Work in Progress

I've been scripting my graphic novel, The Package, and I thought it might be interesting to provide a look at my comic book writing process, which I suspect is a little more circuitous than the process of a more seasoned comics writer.

Generally, no matter what it is I'm writing, I start with extensive notes in a notebook or on a legal pad. Every project, though, takes a life of its own, and when I was outlining this one, it went almost directly into the computer. But when I started scripting, back to the legal pad I went:

The big difference between scripting for animation and for comic books is that in comics, you're not just describing action, but instead a specific moment of action, because that's what you get in a single panel. I use the legal pad to rough out my dialogue, and to start thinking about what moments I want to see in each panel. It's also at this stage that I start thinkng about how those panels might flow, and how many I might want to use per page. However, since I'm not an artist, this is the part I find most difficult. So I've come up with a solution...

...a thumbnail sheet. I've decided for this story to plan out each page on a six-panel, three-tiered page. For the most part, I feel like I can get across everything I want to get across in six panels or less per page. I also think this keeps me from crowding the page with too much action or dialogue, and gives the artist for this project, Alexis Ziritt, enough room to work. You'll notice, though, that I'm not actually drawing crude stick-figures on the thumbnail pages - instead, I'm filling in each panel with description and dialogue, which gets revised from the legal pad stage as I go. This is the only way I've figured out (so far) how to make sure that I've got the pacing of the story and its moments to my liking. (I also think this is where my process gets a little unusual, but I could be wrong about that.) Once I'm done scribbling words in those little panels, I move on to the actual scripting:


Dialogue gets a final tweaking here, as do panel descriptions and pacing. But so far, not too much. Even though I'm typing the script for the first time, it's really almost a third draft. Works for me.

-EB


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone