Ch. 1: Do You Still See Me?
You can observe a lot when people forget you're a real human.
This is chapter 1 of 8, that I’m publishing one chapter at a time every Friday. I wrote this first draft of my novel for NaNoWriMo 2022, and I’m sharing it here along with new artwork exploring what it could be like if I turned it into a graphic novel.
You can also listen to me read this chapter aloud while you do other things—just hit play above.
It usually only takes people a few minutes after they meet me to start ignoring me.
It’s not rude of them, really, it’s just how people are. And if I’m being honest, I don’t mind.
I’ve had a lot of introductions this year, and they all go pretty much the same way:
Grandma and I walk up to someone she knows (she knows everyone) and I try to prepare myself. It doesn’t matter that I know what’s coming, this part never gets easier. The person smiles.
“How are ya, Imogen?” They say.
Or something like, “Imogen! It’s been awhile!”
Everyone loves Grandma, and they’re always happy to see her. Then they notice me, and I see the question in their eyebrows. It’s not surprising—I haven’t always been here at her side. It’s new, or relatively new. Until a year ago, I barely knew Grandma, and never visited here. And I know I’m not the spitting image of her or anything (the opposite, really). But this is always the part where I notice my heart beating, where I feel the pressure start—the Need to Speak in Social Situations. The way it sort of chokes, gets stuck in my throat. It’s gotten a bit better over time, but not much.
Grandma puts her hand on my shoulder and says, “This is my granddaughter, June! She lives with me now, and-”
Whoever it is smiles, and says “Oh!”, and sometimes puts their hand out to shake, and tells me their name before Grandma can finish what she is about to say. Sometimes they even make it as far as asking me how old I am—why are adults so obsessed with age?—before she finishes:
“She doesn’t speak, but we don’t let that stop her, do we now, June?” Grandma turns to look at me, every time. I’m not sure she’s actually ever seen the facial expression that always comes the second after–the one where they try to compute my age, and whether I look intellectually disabled or something (which doesn’t even make sense—you can’t see stuff like that, and plenty of people in the world don’t talk, for all kinds of reasons). Then it’s on to the part where they backtrack, sometimes gracefully, sometimes not at all.
“Oh! Right! Of course! Well, then.”
Or “Oh, well, that’s not a problem, is it, June?”
Or “Oh! Well, good for you.” (The not talking part, or the not letting it stop me part?)
I smile and shake their hand if they’ve offered it, and kind of shrug. I can’t really help the shrug. I guess I’m trying to say “It’s okay, I know it’s weird. You don’t have to be embarrassed.”
Then Grandma asks them how their nephew is, or whether their begonias came in this year, or something like that, and because I can’t add to the conversation in a way they’re familiar with, they’ve already forgotten I was there, which suits me just fine.
I prefer to stay unnoticed.
It’s vital, actually, for more reasons than you might think.
But enough about that.
If the introduction doesn’t go down pretty much like that, it’s because they’ve already heard about me, which is far worse… … and happened all the time after I first got here.
It starts about the same, weirdly:
“Oh, Imogen!” Someone waves at her from across the street, already running across toward us—which is pretty safe basically anywhere in town at any time of day, it’s that small and quiet here. “It’s been awhile!”
On the way over, they keep glancing at me, appraising me from afar, and they don’t think either Grandma or I have noticed.
We both have.
We always do.
Sometimes Grandma squeezes my hand as whoever-it-is catches up with us and starts their little routine.
“I haven’t seen you since–Oh!” They stop suddenly, feigning surprise and turning to address me instead. “Hello there!”
They always pause for a second, waiting.
Maybe this time. Maybe they’re special, somehow. Or maybe I’ll have forgotten I wasn’t talking—those are the worst, the ones that think you’re faking it.
I’m not. By the way.
I can’t speak.
I used to, but I can’t now. And I don’t really even want to, most of the time.
You would think that would be enough explanation, but it never is. People always wonder why.
Why is there a strange, hard, unscale-able wall in my head that makes even the idea of talking so painful?
Why can’t I just push through it?
Why does it feel like using my own voice would make me exist—really exist, visibly, tangibly, solidly—in the world in a way I’m not ready to anymore?
Why do I feel unsafe existing? Why do I need to hide in silence in my own life?
Why was I not like this before?
Before.
Before what?
Before what?
But I just don’t like to talk about it.
See what I just did there?
.
.
.
Okay, fine, it’s not that funny.
But I don’t really—like to talk about it, even if it’s writing about it in one of the millions of notebooks I always carry with me, which is one of the ways I communicate when I have to.
That’s where Grandma is always, always there to help me out. She knows how to do it so I mostly don’t even have to. During our awkward introductions, she makes sure to jump in before they say anything else:
“June’s been staying with me ever since we lost her mom last fall, so we’ve been getting lots of time together, huh?”
Just like that. She tackles the question before they even ask it, and answers it anyway so I won’t have to explain myself—for all their curiosity or suspicion or confusion before that, people mostly accept “we lost her mom” as enough, at least for starters—and redirects it right back around to a whole new topic:
“She’s a big help down at the diner,” Grandma says.
Or “She’s been beating me at chess,” or “We’ve hiked all over the mountain by now,” and just like that, Grandma’s danced circles around them so gracefully they never knew what hit them, AND showed them I’m not just an object of pity at the same time. She’s a wonder. I don’t even really know how she knows what to say, or that I need her to—there’s a lot I don’t ever have to try to communicate with her.
Sometimes I think she’s magic.
And really good at talking with people, just in general. She does it all day, almost every day, running the diner—she owns it—and I’m there most days, too, doing homework, or drawing, or helping in the kitchen, or rolling silverware into baby blue paper napkins, or just watching people.
That’s when my unique talent of disappearing into the background comes in really handy. I’m not sure what it is about people, but once they know you can’t communicate back to them in the same way they usually do with everyone else, they sort of gloss over you, and seem to forget you’re still a normal human, too. It’s like you just get to be a fly on the wall—probably especially since I’m a kid, and short for my age. People always think I’m younger than I am.
I’m fourteen, but sometimes I feel ancient–an ancient, silent statue of a kid in the corner.
People don’t expect much from kids, usually.
Or far too much.
I guess it just depends.
People don’t usually expect much from me, after that first introduction. I’ll sit in the corner booth in the diner for hours, snuggled into the worn-soft, mustardy corner booth—the seats are both mustard yellow and covered in mustard spots, usually—just watching and listening to people. It’s much better than having to interact with them, and less scary. I don’t have to fight off that Need-to-Speak pressure, or explain anything. I can just sort of… …not exist. But also still smell the coffee and see the streetlight glow hugging the old mugs and chippy tables, and hear the clinking of silverware and the sizzle of comfort food from the grill.
It’s peaceful that way, in those moments, with no talking. And no trying to talk. And no feeling people wanting me very very badly to talk.
Those are my favorite days lately. The rainy ones, where the leaves are falling and you need a sweater, and when school gets out and all the noise of the bell and the lockers and the other kids and the cars and parents picking them up is fading away, and I walk a few blocks to the diner. On the way I smell Fall in the air, and notice how moss is growing on the bricks in the old buildings, and hear the raindrops plinking on the iron gates and feel the way puddles press in on my rubber boots if they’re deep enough. It’s here I can (usually) forget about things like the school Halloween dance coming up, or the next meeting with my social worker and my therapist, and the never-ending questions on their faces–the ones they don’t usually ask– that want to know:
What happened, exactly?
Will I ever speak again?
Why won’t I talk about her?
Every step I take toward the diner (where I always go right after school) shakes another unspoken question off my back, and I feel lighter.
As I get closer, I can smell the food. Hamburgers, or fried chicken, or biscuits and gravy, and bacon—always the same kinds of food, the same kinds of smells, and it’s comforting. I’m not that far from Grandma’s house, either—my world is very small, and I feel safer that way. Sort of hidden, tucked into these rocky hills, with the river running through it all, and surrounded by people who have lived here their whole lives, with small worlds and stories of their own. You can almost feel them, all their stories—small and rounded like pebbles from the river, clinking softly in your hand. And it’s not bad that they’re small and often the same every day—it’s comforting in its predictable-ness. I know where I stand here, when no one’s around and it’s just me and the rain and the leaves and the bricks. And if I time things right, and stay quiet and out of the way, I can slip right between the cracks of people’s lives and stay there.
At the diner, I ease open the door so the bell only clinks softly as I slip my backpack off and hook my coat onto one of the many pegs on the wall, where other people’s jackets are already hanging. I love that wall of hats and coats and vests—it’s a place everyone can come together, in all their differences, and not have to talk or argue or expect anything from each other. Brightly knitted scarves and shiny leather jackets and worn-out canvas workwear–it’s all happy to be piled on top of each other, friendly-like, especially if it’s very cold or very wet, and I like to think we all leave a bit of the outside world at the door as we hurry in, hoping for a cup of hot cocoa or a stack of pancakes or a slice of Grandma’s amazing pumpkin pie.
Out on “the floor,” (which I’ve learned is diner speak for the dining area), at a booth by the front window, Grandma is taking someone’s order, and laughs in her friendly way. Hank, the main cook, is in the kitchen, humming along to the radio, and the burger he’s grilling is sizzling nicely. There are so many little glowly lights in the diner—the neon sign in the window that says “Breakfast Served All Day,” and the faded Coca Cola sign on the wall that blinks a lot, and the little orange string lights hung up on the ceiling around the kitchen in the back, where the tall swivel stools are. All the stainless steel napkin holders and the fridge and the silverware and the metal table edges reflect the lights back in a sort of faintly Christmassy way that’s impossibly cozy.
All I have to do from here is tiptoe back to my favorite spot—the corner booth on the left—where I can see the kitchen, and the rest of “the floor,” and the door. I can see what’s coming from here—who’s entering the diner, and who’s leaving, and where Grandma is. Here, there are no surprises. And because it’s a small booth in the back, sort of shoved in between the kitchen counter and the corner wall, no one seems to ever want this seat except me.
It’s perfect.
Grandma knows I’m here—somehow she sees everybody come in and out even if she’s in the kitchen, facing away from you, when you arrive—and brings me a cup of cocoa with cinnamon. She never has to ask. She winks and smiles and bustles off to take care of a customer, adjusting her glasses on her nose and pulling out her notepad and one of a few pencils that take up permanent residence in her ponytail as she goes (even though she rarely has to use them).
And I’m in. I’ve made it to the best part of the day, where no one else notices or talks to me. I’ll usually do my homework first, to get it out of the way–but mostly I listen and watch people. I do a lot of that.
Sometimes I’ll tune out of any specific conversations and just listen to the babble of people across the diner. If someone’s telling a really loud story or a group of kids is laughing too raucously, it can be overwhelming, but if you work at it–on not catching it all–you can hear it as one sound, all together, like music.
Other times I’ll listen to one conversation at a time. I know it’s eavesdropping, and I probably shouldn’t do it, but I’m always here, and people always talk, and in a weird way, sometimes, I feel like I’m the only one who can really listen to them—really hear what they’re actually saying above all the other noise.
Because most people don’t say what they actually mean.
They say a lot of everything else, but not that. Not what they really want to say.
But if you really listen—really pay attention to what they say with their body and the spaces between words—you can catch it sometimes.
Last Saturday, Bill and Marge came in for their special weekend-breakfast-at-the-diner that’s supposed to be a date. They do this every week. They live a few blocks away from me and Grandma, in a white house with green shutters that looks exactly like a postcard house should, with a room facing the street that still looks just like a teenager’s room even though their son moved out years ago. And Bill and Marge themselves look exactly like you might expect someone named Bill and someone named Marge to look. They’re not very old, but not young, either, and they look a little deflated–like they got stuck somewhere in time and even though they might be physically bigger than they were back when they knew what they wanted out of life, they’ve somehow shrunk since then. It’s like their clothes and their faces don’t fit quite right anymore, but they forgot how to adjust, and to want anything else that’s different. So they’re just stuck there, a little worn at the edges and always waiting for the phone to ring.
Anyway.
They had a “date,” like always.
They talked, non-stop, about the weather, and their son, and how one of these days he’s just going to meet the right girl and he’ll “figure it out” and settle down like they did, and oh did you remember to water the bushes in the front lawn, and how their neighbor’s new fence is clearly over the property line and this eggs benedict is heavenly as always, Imogen, don’t you think so, Marge, and
words,
words,
words.
The air was filled with words and the smell of ham, and absolutely nothing else.
They never talk about how they feel about each other, or ask each other any real questions about their life, or dream about anything together. Shouldn’t that be what dates are for?
I don’t know. I’ve never been on one. But still.
And Marge.
She sits there shredding her napkin through the whole thing.
Every week.
So much baby blue napkin confetti.
She tries to clean it up, but there are always bits leftover that I sweep into a sad little pile at closing time.
At first I thought she was just a nervous kind of person, but I don’t think that’s all.
Every week, they talk about similar things, and she doesn’t seem… bored, exactly. She says the same things often, too, and laughs at some of the same jokes. She’s not angry that Bill doesn’t say other things… …except.
When they talk about their son, Sean, and the things they want for him, you can see it a little. You can see her picturing something in her head. And maybe it’s what you might think—either Sean holding hands with a “nice girl” and future grandkids pattering up their sidewalk, or even a time long gone where Sean was the one running into her arms—but I’m not so sure. I do think she’s picturing a different time–when maybe her clothes and her life felt like they fit better, straighter, and she felt at home in it. But I don’t think it’s just longing for the past, or wishing for the future.
“And y’ know, one of these days,” Bill says in one way or another every week, “he’ll walk through a door somewhere and see her, and just —BAM! You know? It can happen. He’ll feel it.”
When Bill talks about Sean falling in love, Marge shreds her napkin.
“Oh, yes, absolutely. He will.” Marge nods, “When the time is right. It’s got to be right. I just hope he’s not lonely.” Marge lets out a truncated sigh, like it’s all she’ll allow herself, takes a sip of her coffee, then goes right back to that poor napkin.
Bill nods, and thinks he’s heard her.
She said she hopes Sean isn’t lonely.
That’s what she said.
But what she doesn’t say, I think, is more about her.
What she doesn’t say is how lonely she’s afraid she might be, if Sean’s gone, and if Bill doesn’t answer the question she’ll never ask:
“Am I still wanted? Do you still see me?”
Bill knows to accept a top-off for her if she’s in the bathroom, and what she’ll probably want to order, and he shovels the driveway and probably opens jars and everything. He cares about her, but it’s all ordinary and habit and she wonders if she’s just a habit, too. He’ll never know to answer her question unless she asks it–he’s not paying enough attention to see it himself. And she’s never going to ask it—she’s afraid of the reply, I think, and maybe just wants him to answer her unspoken question without her having to open her mouth.
For him to see her without her having to ask to be seen.
I see all of this, and lots more besides, from this corner booth, with a cocoa ring on the table and my homework spread out around it, but I don’t say anything. Grandma, on the other hand, flutters around topping up coffee and bringing biscuits on the house at random and seeing people in the way Bill doesn’t seem to see Marge while she also actually talks to them.
That’s part of why I love Grandma so much. She’s really good at talking to other people about anything—I’ve seen her maintain a friendly conversation with a man about a particular flavor of jam throughout the course of his entire meal and still make him feel totally seen and heard and cared for by the time he left—but she’s also really good at the not talking part of communicating.
Grandma is a master of seeing people. A lot of the time, people come in here just for food, and sometimes that’s all they need. Sometimes a burger is just a burger. But really most people need to feed more than their stomachs, and sometimes they don’t get fed in other places—they need the safety of this place, and the love in it. Grandma can’t fill every need everyone has, but from the second they walk in the door, she lets them know someone cares. They feel it in the fraying cushions, and the dark wood worn soft by decades of people putting their hands in the same places while they ease themselves into the booths. It’s as obvious and intangible as the smells wafting from the kitchen, and the way Grandma calls everyone “love,” and gives them extra big portions when they don’t ask, and all the little things that somehow remind everyone of home even if they’ve come from totally different backgrounds.
It’s hard to explain how Grandma loves people in this way—it doesn’t sound like much from the outside, but you know it when you feel it. All she does is bring you what you ordered, but she looks at you while she does it—she sees how it makes you feel, and it makes her break into that wonderful slow smile she does that gets really, really big in a way fake smiles can’t. The way she laughs—but not at you—when you take your first bite of something new and it bowls you over, it’s that good.
She says all she’s doing is bringing people food they’re already paying for anyway, but it’s bigger than that. She notices how people are, often more than what they say out loud, and somehow, magically, lets them know she knows, without having to say a word about it. It’s like she hears your heart speak before you say anything—or even before you know it yourself, sometimes. And sometimes she’ll ask how you are twice or even three times, to pull it out of you, but a lot of the time all she has to do is look at you, or wink, or bring you a slice of pie, and you can feel that she’s already seen everything you would ever have wanted to say anyway.
Sometimes Grandma sees you with what she says, but a lot of the time it’s with what she feeds you.
Sometimes food is more than food.
The amazing food doesn’t hurt, of course, but Grandma has a knack for feeding people’s souls, too. It’s like the food is the vehicle for all the love she has for everybody–like she has too much of it and never got a chance to give it away before.
She’s like that with me, too. She knows things. She’ll talk to me, and I’ll write or sign back (I use sign language with Grandma often), but a lot of the time it’s like we can have a whole conversation without all that effort. Some days we’ll barely speak (or write or sign) to each other, but we’ll still have spent all day together, and we haven’t felt alone. With Grandma, you can say so much without all the words.
Grandma brings Marge her favorite kind of pie (pecan) without asking, every week, with a new napkin, and fresh coffee. Marge smiles, and Grandma winks, and even though it’s not the same as Bill saying he sees Marge, or even winking at her, Marge knows. Someone sees her. Someone noticed. And in that moment she’s more than a recording of the same conversations, the same tasks, the same choir practices and the same crock pot meals, all wrapped up in a perm and mom jeans. Marge feels seen, just for a second, or at least less invisible—!!!!!!and she might not know how to put that into words, or even notice it consciously, but I do believe it makes all the weekdays—the ones in between diner dates—better.
Watching Grandma do this kind of quiet superhero work here in the diner, I don’t understand why we didn’t visit her more–why I had only met her a few times before I came to live here. Mom hardly talked about her at all, but I don’t know why, and it makes me feel sort of sick inside, that Mom wasn’t here for this—or that she had this growing up, and left, on purpose. That she wanted to get away.
I’m sort of scared, I think, to know if Grandma used to be the same, or if she was different somehow, back then. Scared to know if things could have been different if Mom had stayed. What if they had?
Would I be here?
Would Mom?
I don’t ask Grandma those kinds of questions.
Grandma doesn’t talk too much about the past. Neither do I.
Sometimes, I think I might see something–some sad pieces of Grandma’s past resurfacing from under all the warm stories and laughter and wide, slow smiles. There’s a whole wall of old photographs next to the coat hooks, where the whole town keeps the candid, everyday parts of its history. All the residents and regulars can point to pictures of themselves from decades and decades ago, sitting in their favorite booths and gathering for town festivals and celebrating the milestones of their lives together over pie and coffee. Grandma’s in a lot of these pictures–her parents bought the diner before she was even my age, and she’s been working here since. I can see some of Grandma’s history here, spelled out in Polaroids and yellowing photos–the day her parents bought the place. Grandma taking orders as a teenager, keeping an extra pencil in her hair just as she does now. Her high school graduation, surrounded by friends–including Grandpa, whose family moved to town when Grandma was ten or eleven.
Grandpa died six years ago, and I didn’t know him very well. I think it makes Grandma sad I didn’t know him—either of them—better before I came here. It makes me sad, too. But there are pictures of him in the diner and all over Grandma’s house, and he’s always smiling. I know he was really funny—so funny he used to make Grandma pee herself while they talked in the evenings sometimes, right there in the middle of the diner kitchen. I know he was kind, and good at chess. I know Grandma misses him a lot, but I think it helps to talk about him—at least I get to know and love him more as she tells me more about him, and that matters. She’s always up to tell me a Grandpa story.
But often, when I find a new photo of Grandma on the diner wall, and ask her about when she was younger, she gets uncharacteristically quiet. For a second, there’s a heavy sadness, before she covers it up with a laugh and a “Oh, who remembers that long ago, anyway?”
Those strange, sad pauses keep me from asking more.
Sometimes I wonder if I should ask Grandma about Mom, too–if it would help Grandma to talk about her, like it sometimes seems to with Grandpa. But I can’t. I hardly say anything–in any way–about Mom. Not if I can help it. But I know Grandma misses her, and it hurts a lot. I see her falling apart sometimes—not on the outside. But in the same way Grandma sees Marge when Marge feels invisible, I see Grandma’s soul hurting. On the outside, she’ll be just sitting on the porch, drinking a cup of coffee, but on the inside I think she’s thinking of Mom, and it looks like her soul’s barely holding together in her invisibly broken, bleeding chest. And I want to reach out, for our shattered souls to comfort each other.
But I push it away.
It’s too big, and hurts too much.
You can feel it, like an actual wound.
Some days it feels like you should be calling, screaming for help. That you desperately need to go to the hospital—like you’ll just bleed out, right there in the middle of class, or walking past the cemetery, if you don’t get to the ER right away.
Or that it’s already too late, and you’re just walking around, as dead as Mom is, yourself.
Sometimes I feel like that.
Like a ghost.
Silent, and lost between the cracks of life, just watching it all happen around me. Mostly–mostly– I don’t mind it. Not exactly. It feels safer this way–to not really exist. But it’s still strange, like a dream you can’t wake up from, and you’re not always sure if it’s a dream or not.
And you know it’s not a dream you really want to be dreaming.
Not if you really had a choice.
I don’t know for sure, but I think Grandma feels that way sometimes, too. Maybe it makes her better at seeing other people. Maybe that’s part of it for me, too: that we know what it’s like not to really feel real, so we see that in other people, too. Maybe we’re all just part of this secret, invisible club of hurting, broken people who can only be seen by each other.
Maybe.
But so much of the time, it feels more like we have to try—to pretend somehow—to fit into the world around us, instead of hiding away in our own little safe one. That the problem is us, not the things we’ve been through.
I look around the diner, and I see other people hurting, too–other souls bleeding out. Sometimes badly, and sometimes they’re just bruised, but everyone hurts somewhere–whether they talk about it or not. Usually not. Because on the outside, they don’t want to show it, or even want to know about their own wounds, let alone yours—especially the people who haven’t been wounded so deeply. It seems like those people, whose wounds don’t go as deep, don’t know that life can hurt anyone so badly.
They seem to think it shouldn’t matter. That we should shrug it all off. Be more positive. Maybe I’m wrong, because no one really says it this way, but from here in my corner, I notice them square their shoulders or scowl a bit or start to give speeches about Life and Success. I see them question the rest of us invisible, bleeding ghost people.
Everyone else can still walk.
Everyone else can still work.
Everyone else can still sleep.
Everyone else can still talk, June. Didn’t you know that?
But I think they only say that—even just with their eyes—because they haven’t looked down to notice their own wounds. If they knew, if they noticed, maybe they would realize how much pain they’re in, too. Maybe they think they have life figured out, but the whole time they’re trailing blood everywhere—and maybe it’s just a little at a time, but eventually, it’s enough. Eventually, it will catch up.
Everyone is hurting somehow.
So we all sit here, getting invisible blood on the checkerboard floor, some of us keeping to ourselves, some of us crying for help, some of us asking questions or making judgements. Ones like:
Well at least X, Y, Z didn’t happen.
How are you still struggling with this? Hasn’t it been long enough?
Everything happens for a reason.
It’s all about perspective.
Here’s what you should do.
And if I slip up, and am in the wrong place in the wrong time, or make too much noise, or draw attention to myself somehow, so that I’m out in the light of the Real World and have to interact with people, sometimes I see the Me-specific questions cross their faces, too:
But she must have been young, right?
And don’t you have a dad?
So where is he now?
Lots of kids lose their moms. Are you sure you can’t talk?
But why?
Why?
Why?
And Grandma can’t stop the worst part from happening, then. The worst, which has already happened in our example introduction, and all the ones before it. It happens every single time–even if they’re the nicest, sweetest, kindest person about learning I don’t speak (and really most people here are kind about it). It doesn’t matter if she tells them so gracefully that Mom died, or if they accept it nicely and move on.
The politeness doesn’t end up mattering.
The worst part isn’t knowing people already know about me, or even that they want to know why I don’t talk.
It’s that every time, no matter how hard I try to shut it out, I have to remember why.
And remember.
And remember.
Like a fist in the face.
And feel it, deep, in that hole in my chest, where I’m always bleeding, where I always feel like I’m about to die.
Where no one can see the wound.
Every time I see the questions in their eyes, or just on the tip of their tongues, even if Grandma gets there first, I still answer in my head—like a gag reflex I can’t do anything about. My brain answers every question with flashbacks and screams and blood and a mountain of fear, like an avalanche, while I smile and hold out my hand to shake.
Here you go.
Here’s your answer.
This is what happened, June. Did you forget?
Did you?
Here it is, June.
Remember?
Here’s why.
Every.
Single.
Time.
Graphic Novel Development: Character Design
This is the first draft of Things Not Said —with a few basic spelling and grammar corrections since I first published each chapter as I finished it on Patreon two years ago. If you want to read more about why I did the very scary thing of sharing the first draft as I wrote it, you can check that out here.
I know it’s a bit rough, and already have some big ideas for what needs to change in the next draft, but as I republish the first draft here on Substack, I’m exploring what it might look like to develop it further as a graphic novel rather than edit it as prose novel.
Each week after the new chapter of prose, I’ll be sharing some artwork and test scenes to help me get a feel for whether this is the right direction. This week, I’m working on colors and visual direction, as well as some basic character design!
I have many other pages of sketches that didn’t make the cut, but here are some I liked the feel of, and developed a bit further. I knew I needed to be able to replicate each design faithfully panel after panel, draw them from every different angle, and be able to express a whole myriad of emotions with features that are still easily recognizeable. There’s so much more to character design work, but I’ve made a start:
JUNE AND IMOGEN:
Graphic Novel Development: Color Palette and Style Exploration
Full disclosure: I’ve never written or illustrated a graphic novel before.
Oh, didn’t I tell you? Yeah. Nope.
And I know it’s tons and TONS—years—of work. I know that I don’t even know what I don’t know about this process, but I’ve done enough illustration work to know that if this is the direction I take with this story, I’ll be drawing like crazy, and drawing the same people and places over and over and over again. And every one of those drawings will need to be done in a reasonably similar style and process so they flow well and don’t look like a random collection of illustrations loosely connected by some words.
So to even begin to attempt a (quite small in comparison) collection of concepts and sketches that I’ll be creating and sharing with you over the next eight weeks, I need to set up some rules.
I need to establish conventions, a kind of visual language, and a regular process by which I create each of those many illustrations.
Here are some ways I’m trying to do that:
COLOR PALETTE & MATERIALS
It’s just a few screenshots, but I like that with a quick glance you can get a feel for my mood board in the gallery above without even opening any photos larger (none of these are mine—all borrowed from Pinterest while I honed the aesthetic I’m going for).
I used the mood board as a starting point for a color palette, but limited and tweaked it to create the color palette shown below.
It took awhile of testing various digital brushes (I know digital will be the way to go at least for now, since I’m most used to that workflow), but I settled on a couple of materials, which I’ll also use throughout the whole project to keep visual continuity:
THE BIG STYLE QUESTION
It’s always a bit of a challenge, but absolutely necessary, to limit yourself as an illustrator. There are a million and one ways you could draw a thing. From colors to materials or whether you draw all the lines first and color it in, or use color blobs for all the shapes, or include shading or not…
It gets complicated quickly.
Here are a few rough tests I did with one of my character design sketches, just to take a quick whack at different approaches I can pursue:
After a day of that, I felt pretty lost. These look like old Gracie drawings, and they’re not right for this. This is often the place I get stuck in if I’m too in my head. I think I was thinking too big—about all the possible ways I could approach this—as well as forgetting that it doesn’t have to look like what other people think a graphic novel should (looking at you, inked Imogen).
Then I remembered this piece.
This is a creation of mine I really like, where I pushed myself stylistically:
Don’t worry, I know I can’t make every single panel in a graphic novel as complex as this example, so I’ll need to experiment with simplifying it, but I’ve always felt this piece burst out of somewhere deep in me, that I want to explore further. What I was trying to capture about trauma and dissociation and flashbacks here is incredibly applicable to Things Not Said, and if I can latch onto some specific bits of visual language from this piece, I can see if I can replicate them, simplified.
To start, I made a list:
Heavy black gouache
Mixture of block color and linework
Limited color palette
Tons of texture
Aged newsprint background
NOT STANDARD REPRESENTATIONAL
I yelled at myself a bit with that last one, for emphasis—I’ve always struggled with stylization, and I honestly sometimes wonder if this is an Autism thing. As an illustrator, I have a hard time letting myself depict things in a non-representational (read: true-to-life-as-you-can-see-it) way. I often catch myself thinking But it doesn’t look exactly like this, so people will be angry I wasn’t honest, which is, of course, ridiculous.
Especially because my deeply-ingrained calling of being honest isn’t about factual exactitude—it’s about feeling.
It is my personal purpose as a storyteller to capture how things feel, and to do that well, you have to seriously bend the “rules.” (I’ll spare you from an infodump on the principles of Animation and the horrors of MoCap here, but hopefully you get the point.)
So let’s start over with a moment from chapter one (so there are no spoilers) that has more emotional resonance, and try it using some of these elements.
Whoops.
What started as a sketch turned into a full blown spread:
I love how the sparking, catching fire imagery really took on a life of its own here as a way to show what June feels catching up with her, and I’m excited to use that more as a visual storytelling technique throughout this story! Turns out, if I just show up and start, even if I don’t know what exactly is happening, good things usually unfold.
What do you think? Does this feel like Things Not Said? I’m feeling really good about exploring more in this direction!
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Damn I proud to know you (even if it’s only via screens). I’ve always loved the way your brain makes a story. The fact that you’re putting this out there is fantastic.
Dear Gracie, thank you so much for sharing your wonderful writing and illustrations with us. I can't begin to imagine how much effort you've put just into this single post (the option of listening to the chapter is such a unique idea). Your attention to detail is fascinating. Kindness shines through all of your work. I am so excited to read the next chapter, I love it :)