I say this a lot, but audiences are important. If you’re putting something out into the world, and don’t have a sense of who would care about it, it might be because no one will. But “people like me” is a valid answer. “People like me at age 10” is an even better one. People…
Writing a comic script is an extremely regimented process. You’re often working within an extremely tight format that leaves little room for error. John Ostrander explained it for us a while back: First number: the number of pages. Right now, your monthly comic book is 22 pages long. Let’s say you’ve been asked to do…
Day 3 of #NaGraNoWriMo. Now that you’ve decided the format your graphic novel is going to take, you have to decide how you’re going to write it. For that, we have to discuss the two major schools of comics writing: Plot First vs. Full Script. Plot First is occasionally known as “Marvel method” because Stan…
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…
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…
Your graphic novel writing exercise for the day: Take a tracking shot from a movie or TV show– one long, unbroken take that runs for a minute or more. If nothing immediately comes to mind, we’re going to take the opening from the last James Bond film, Spectre: Your mission, 007: select the single…
Scènes à faire. Ever heard of it? It’s an interesting concept that writers and artists encounter when they work, although they may not know what it’s called. It’s French for “scene to be made” or “scene that must be done”. In practical terms, it refers to a scene in a creative work that’s pretty much…
A sad fact of a writer’s life is writer’s block. That’s when you sit down and look at the blank page or the empty screen and go “I’ve got nothin’.” Some form of that can happen every time you start to write. The really bad version can go on for a long time, maybe for…
When doing my writing lectures/classes, near the start I always ask who in the class would consider themselves to be storytellers. A few raise their hands and then I tell everyone to raise their hands. We’re all storytellers. We all use story in our daily lives. They’re the atoms of our social interactions. The example…
My Mary will sometimes pop into the office to chat a bit. If I’m just goofing off (a lot of my work day consists of goofing off), that’s fine but if I’m actually working she has to leave. She understands and doesn’t take offense; she can get the same way when she’s creating. I don’t…
So you had a story idea and you’ve worked it up into a plot. The characters are defined, you know who is doing what, the twists and turns and even the theme. Now you have to put words into everyone’s mouths or, more precisely, into their word balloons. For some would-be writers, that’s where the…
I have a technique I use when I’m plotting my stories. I take the idea, an event, and then I extrapolate. I figure out what might reasonably follow given this event. Lots of things are possible; few are probable. I try to stick to what’s reasonably possible. I also use inference; I figure backwards from…
