Author: Glenn Hauman

Day 4 of #NaGraNoWriMo! Last time, I told you that a full script for comics can look very deceptively like somethings it should never be… and those are plays: both traditional stage plays and screenplays.

Why? Because they simply don’t describe the same things.

The single most important difference between a play script and a comic book script is that a comic story is made up of single frozen moments that express something, most often either an action or an emotion.

Plays don’t do that. Plays describe ongoing action and motion, and comics are not built to do that, as they’re made out of single images. You’re not writing in documentary, you’re writing in newspaper photographs.

Take one of the most famous photographs of all time:

You can’t tell if someone just put on his hat. You can’t even tell if someone is blinking. What you can tell is that each person is doing a specific action, some of which are in reaction to other actions.

That’s the best you can hope for– that each person in the shot gets an action, and that the image expresses something.

David Mack, author of the WWII dark fantasy thriller The Midnight Front, wrote about this for us previously:

When describing a scene in a film/TV script, one can describe continuous actions with great economy. For instance, a line of action in a screenplay might read, “Porter gets up from the table, picks up the phone, and uses it to smash in Resnick’s skull.” The reason this direction works in a screenplay is that it’s a blueprint for a motion picture—emphasis on motion. That one sentence might end up being depicted with a half-dozen different shots edited together in a film, but in the script, one needs to describe only the continuous series of actions.

Comic-book scripts are not blueprints of moving action but instructions from which an artist will render sequences of static images that imply movement by breaking down an action into decisive images across any number of panels.

What that means for the story you’re telling is the one thing you may have hoped you’d never have to deal with as a writer… math.

It’s Day 2 of National Graphic Novel Writing Month– and we haven’t even started writing yet!

Good!

“Good?” I hear you cry. “How can that be good? I see all those novel writers who have started posting their word counts! Some of them are thousands of words ahead of us!”

Big deal. Writing a novel is easier. We have to know things first. Novel writers can just put one word after the other after the other, and keep going until they run out of steam or story. If it runs short, it’s a novella; if it runs long, it’s a trilogy. What if they had to write to an exact length?

I’m not just talking about the length of the novel. I mean writing to the exact length of each page– each page has a maximum 210 words, no more. And every scene has to end at the end of a page. And each chapter has to be exactly 22 pages long. And…

You get the idea. Even when a prose book is heavily reformatted, as with this new tiny book format, the text itself barely changes. With comics, that’s not going to be the case.

That’s why the most important thing to know before you start writing your graphic novel is the format– how your book will end up being initially published. Comics are a very regimented format— so much so that large comic book companies will produce art boards of a specific size for artists to use— and knowing those formats will inform how you create your work.

Take a look at these books.

Notice that every single one of these are a different page size than a “regular” comic book, and as a result, each one of them will have different storytelling challenges. Only so many words will fit on a page, only so many panels, only so much action and detail, and you’ll have to plan accordingly.

Length of the book matters too– is it 22 pages? 48? 120? 300? Are you reading it all at once, or is it spread out over months? Reintroducing your characters and setting in a monthly comic is one thing– it’s been a while between issues for your regular readers, and there’s a chance that this comic is the first issue a new reader may pick up, so it makes sense to introduce them. But if you read them in a collected omnibus format, being reminded every 22 pages or so that his claws cut through steel plate as easily as rice paper gets tired quick.

Similarly, if most people are going to be reading it in a collected format, you’ll have to accept that those 4-page digressions you put in the back of the monthly edition are going to be skipped over by a lot of people when they read it now.

Bear in mind that there are also technical and practical limitations to what you can actually print. If you decide that your graphic novel is going to be, say, 8″ by 9″, you’re going to be hard pressed to find a printer that can produce your books in that size and it’s likely to cost more. And while we’re talking about price, remember that every page you add is going to cost more to print, and unlike prose books you can’t use a smaller typeface to make it fit in fewer pages. In addition, your printer may be able to offer you a discount if your page count is a multiple of 16 or 32…

So that’s your first challenge: what do you think your graphic novel is going to look like? What’s your format?

Yes, we got enough demand from you that we’re doing it again! For the month of November, we’re going to help you learn how to write a graphic novel! Stick with us for 30 days, and we’ll go over just about everything you need to know about writing for the specific requirements of comics!

It is our hope that by the time we’re done, you’re going to be well on your way to being able to show us your work, and be able to guide you to the next steps of creation. We also hope you’ll share these lessons with other folks far and wide.

First: let’s pull out some of the textbooks you’re going to want to read. Your first homework assignment is to get some of these from the library or the store.

We’ll recommend others as we go.

Second, let me tell you what this is NOT going to be.

This is not going to help you create your idea for a graphic novel. We’re starting with the assumption that you already have an idea for a graphic novel, and need help trying to write it.

This is not going to require you to be an artist. While there is a place for the person who can both write and draw, this is intended for the person who is going to be working with a collaborator or two. As such, you’re going to learn the best ways to write in order to make it easy for a collaborator– even it you don’t even know who’s going to draw it.

This is not even going to require you to have any drawing skills. If you can make stick figures, you’re qualified. Yes, you will have to draw stick figures.

This is not going to be genre-specific. Comics contain multitudes– superheroes, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, humor, porn, educational materials, biography and autobiography, on and on and on. We’re not teaching you how to write Batman, we’re teaching you how to write comics.

And finally: This is not going to be a rah-rah confidence builder. There are plenty of places where you can get the types of affirmations to help during long nights staring at your wall, and you should make use of them if they help you– but this is for the nuts and bolts of writing for comics, and the only way to really learn that is to sit down and write them. These lessons are not to help you power through the creation of a comic, giving you “waytogos!” as you hit particular word counts during the month. In fact, there will be no word count goal in your creation process.

Why? Because it’s impossible to quantify how many words are needed to make a graphic novel. It could take 5000 words– or 500,000.

And on that terrifying note… see you tomorrow.