives, and I hope they continue to learn and one day teach their kids how to draw.

BIO – Choosing to be a Graphic Novelist

It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I have a letter written to myself from the 6th grade where I wanted to work as an animator for Walt Disney Studios. I got close by becoming a TV animator for the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes animated series. But something I’ve always found frustrating about animation is that I’m not so in love with making things move. Oh, sure, there is immense satisfaction in creating what Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson call “The Illusion of Life”, but I realized I was far more interested in the story of why the character was moving.

It took a decade of working in television animation and video games before I realized that comics was the perfect medium to combine my writing with my art. That’s when I became a dedicated long form comic book writer, or, a graphic novelist. Today, I’m starting my eighteenth book and there is an energy (and a great deal of frustration!) with cracking a new story. It can go any direction, and as I write the words my mind goes to how difficult some moments are going to be to draw.

If your interested, you can buy a ton of my books on Amazon or your local bookstore can order them:
https://www.amazon.com/Doug-TenNapel/e/B001K7Z214

I’m starting this new book with an outline, written out long hand but based on a pile of notecards. The outline will be about sixteen pages of pullet-points and scratched out lines, and I’ll go to script from that. It is hard to believe that this is the most important part of the process because everything seems so… thin. Before a story gets more gravity and meat hung on it, the words aren’t very convincing. The story isn’t thickened with rich characters and I find it bad to put too much writing into a bullet point because a bad moment could look like it’s going to stay when I might just as well need to draw a line through and go in another direction.

With any luck, I’ll start writing the script next week.

BIO – Finding Facebook 2007

I graduated high school and went to Point Loma Nazarene College in 1984. We all knew what college was for, we would train for a job and were promised a higher income because we graduated college. The problem was that I was an art major. Not just any art major, but an art major who graduated in 1988 a full five years before things like the internet were widely used by consumers.

Below is a picture of me with my college buddies after graduation. We’re hiking in a desert, camping, going to the beach, and now we’re middle aged men texting each other all day:

There was no preparing for the computer revolution of the 1990s… imagine going to college and not knowing anything about the industries to come like EBAY, Amazon.com and Facebook! These companies have changed the face of business and all I got was an art degree. My generation learned quickly and bought our cellphones and posted on the internet and bought stuff from Amazon and used our Apple products like good like tech-heads. Most of us still can’t set the clock on the VCR but that console is going in the trash anyways because we stream our video rentals through Amazon.

I can’t remember if I got on Facebook in 2007, but it slowly took over so much of my social life that it scared me. I fasted from Facebook for all of 2010, but all that did was develop my addiction to Twitter. Like so many other Facebook or other social media users, our lives have been changed. I’ve reconnected to long lost friends I grew up with, even the people I graduated with in 1988 found me and we can see each other’s families or send notes of prayer and support.

My Facebook page has become a live studio experience where I can paint and draw in front of my friends. This isn’t exactly putting on a show, I’m not performing, I’m just drawing with the camera on:

https://www.facebook.com/dougtennapel/

Facebook has become how I check in on my mom, my mother-in-law, my wife and the various clubs and groups of friends I’ve grown to love over the years. Still, it’s hard to like Facebook. I sort of resent it, because I want to meet people in reality and I have to settle for an experience of a few well-posed pics and a glance at 5,000 people’s lives.

I recently asked a question to a group about if they were happier before they got a smart phone and nearly everyone responded that they were happier before they had a phone. My question to you is were you happier before you got on Facebook?

BIO – a quick look back at my slow career

I remember first seeing cartoons and marveling at what I saw. I knew how to draw but I didn’t know how to make my drawings come alive. I was naturally drawn to animation and probably had the most fun doing little flip books in the corners of my school textbooks. I set a goal to one day be an animator.

What I know now, but didn’t know then, is that animation is easy enough on flip books, or even in my high school puppet animation, but to get good enough to be a professional animator was above my skill set for how undisciplined I was with drawing. You see, I’ve always drawn because I enjoyed it. I didn’t do it because I was good at it, though I got better simply because I drew so much. But merely loving to draw isn’t enough to become a great animator, you have to be psycho about it.

So while I made it to professional animation status for animated television and for video games, I couldn’t cut it for feature animation. I don’t know for certain I couldn’t do it, I just tried once at a feature submission and quickly gave up. I was far more turned on to story-telling, and I mean telling the whole story, not just animating a few scenes of a movie.

Over the years, I’ve told hundreds of stories, some as director, some as storyboard artist, even some as a video game developer. Here’s a list of some of my work that made it to IMDB, though this is not a complete list of my 25 years of work:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0855066/

One thing I’ve learned is that my career has ups and downs, and battle-worn creators learn to get a thick skin when the money truck doesn’t back up every day to your house. My art is a commitment, and where my career has failed me every so often, my love for art and story-telling has not.

BIO – Writing Earthboy Jacobus

The first graphic novel I ever made was GEAR. Nickelodeon picked it up and we made it into the TV series Catscratch. That seemed easy. My next graphic novel was Creature Tech, a personal, idiosyncratic, strange journey of Dr. Ong, a man with an alien attached to his chest trying to bring him back to God. I sold those movie rights to Fox/New Regency. The next book I made took me just three or four months to write and illustrate and it was called Tommysaurus Rex. I sold the movie rights to Universal for the most I’ve ever sold anything to anyone. This seemed easy! I decided to write my masterpiece, Earthboy Jacobus.

I spent over two years pouring over that book, writing and sketching everything to perfection.

Earthboy Jacobus
(above) A heavily edited script page with corresponding thumbnails for Earthboy Jacobus

Nobody wanted what I still consider one of the best stories I’ve ever told. It remains unsold today, and I kind of like it that way. It keeps me humble, hungry and has lowered my expectations on all of my books since then. It’s important to not just make books to be sold, but to tell stories just so they can be told.

BIO – My Daughter Turned Me into a Father

My daughter is now 6’3″ at sixteen years old. While she spent this weekend in Atlanta playing in a volleyball tournament, I’ll always think of her as the person who has changed me the most. The thought of having kids before one has kids is an intimidating thing. I didn’t feel adequate or complete as a person, I didn’t know if I would be glad that I had kids, I didn’t know if I would rise up and be the kind of great parent I had. All of that disappeared once my daughter came along.

It’s like a little switch is flipped inside your person. You have a baby, and life quickly (perhaps, instantly) prioritizes itself. Going from being single to married is a big shift, but even when we get married, we’re dealing with an adult mind, a peer, a partner. But a baby is none of those things. A baby changes you into someone who is bigger because you have to be bigger, is selfless because you have to be selfless.

But the thing I like most about being a parent are the little moments humor that kids create just by being kids, like when they blow their loose tooth in and out like it was a rickety shutter unhinged from a dilapidated house.

Doug TenNapel BIO 2007: Pitching for Survival

“Doug TenNapel can pitch.” I’ve heard this phrase more than a handful of times and while I don’t take compliments well, I get a little charge every time I hear it, not because I doubt my ability to pitch, but because I know where I came from.

I have two qualities that conflict in that I’m both an introvert and a class clown. I see this dual-attribute in many kids we see putting on a show in front of people, my son included. I suspect that people who perform for others or draw attention to themselves are seeking some form of social validation. In many ways, we all want that. Most people like the sound of their own name spoken by another. That’s something deep in us where we enter into a relationship any time someone is addressing us. Given I believe that loneliness is one of the most gnawing form of torment one can experience, we must get relief when we get attention.

Which came first? The clown or the introvert? In my case, I can remember being shy or uncomfortable around others before I started doing and saying things that got attention. So I assume the shyness or introversion came first. Most public speakers didn’t become comfortable until they regularly spoke in public. So we’re all naturally shy or uncomfortable when addressing an audience. Like any skill, speaking in public takes some more practice to gain the skills than others.

But one thing happened that kept me from being a wallflower forever. There was a time when I could get away from being noticed, when I could turn off the performance switch and disappear when I really wanted. Then in tenth grade I great to a height of 6’8″. My life of disappearing was gone forever. Ever see video footage of criminals in ski masks holding up a mini-market? They’re never 6’8″ because they’d be pretty easy to find in a line up of suspects. One can’t height when one sticks out more than just about anyone else.

When I went to college, being an art major was a natural choice. Part of my studies included not just painting and creating abstract art, but having to defend it during a critique of my peers. I had to present cogent reasons why the art was legit, and that too helped me become a better public speaker. Little did I know that step-by-step my life experiences were training me to be comfortable with speaking to a room that would be the key to the greatest successes in my career.

By the time I got my first video game job I was frustrated with not being able to work on my own ideas. I knew there wasn’t anything in the natural course of events that would lead a video game company to just magically make one of my ideas so I had to make it happen. I pitched game ideas at every company that hired me to animate. I’ve long believed that nearly everything we do is a form of pitch from marriage proposals to job interviews to explaining yourself to the cop who just pulled you over. You have an idea and you pitch it. It amazed me how successful I was with my earliest pitches and it was largely due to desperate love of a gaming idea I believed in not my own comfort with public speaking that drove me.

When asking why Carl Sagan was so passionate about science he said, “When you’re in love you want to tell the world.” That’s how I feel about the things I pitch, I love the idea so much that I have to tell someone about it, and many times the pitch is the only way those ideas are expressed, because so many of my pitches are turned down before any one of them is picked up.

Here’s a pic of me pitching a Nickelodeon short back in 2007.