There’s a longstanding tradition in the visual arts of trying to represent the invisible. Naoki Urosawa draws the feet and legs of people walking to represent a sense of purpose or determination. Bill Waterson drew uneven, exclamation mark-styled lines around his characters to represent excitement, surprise or anger. Superman is depicted like a strongman flexing every muscle at once to represent his power and resolute nature. These visual representations have been borrowed by many other visual artists in other mediums precisely because they are effective in their chosen goals. 

There is one area where these attempts to depict the invisible haven’t really found traction. Many illustrators have tried to depict music and its effect on those who hear it but so far there isn’t any one standout way to do it. One artist who has portrayed music with some success is Kazuya Machida, the author and artist of The Shiori Experience. 

The basic premise of The Shiori Experience is quite comedic. Shiori is a school music teacher who used to idolize her older brother, who was lead guitarist in a garage band. When Shiori’s brother tries to fund the production of his own album but gets ripped off his family is left in debt and he flees overseas to America to try and make his guitar legend there. Shiori gives up her love of rock and roll because her family turns on the medium. She still loves the guitar but she loves her family to the point she won’t push them by putting her love of rock and roll in front of them constantly. Until one night, at midnight on her 27^th birthday, she meets the ghost of Jimi Hendrix at a crossroads. Jimi haunts Shiori and imbues her with some of his legendary guitar skill. In exchange, she must become a musical legend before her 27^th year ends or she will join the 27 Club – the group of musicians who had the potential to change music forever but died at the age of 27. 

Jimi himself is a card carrying member of the club, of course. He hasn’t given up on creating new music so he’s returned to the mortal realm to find someone willing to make a deal with him. Shiori didn’t make a deal with him but he’s there for some reason and that means she has 365 days to become a rock legend or she’s doomed. There’s a lot of odd couple vibes to The Shiori Experience on top of the usual trials of a person reigniting their passion for a skill they let fall by the wayside for years. It’s a fun tale, although heavily reliant on tropes. 

But it’s the depiction of music on the comic page that really interests me. Manga has a long standing tradition of using visual metaphors in moments of strong emotional impact – crashing waves behind triumphant warriors, blooming flowers wreathing the objects of romantic affection, that kind of thing. Some of that is used in The Shiori Experience. For example, when a guitarist haunted by the ghost of Kurt Corbain meets Shiori and Hendrix the four of them engage in a guitar duel at an underground rock venue where their clashing riffs are depicted as waves crashing into each other. 

While this is very well trod ground in action manga, The Shiori Experience puts a new spin on it. The change from depicting a simple battle to a struggle between entertainers lets Machida recontextualize the metaphor. He does this by showing the waves sweeping the audience away. 

Many comics and manga try to show the input of music on the audience by illustrating their emotional reaction to it through expression or perhaps actions like dancing or crying. Machida shows the audience becoming a part of the metaphor. As the music surges between the dueling guitarists the audience swirls back and forth on the dance floor, caught in the maelstrom. It’s a brilliant use of established conventions in a new context to powerful effect. 

Machida’s use of visual storytelling doesn’t end there. When Shiori takes her band to a battle of the bands each song in their set is given a full, 38-40 page chapter to show us the impact of the band’s performance on the audience. It’s a very bold move, relying on purely visual storytelling to emphasize relationships between the performers and the audience. Two of the songs in Shiori’s set are classic rock songs, Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” and The Monkee’s “Daydream Believer.” The other two are ‘original’ songs composed by Shiori and her band, songs we’ve never heard and have no canonical lyrics established in the manga. They exist only in our heads. Machida uses different approaches for each. 

The real songs are used to establish the rapport between the audience and the band, with the lyrics and the reactions to them showing how everyone in the venue is reacting in the same way. The only words in the chapters are the song lyrics – we get the rest entirely through expressions, motions and reactions. The two ‘original’ songs have no written words in their respective chapters at all. To get his point across in these chapters Machida relies even harder on visual language from action manga. 

The opening number uses what I call ‘team building’ metaphors, with the band member known as Prince (and clearly based on that Prince) leading the band in a song he composed to show off each of their strong points. As each one comes in we see the band building in a visual pyramid with the crowd surging towards the stage, reminiscent of tokusatsu costumed performers creating a dynamic pose as they make their entrances. If you’re not familiar with this style of Japanese storytelling, a small part of it has been imported under the brand Power Rangers. The language here is pretty simple: Shiori’s band is building to a high point. 

At the other end of the set, they perform “Jack In,” their other ‘original’ song. During this song Machida appropriates the visuals of ‘special attacks’ as often seen in battle manga. The audio input jack is a recurring visual metaphor in The Shiori Experience, used to symbolize the connection between Hendrix and Shiori, then later Shiori and her bandmates. But at this juncture we see audio jacks streaking from the stage and jacking into the heads and hearts of the audience as the music connects with them. 

This song is all about Shiori’s band versus the other bands they’re competing against. As the song builds to the climax of their set these audio jacks connect with the opposing band members in the audience, showing the moments they win over each of their rivals. Some are hit by the jacks right away, some even actively run into their paths while some drift around the venue until a particular moment in the music connects with then. One actively fights off connecting with the song, grabbing the jack sent his way and holding it in his hand until he relents and jacks in himself. Machida uses these metaphors because he doesn’t want this sequence to just be about the song or its effect on the audience. He wants to show the conflict between Shiori and her rivals, so he steals visuals from stories about physical conflict but adds just enough context to make it clear these are metaphors. 

It’s difficult to show something intangible in a visual medium. The Shiori Experience isn’t creating a definitive series of metaphors for music on the comic page like Superman or Waterson did. However Machida is innovating and working on the problem in ways few other artists are and that’s a great reason for anyone interested in visual storytelling to give it a look. 

Thoughts on how to adjust when things don’t go to plan in this week’s writing vlog:

Believe it or not there is a story which you can tell about characters in any time period, of any social stand, in any place in the world, about people in just about any stage of life. This might sound like a bit of a stretch but believe me, it’s true. I know it’s true because it has been done. I don’t say this in the way Joseph Campbell talks about the Hero with a Thousand Faces. I’m talking about an actual story, with a prescribed set of events, that authors have read and then deliberately copied and adapted to narratives of their own. 

This story is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. 

There was a time where no TV show was complete until it had a Christmas Carol episode. Everything from The Flintstones to The Jetsons to The Muppets has tackled this basic narrative at least once. Something about Dickens’ basic narrative has such a broad appeal and universal applicability that English speaking culture developed a fascination with trying to retell the narrative that lasted all the way up to the end of the 20^th century. What are the lessons we can draw from this? 

Well, first that simple motivations are the best. Ebenezer Scrooge was not driven by any kind of deep trauma or some kind of overly complex theory of society. He suffered abuse as a child, yes, but nothing outside the normal human experience. He had good friends, a sense of morality and goals beyond securing his own position. Unfortunately he gets distracted by very simple, understandable human motivations: a desire to increase his own wealth and standing. Stubborn pride. A desire to avoid falling back into a previous state that was terrible for him. 

These are very easy motivations to understand. Everyone has felt them at some point in their lives and, even if the exact situations Scrooge experiences haven’t happened to you, you can probably translate the basic sense of Scrooges experience to your own life. Some kind of disappointment from your family, friends you grow distant from and goals you get overly fascinated by. It’s very easy to start down the path to Scrooge, that’s part of what makes him a great character. 

The themes of A Christmas Carol are equally universal. Loneliness and obsession are things everyone have suffered and redemption from the shackles they put on us is something we’ve all fought against to some extent. It’s very tempting to lapse into some analysis of class dynamics or recovery from trauma when looking at Scrooge’s story. However these things are too specific, too bound in one time period or lifetime to allow the creation of a universal story. Dickens could and did write about themes of social status (it’s very prevalent in his work, actually) and traumatic events but comparing his work that touches on those issues to A Christmas Carol it really doesn’t look like that was what he was going for. He was examining the potential human cost for much more mundane, immediate decisions based in human nature, not class or trauma. 

The format of the story also allowed Dickens to explore these very human themes and motives to their very utmost. Scrooge doesn’t just explore his past, he sees where his actions ultimately lead him if he will not change. He will die alone and get buried, unmourned. Seeing these results through the eyes of a ghostly vision, brought by ghosts who have proven trustworthy in every aspect of life they’ve revealed to Scrooge before, removes some of the subjectivity from the situation.  

That’s not always a good thing to do in fiction but in A Christmas Carol the whole point is to show us an 18^th century intervention where a person is slapped out of their obsessions to see where they stand in reality. The motif of supernatural visitations accomplishes that. And it doesn’t remove all of the ambiguity from the situation. Even now, it’s hard to say for sure that Scrooge actually saw ghosts and not a dream brought on by guilty conscience. Or undercooked potato. Whatever the source of the visions, the truth of the situation is found through the outcomes. Scrooge does turn his life around and it is better for him. 

It’s these simple themes and motivations, explored to the fullest extent, that makes Scrooge’s story so powerful and easy to apply to other characters regardless of time, place or society. Granted, a certain part of the enduring appeal of Dickens’ landmark story is his masterful prose. Neither can his piercing insight into human nature pass on to another author who is trying to transmute A Christmas Carol into a new form. The genius of Dickens was in large part in his execution of his stories. 

But he also knew how to tap into the universals of the human experience and nowhere do we see that more clearly than in A Christmas Carol. That is what has made Scrooge’s story so enduring, to the point we are still talking about it almost two hundred years later. There are not many stories this broad, this applicable and this compelling. Nor are universal stories the only good kinds of stories that exist. But when an author tells a story that everyone wants to retell in their own way they’ve tapped into something profound. And that’s something every author should try to understand, for their own edification if nothing else. 

Today’s writing vlog is a day late, due to my being forgetful. Apologies! Just a few notes on where I’m at in writing and how I feel about it this week:

This weeks writing vlog: Essay update, and ruminations on essay writing.

I spoil most of my writing essay topics and give a few thoughts on why I chose them in today’s writing vlog:

As a preface – it’s not my intention to take any specific side on the Ukranian conflict in this essay. I have very strong and distinct opinions on the situation and I don’t think sharing them on the Internet is useful so don’t worry, you won’t be getting them here. However I do like to study current events and try to derive lessons for fiction writers from those events. There is a lot of fiction surrounding the war in Ukraine right now which makes it a rich source of insight for the astute observer. 

The first lesson comes from the fascinating idea that a conflict in Ukraine was either allowed or provoked because propagandists needed a distraction from increasing questions about COVID vaccinations and regulations. I find this fascinating because it illuminates the first misconception nonwriters have about fiction – that the foundation of storytelling is a brilliant idea. It isn’t. Writers have inspiration everywhere. I’ve never met a writer who didn’t have a list of stories to write twice or three times as long as what they’ve actually written. 

If propagandists want to distract from something, they don’t have to invent something to hype up, they just have to look around a bit and find something shiny. By the same token, a writer doesn’t have to find a brilliant ideas to create a good story. Ideas are in abundance all around us. 

Our second lesson from the Ukraine is about perspective, and is inspired by the tale of the Ghost of Kiev. For those unfamiliar with this urban legend, they tell of a Ukrainian pilot so skilled and so dominant that he shot down five or more Russian pilots over the skies of Kiev in the first day of combat. The victories of this legendary pilot were trumpeted by the government of Ukraine and many news outlets. And they were almost certainly just that: legends. 

Some pilots do become aces (fighter pilots with five or more confirmed kills) in a single encounter but they’re quite rare and usually in very chaotic, target rich environments. It’s not impossible for such a thing to happen but the skies over Ukraine haven’t offered good places for it at any point of the war. What’s far more likely is that the Ghost of Kiev was a pilot who shot down one or two Russians and was observed by multiple people, who’s accounts were taken as separate stories rather than multiple accounts of the same event. This is pretty common in wartime situations and rarely ever gets sorted out later. 

The lesson – differing perspectives can turn the same story into different stories. First, keep in mind that your audience is going to read a far different story than what your wrote. That’s just part of the game, kid, don’t let it get to you. Instead, enjoy their perspectives and the stories they read and learn what lessons you can from it. You can’t craft a story people will love if you don’t love how they listen to that story. Second, your perspective on a story is going to be very different from anyone else’s. Don’t worry too much if your idea isn’t original or if you think it’s been done before, originality isn’t as important as skill and craftsmanship, and if it’s really a story told from your perspective it will be different enough to stand on its own. Third, remember that your characters see the world from different perspectives, too. Don’t let their take on the story become homogenized but rather give them all their own ways of looking at things, to the point where they could almost be talking about different stories. That will keep your narrative feeling authentic. 

Finally, remember propaganda is targeted at an audience. Some people will eat up propaganda, some will listen along with it but question some of what they hear and some will reject it outright, regardless of how much of it is true and how much is spin. Generally the two extremes are the smallest parts of the audience reached but it’s those already predisposed to believe it that propaganda really targets. They’re the ones that share it and really buy into it. You should target your audience the same way. 

Tell stories for your very dedicated audience, the people who love what you do and share it, rather than the questioning masses or your harsh critics. Unfair critics will never be won over, they’re predisposition to hate you comes from them and not you. The moderately interested group tends to be won over by the enthusiasm of your diehard fans, you can’t gain their interest by catering to them. If you try, you’re more likely to offer a watered down product that doesn’t get your point across and doesn’t do what they want well enough to hold their interest. Accept their partial buy in and hope they’ll dig deeper with time. 

And there you have it. Three lessons writers can learn from propaganda, with no political grandstanding thrown in. Great stuff! Now go buy beans and rice, the nuclear winter is coming and it’s gonna be a cold one. At least the diaries you write by candlelight will be fun and interesting reading when alien archaeologists find your skeleton hundreds of years from now! 

You can be a writer without ever writing about writing. But I think its healthy and helpful. My thoughts on why in this weeks writing vlog:

This week’s writing Vlog: A short update on what’s happening next.

On the critique of other writers, and why it helps YOU be a better writer.