In the mood for satirical scifi? Check out Adam Wilson’s What About Tuesday? , a novella published by Read Furiously.
1. Your bio describes you as ‘A former comic editor.’ How do you utilize that background in your current writings?
As an editor, you really get a window into other people’s creative process that most don’t get, and I think getting to see how other people write really taught me a lot about the writer I want to be. I got to see how a lot of different writers approach their scripts. How they have to think both visually and narratively to help establish the flow of their pages and pacing of the panels, what they make explicit in the scripts to the artists vs where they leave open to interpretation, and how all these layers that exist under the surface of the story come together to help shape the final product.
Seeing all that play out in real time is such a great lesson in understanding what’s possible in comics. All that really made me conscious of how I’m using the medium to tell stories. I started to see what kind of rules are there, which ones can be broken, and how you can push the boundaries and still create something that’s accessible and enjoyable to readers.
And more than that, it made me cognizant of the stories I wanted to write. I’ve worked with all different types of creators and some of them are so passionate and excited about the stories they want to tell. It really puts it into perspective and it makes you want to find stories that bring you the same kind of excitement.
2. Where did the inspiration for What About Tuesday come from?
The inspiration for What About Tuesday is funny because it’s actually twofold. My initial inspiration came from this period where I was really into reading about quantum physics a few years back. Just the lengths that science is going to understand the nature of the universe and matter and how all these seemingly different things are all so connected and play by such similar rules.
But as I was doing all this reading it also just struck me that, as interesting as it is, it doesn’t really impact most people’s lives on a day to day basis. Like were scientists to suddenly discover the missing piece of the equation that unifies everything from String Theory to Quantum Physics to proving existence of dark matter in the universe, wormholes and black holes, it’d be a huge discovery that would change the way we understand existence as we know it. But the vast majority of people would still just go about their day as if nothing changed. Cause nothing really would change, it wouldn’t impact every day life much. And I loved that idea. Something so significant is really completely insignificant.
So I wanted to play with that idea. And ironically enough, I chose time as a way to examine it.
What would happen if time wasn’t what we thought it was and it’s not this steadily ticking thing we assume it is (cause from a scientific perspective it’s not). How would that change someone’s life who suddenly became aware of it. Would it change it at all?
And it turns out using time in this was had a hidden significance I didn’t realize till even after What About Tuesday was published.
See, in the book the main character suddenly becomes aware of these temporal anomalies where because time isn’t this consistent thing but we try to measure it with a static unit (days, hours, minutes, etc.), units of measurement go missing to right itself. Kind of the same way that our understanding of the continents is based on a map, but the map distorts their shape due to the fact you can’t accurately put a round object on a flat surface. In this case though, time will suddenly jumps from 2:00 to 3:00 or as the main character discovers, he wakes up and though no one notices it an entire Tuesday didn’t happen.
So through the story the main character has to reconcile the fact that knowing this makes it feel like he’s missing out on moments of his life. Fast forward a few years later and my therapist had just diagnoses me with ADHD. As we start unpacking why this makes it so hard for me to get things done sometimes, she starts explaining to me the concept of time blindness, where people with ADHD have trouble regulating their internal clocks and there are all these factors that can make it can feel like you’re losing hours out of a day.
So in a roundabout way, the book I wrote about a science-y thing I was interested in ended up also being about a symptom of my undiagnosed neuro-divergency without me even realizing it.
3. What do you enjoy most about writing?
I really love the ah-ha moments that come with writing. The ones where you’re juggling all these different pieces of a story and suddenly everything just clicks and makes sense. Those times when, even if you’re not done writing, you finally see the whole picture for the first time.
Working as a comic writer especially, the collaboration with an artist really adds a whole extra layers to those moments – getting to see the ideas that only existed in your head suddenly appear on the page changes your relationship to the story. It makes it real all of a sudden.
And sometimes the artist will interpret the script in a way that you completely didn’t anticipate and seeing their art on the page suddenly changes your perspective on something you’ve written. It creates this whole other type of ah-ha moment and can really bring the story you’re trying to tell to a whole other level. There have been a few instances where I rewrote dialog or changed scenes around just cause of these amazing reinterpretations of the script artists have sent me as we were working together.
4. What can we expect from you in the future? More graphic novels? Novellas?
So my next big project is a new graphic novel called Last of the Pops. It’s a book I’ve been working on for about the past seven years. It tells six different, loosely connected, stories that all revolve around the final ever radio broadcast. The book is very different from anything I’ve done previously, but I’m really excited about it. I pull in all these different interests I’ve had over the years – everything from music to technology to street art. And I really tried to play with form, utilizing not only sequential storytelling but also epistolary storytelling. It’s a big swing, but I’m hoping it’ll pay off and people will enjoy it.
Musings of an Author 