Creativity on a Hotel Room Floor

I went to Detroit this weekend to visit my friends and celebrate at their engagement party (congrats again Jessica and Dan), and I realized that I always have a spark of creativity when I'm staying in a hotel room. It didn't take longer than five minutes before I felt that sexy writing bug bite me and my hands begged to hit the keys of my MacBook.

It probably helps that the comic book script I'm currently working on takes place primarily in a hotel, but I've had this feeling when I've traveled other places as well. I also seem to get into a deep reading mood. Three hours were spent in a Barnes and Noble reading books I'd picked up on a whim. I read Demetri Martin's Point Your Face at This and Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's Spiderman: Blue. Both of them moved me deeply in different ways, but the bottom line is that it's something I wouldn't have done in my own town. It's something that I NEED to do more often.

Point Your Face at This was so funny that a girl behind me must have thought I was choking to death as I tried to laugh silently. Martin has a way with cartooning and graphs that can rival any humorous essay on the planet.

Spiderman: Blue might be my favorite story about the web-slinger. By the end of it I was on the verge of tears, and the fact that I saw one of my best friends in her wedding dress (for the first time) and didn't shed a tear is saying something. If you're a comics fan and you've never checked out Loeb and Sale's work, on any character, do yourself a favor and just buy something.

But anyway, back to the strange creativity jolt from traveling.

Maybe to be more productive I just need to stay away from home. The next time I get a big writing assignment I should rent out a hotel room, lock myself inside, and stay the whole weekend while I string words together. The long drive to Detroit also gave me a chance to sort out my thoughts on the main character of my story. At first I thought I had fleshed him out enough, but once you read your own work with a truly objective eye you can always find new things to show about a character, especially in comics.

Hopefully I'll have some sample pages of projects I can show you all in the near future. I'm working on a pitch called Star Spread Panic with Andrew Budnick, which is kind of an homage to the Fantastic Four and cautionary tales about the dangers of science.