

PROJECT CANVAS DC COMICS DRIVER
You will deviate from the outline during the writing process.Įvery long road-trip needs a map so the driver doesn’t get lost along the way. Even scenes within stories have three acts.Īt least the good ones do. You can apply three-act structure to an animated short, a trilogy of novels or an entire season of television. Three-act structure is versatile because it is flexible enough to scale to fit the length of whatever story you are writing. There are a bajillion books about three-act story structure but we recommend Save The Cat by Blake Snyder as a great, practical way to get started. Regardless of whether you’re writing an individual issue of an ongoing, serialized comic like Spider-Man, a stand-alone graphic novel, or a five-volume series, we recommend that you use a traditional three-act structure. Keep the characters in motion emotionally and you’ll keep your readers engaged.īe sure to include the timing of vital set-ups and pay-offs for both plot and character. We recommend creating an emotion-graph for each character: An Emotion Graph can help you chart where your characters are, emotionally, at each point in the story. The most important parts of your outline are the arcs for your main and secondary characters. To learn more about this, listen to Lora and I talk about The Ocean and Story Structure. So if you are sure that you have a cast of compelling characters, a brilliant, surprising idea and a solid plan for the story you want to tell, read on…ĭo not start writing a script for your comic without a rock-solid outline.Ī rock-solid outline includes a clear plan for the beginning, middle and end of your story.

Our regular readers won’t be surprised to hear us say that there is no point in starting a comic script unless you have addressed these 5 things. Then we’ll share our own crazy approaches to give you an idea of how flexible this process can be.Īnd to show you what this looks like, we ( Lora and Chris) provided samples of our comic scripts via the links below. We’ll begin with a pseudo-standard approach to comic book script writing. Working with separate members of a team requires a tighter, more standardized approach if the writer’s intent is to be fully realized by the artists. After all, you are the only one who ever has to use it. Though comic writers who work for the big publishers typically format their comic book scripts similarly to screenplays, there is still no official industry standard.Īnd if you write your own independent comics-either webcomics or print-you have even more freedom with your script’s format.
PROJECT CANVAS DC COMICS HOW TO
A plethora of resources both online and offline will teach you exactly how to write a screenplay but good luck trying to learn how to write a comic book script.
