The Writing Process
I’ve had a few people ask me about the writing process for a comic, so I thought I’d write down the two methods I’ve used to hopefully give aspiring authors a small roadmap.
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But before I continue, I’ll give a brief progress update on Ollie Max vl 2. It’s still happening! I’m making slow but steady progress. Pages are looking really good and I’m so excited to share it with the world. I did a cool double page spread a few weeks ago that I’d like you to see. I wanted to do a “where’s waldo” style image with things happening all over the place. I really like how it turned out.
After my wife gives birth to our daughter, I’ll have to take a short break to help out, but then my schedule will open up and progress should ramp up pretty significantly. I’ll be sending anyone who’s subscribed to my email list the first two chapters soon, so sign up for that if you’re not already. Believe me when I say no one is more upset with how long this project is taking than me, but I’ll keep working hard to get it done! THANK YOU for your patience :)
about writing
I’ve used two methods for writing a comic story before.
Bullet point beat sheet
Notecards to script
I used method 1 for Domino. I wrote the story loosly with lots of beats to hit (ie: Domino shows up in town, Domino tries to get info but is attacked, they meet Toho, etc…) and immediately went to translate that to comic pages. Essentially writing the dialogue and fleshing out the story through the thumbnail phase. This method works well but it takes a lot of thinking when thumbnailing the pages.
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I’m using method (2) for Ollie Max. I started by brainstorming lots of ideas on paper until I got something I liked. The goal of brainstorming wasn't to make a finished story, more to get all the bad ideas out of the way and keep playing with "what if" questions until I started getting something I liked.
After that, I used notecards and started plotting out the main beats of the story, then filled in the gaps with more notecards. It ended up looking like this:
Each color represents a diferent act of the story following a 4 act structure. The goal is that each scene in the different acts mesh well with the mood/goal of that specific act. I used a mix of the story circle by Dan Harmen and a book by Larry Brooks called “Story Engineering.” There’s a million different advice books and youtube videos on writing though, so I think it’s more important to just try out a method and see if it looks good to you.
Here’s the story sheet that I have printed out and used for writing out the story.
After I had all the scenes planned out, I translated them into a movie script that I could use for my thumbnailing. If you have all your ducks in a row, writing the script actually becomes the fastest part of the process!
I sent this script off to Jennifer M Baldwin, who was an editor I found online who read through my story and offered some advice on ways I could improve it. She’s credited on the book’s cover because of this. Although it’s a small part of the process, I’m thankful to have had another set of eyes look over the work before diving into it for the next few years of my life.
Moving Forward
Well, that was a lot! And also a little, I realize. Writing is intense and there’s a lot of ways you can go about it. In the future, I don’t think I’ll use a script, but I might. It didn’t really offer me the benefit I was hoping for in terms of ease of thumbnailing, but it is very helpful to be able to read the whole story in an easy format. For my next work, I think I’ll just use notecards and move straight into thumbnailing for there. Basically a more structured version of what I did with Domino. Who knows.
If you have any comments/questions, I’ll make sure to respond!
Thanks,
Adam
