What's your approach to starting/fleshing out a script?

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Chaz

Hey all, I will start off by stating am new to comicbook writing. I am a comic penciller first and foremost (I have a degree in comic art FWIW). So writing is an entirely new world to me. I have taken a creative writing class which has helped open the realm to me and am eager to move forward from there. However I find it impossible to find any comic book writing workshops in and around NYC.

That being said, I have been working on a saga of sorts. It's been in the works for about half a year. I've written bios for the characters, their abilties/powers, origins of sorts. It is in its first revision but I would like to start to develop the saga scene by scene. I am having difficulties with the approach, do I do it via flashback? Do I set the story back decades? Or do I start out with a current situation and weave the origin into the arc?

Any tips, resources or advice would be greatly appreciated.
 

sunandshadow

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Well it really helps if you know how you want it to end. If you know the end you can write a brief outline of how it gets to the end, and that should tell you where it needs to start to get to that ending.
 

Dancre

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Hey all, I will start off by stating am new to comicbook writing. I am a comic penciller first and foremost (I have a degree in comic art FWIW). So writing is an entirely new world to me. I have taken a creative writing class which has helped open the realm to me and am eager to move forward from there. However I find it impossible to find any comic book writing workshops in and around NYC.

That being said, I have been working on a saga of sorts. It's been in the works for about half a year. I've written bios for the characters, their abilties/powers, origins of sorts. It is in its first revision but I would like to start to develop the saga scene by scene. I am having difficulties with the approach, do I do it via flashback? Do I set the story back decades? Or do I start out with a current situation and weave the origin into the arc?

Any tips, resources or advice would be greatly appreciated.

I'm suggest you build a writing foundation first, then worry about the script. You use the same rules to novel writing as you do the script. I suggest you start in Learning to write with Uncle Jim thread: http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6710

It's very long, but very informative. If you don't know the basic foundations of writing i.e. dialogue, foreshadowing, actions scenes, etc. then your story will look like something that belongs on the web only. As for what you should do? Whatever works for you. AS Uncle Jim says, make it work. If it doesn't seem right, then move onto something else. Without reading the script there's really no way we can tell you want to do. But read Uncle Jim's thread. It WILL help you.

But only you can make that decision. But as I said, worry about your foundational work first, then the script later.
 

Chaz

I really appreciate the feedback, I am going to check the thread now.
 

AzBobby

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It is in its first revision but I would like to start to develop the saga scene by scene. I am having difficulties with the approach, do I do it via flashback? Do I set the story back decades? Or do I start out with a current situation and weave the origin into the arc?

You're mentioning common approaches that would work variously depending on the content. In the face of several stories woven together to make a "saga" I'd ask myself which of them sounded like the best one to me, plain and simple -- the one I could picture all the scenes for, the one that would carry the action and provide a final point for all or most of those other background developments. Now if the background stories appeared first in chronological order, would we care more about what happened later? Or would those background elements only play like info dump before the real story begins?

If they are relatively short action scenes tied directly to the plot -- something along the lines of Bruce Wayne watching his parents get murdered in his childhood before flashing forward to him wanting to chase criminals as an adult -- chronological order won't hurt a thing, and can help the reader care about the character before the main events come along.

For most purposes weaving origins into the arc of your main story sounds best, to be honest, but that's just my bias. This is assuming that your most interesting story to tell combines the strengths of your characters and their backgrounds, and draws upon the background stories in ways that radiate from one or a few pivotal story points in your "present" rather than making their thematic links as clearly if they were in chronological order. Read Watchmen by Alan Moore for a good example of weaving complex histories of superheroes into a story that mainly takes place at the end of their shared saga.
 
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Chaz

well guys n gals......

I immediately went out and purchased Watchmen and thus far it lives up to the hype big time. I find myself really engrossed in it. One thing I notice (correct me if I am wrong) that this books pace seems significantly slower and more deliberate than what one might find in a monthly comic. I would assume that a graphic novel can afford to do so and flesh out the backstory of its character(s) more thoroughly. I feel the storytelling in conjunction with the captions are especially clever and well done. Another aspect of the book that is standing out to me are the panel layouts, they're almost all identical with the 3x3x3 formate dominating a majority of the books layout. It works, Ive always felt dynamic panel layout can work but IMO the images within the panels (combined with the story) were more of a conern for me.

That being said I'm almost 100% sure now that I'd like to pursue the Graphic Novel route for my project. Which at this point is all ideas and such but I think that might be a good starting point. Now.....I have to figure out how to approach writing the sucker:Headbang:
 

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Yes graphic novels definitely have a slower pace than monthly comics - think about it, any unit of fiction generally has one plot arc that lasts the length of that unit, to keep the reader in suspense until they run out of pages and then satisfy them with a dramatic ending. A monthly comic is more like a short story, where there's no room for anything nonessential to the plot, while a graphic novel is more like a play with more room for character development, worldbuilding, etc.

I've done 3 graphic novel proposals so far. These are for manga-style graphic novels which means 3-7 panels per page and 100-160 pages. For two of them I ended up with the following structure: prologue, 9 scenes, epilogue. Those scenes could be further classified into a 3-act or 5-act play structure if desired.
 
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AzBobby

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I believe Watchmen, like most of the popular graphic novels, is really a compilation of what was originally printed in many parts. I forget how many monthly mags comprised Watchmen originally -- maybe ten? To judge its pacing as originally experienced, take note of its division of parts and try to imagine one of them as a single thin comic book. I agree that it's a bit slow and talky as these things go -- downright soap opera sometimes -- but luckily the characters and wit of the storytelling can sustain that pace.

Crazy-shaped frames are fine once in a while to serve very special purposes (where a jolt or distraction might belong at a given point), but my eyes and imagination definitely flow more comfortably over boring frame layouts like you see most often in the example you cite. To me, it's all about immersing the reader, not impressing them.
 
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