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Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Comics Writing Fundamentals
An interesting aspect of the comics world: So many people who read comics want to write, draw or edit them, or, failing that write about them. I can think of no other entertainment industry that attracts the desire to be part of it like comics. This is a good thing since comics readers make up a relatively small percentage of the general population. If the people who read comics didn't want to make them or write about them, the industry would get no new blood unless we started converting people, perhaps going door to door with pamphlets, like Jehovah's Witnesses.
The comic book writing workshop I hosted on April 14th with Landry Walker (writer and co-creator of The Super-Scary Monster Show and Kid Gravity and co-writer of Tron) and Alternative Press Expo (APE) that took place this past weekend made it clear that, no matter what the state of the industry, no matter how jaded those of us who work in it get, there still are people who want to make comics. We're hoping to encourage that at SLG Publishing, and the workshop I hosted was the first push of what we hope to be a greater effort in months to come.
Because of the workshop, APE, and a local comic book expo for teens I'm attending tomorrow, April has been a packed month for me, so I hope nobody will mind if I use my notes for the "lecture" portion of the workshop as this month's column. I used Graphic Storytelling by Will Eisner and Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud as my texts, and I reference them in the notes.
The Basics of Story Structure:
I. Set-Up
Main Character (Who is the story about?)
Dramatic Premise (What is the story about?)
Situation (What is going now?)
„³Inciting incident: Main character is faced with problem and chooses to confront it.
*What kinds of problems will impel a story?
II. Development
Obstacles to solution
Near-solution
Failure -- character at lowest point
New Direction
III. Resolution
Confrontation, Climax -- Character's final confrontation of problem, succeeds or fails.
Denouement - situation is the same as or better than at beginning of story.
Types of Stories and Art
From Will Eisner:
1. Plotless (Action)
Reliance on simple good guy fights bad guy story, action and special effects.
"The artist requires from the writer little more than a plot that centers on a single problem, as in plots that center on pursuit or acts of vengeance. Most often, the solution is so uncomplicated, violent action and special effect art must sustain interest. The art becomes the story, as in tapestries."
2. Slice of Life (Realism
Reliance on emotional conflict, subtlety of expression in art.
"The storyteller selects an event of interest which can stand alone. The writer counts on the life experience or the imagination of the reader to supply the impact of the story. The reader's appreciation hinges on the telling of it. It requires that the artist portrays believable acting. Since characters are dealing with internal emotions, subtle postures and gestures must be true-to-life, instantly recognizable."
There are of course many other kinds of stories and genres, but generally the type of story you will write should fall between these two ends of a spectrum. If you were writing a short story, you could choose whatever genre or milieu you wanted and just depend on your own talents to make it good. But when writing a comics script, you have to keep in mind that this is a collaborative effort, so you have to ask yourself the first of some important questions:
Who is my artist?
In what style does your artist excel at drawing? What are his or her weaknesses? Artists like to be challenged as much as anyone else, but if you write something that that does not fit into their style or sensibility, you are taking the chance that your comic's quality will suffer.
This is a pitfall of writing a comics script without an artist in mind. I believe that the best comics, if they are not written and drawn by the same person, are a collaborative effort. Consider the comic book Paris. It was written by Andi Watson, a fine artist in his own right. However, he wanted to work with Simon Gane, an artist whom he admires, and so he wrote Paris specifically to suit Simon:
"Simon had a shopping list of stuff he wanted to draw -- a bo-ho artist girl, sozzled art tutor, two girls falling in love, Paris, a jealous male student," Andi says. "I took that, added the Deborah character and created a drama and love story out of it." (From the press release for Paris)
Andi's contribution, as he says, is to create the story. I see this kind of interaction all the time with writers and artists. Serena Valentino, writer of GloomCookie and , writes stories that she hopes her artists will love to draw. You can see this process with the early issues of Nightmares and Fairy Tales, which she co-created with artist FSc. The first two issues are much more in the vein of GloomCookie, a sort of dark romance soap opera, but as she got to know FSc's talents as an artist better, she began writing more whimsical, odd stories. Issue four, the "Snow White" issue, is the pinnacle of this, I think. She wrote a script in which FSc can shine.
That's the burden of the comics writer. The art will always be what people see first. It's unfair to some extent, but that is the nature of the medium. And if you are a good comics writer, you will work within the limitations of the medium and write stories that seem as if they couldn't have been done in any other form.
And that brings us to the next question:
Is this story appropriate for the comics medium?
There are some things that even the best artist can't depict in the comics medium. If you're accustomed to writing prose, you might ask your artist to be able to draw more detail into a few static panels than is possible. Will Eisner discusses this on pages 113-115 of Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative.
Think about how you would like words and image to interact in your comic. Ideally, the images in the panels of a comic act as paragraphs of description in prose do. However, comics require economy: each panel can depict only one action at a time, one expression at a time (with certain stylistic exceptions that are most suitable to comedic cartooning). If you want to add to that image, you may do so in dialogue or in narrative, but if you find yourself over-reliant on those, it could be that you want to convey more detail, interior dialogue or motivations than is possible in the medium. Scot McCloud discusses this on pages 152-161 of Understanding Comics.
Comics writers should read McCloud's book, though it may seem as if it focuses mostly on the art side of comics. But we should avoid thinking about writing vs. art. In comics, it's all one. To write comics as a non-artist, you need to learn to think like an artist. (Don't worry; no one is expecting you to draw.) When you write, always keep in mind how it will look in sequential format. Sketch thumbnails of pages if you can. Remember that your artist will have to fit in all the dialogue and narrative that you write.
If you get really good at this, you can consider writing scripts with directions to the artist about camera angle and panel size. If you're not really good at it and you write scripts like this anyway, your artist might get annoyed with you. So it's best to keep in mind some principles, not only about not asking your artist to put too much on a page, but about how time and space works in comics.
Scott McCloud discusses this on pages 100-103 of Understanding Comics.
When your prose style does matter.
Most of this has referred to the behind-the-panels aspect of writing comics, but While you do have to think about writing a story that lets the art shine, keep in mind that badly written narrative or dialogue can make all that work you did dismiss you out-of-hand. "The art was great," they might say, "but the writing was bad." By writing, most people mean, when they're talking about comics, are the words, which are in the panels for everyone to read.
The best course to take when writing dialogue and narrative is to read it aloud and to be honest. If it sounds over the top, stiff, unnatural, or overly flowery to you, that effect is going to be amplified when others read it. What's natural will vary depending on what kind of story you're telling, of course.
Some specific pitfalls in narrative and dialogue:
Redundant Narration. This is narrative that tells the reader what the art already shows them. This was common in comics books published in the '50s and '60s, but now it seems stilted and it interrupts the flow of the visual narrative.
"As you know, Bob," Dialogue. I once gave up on a comic by a certain famous comic book writer who will go unnamed because the characters constantly talked about their shared past, though both of them were aware of the facts they were relating and there was no reason for them to talk about it.
At that time, I was working with SLG's former publisher Bob Simpkins, and I started talking to him like that to illustrate how unnatural this kind of dialogue is: "You know, Bob, I've been working at SLG for two years now--at SLG where we publish comics. You've been working here for a lot longer, though, even before you went to Wisconsin to get your master's degree in anthropology." This, of course, struck him as odd and unnatural. Your dialogue should not be odd and unnatural for exposition's sake.
Explicatory Monologues. It's difficult to convey what your character is thinking or feeling without this kind of dialogue (sometimes shown as interior dialogue, in thought balloons), so to a certain degree having your characters talk to themselves is unavoidable. And most of us talk to ourselves in real life, though rarely in strings of coherent sentences. In the comics medium, readers have come to accept monologues, as they have in theater. However, take care not to overdo it, unless you're doing it for comedic effect, as in Rex Libris.
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The workshop was a great experience, and I hope to be able to do another with more time for peer critique sessions. If you're interested in being updated on another workshop, please email me at slgchief@slgpubs.com.
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
