I tried with a comic but it just ended up taking too long. So I ended up going the novel route instead. Has anyone else done this? Did it work out for you all?
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Feb '17last reply
Mar '17- 26
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I thought of it yes, I was going very far, adding a lot of details on a story and I thought, no way I will make this into a comic it will take forever I will have to draw for ten years let's make a novel instead.
But ...
I am a visual storyteller ( or I think I am ) and in the end I reduced my story to the essentials and came back to a comic project lol on of a more reasonable size.
I did the opposite. I was writing a novel, but put that aside to start on a comic (albeit they are two different stories). I just really enjoy drawing more than writing, I suppose.
The opposite actually happened with me, I tried writing straight, novel-style prose stories for a few years, but I was never satisfied with them. I could never describe things in my stories so that they captured the way the scenes looked in my head. Soon enough, I realized I'm better with visuals than words, and should probably be drawing my stories instead of writing them. : P
I did the opposite.
I was writing a series of novels and decided to turn them into comics.
I'm not good at life choices.
That's hilarious, just like @nessiefynn and @kurapikasuki, I did the opposite as well. I finished the novels but I'd always been drawing out scenes and particular sequences so it just made sense to translate it into comic form (plus it's a series and set of characters I'm endlessly fascinated with, definitely a bonus).
Now, I have started a comic that doesn't have a nice, neat novel base for it that I'm considering doing now. I don't want to give up making the comic but I certainly hope to organise it as a novel soon.
I kinda thought my story as a book first but I was completely incapable of writing it (it had to be in English for scenario reasons, and I'm French soooo...)
Then I thought my English was good enough for basic dialogues and decided to make a comic out of it, even though it's probably way too long...
But I hope I'll find another story for a novel one day... one I can write in french !
I wrote a few (unpublished) novels and for me they've taken a long time to write. My last one, I spent a full year writing it and now I'm letting it sit so I can forget about it and the come back to it and edit it later (It's almost time). But anyways I just started making comics and at first I didn't know how it was going to go because I've never made one before but now I feel like I a little bit used to it. It does take time, but I think creating in itself in any medium is tough and takes time and effort to make. Novel writing has worked for me, it's fun to do as well and so far comic book making is fun as well.
So if you switch from comics to novels or novels to comics or do both, it's all good. It all depends on how you want to express your creation.
I have no sense of grammar or structure so nope. Thought about it, most i'll do is write screenplays/scripts since it doesn't require the same amount of stress.
I used to write novels, and then a feature film script, but because i use non human characters such as fauns, selkies and anthros, it can be really cumbersome to describe them in novels. However, some ideas i've had simply aren't viable for comics in the way i write Laid in Lavender, so i'm toying with the idea of a novel, light novel or VN for certain things in the future.
I'm working on a dark fantasy novel right now (oh hey look free chapters4) because I decided it'd be too epic a length to make a comic...though the urge to comickize it is still VERY strong within me, I might eventually make short comics based on it. XP
...but seriously if I tried to make the whole thing a comic, I'm pretty sure I'd die of old age before I could finish it. XD
I've fluctuated between writing stories and doing comics(not at the same time though). Between 2010 & 2013 I used to do a lot of writing...then I got interested in comics again and dropped the writing.
I attempted to do that once for an older project years ago. I knew my artistic skills were not up to the task of doing what I wanted with this particular idea and ended up writing stories around it instead. Even somehow got a publisher to look at it, but that's as far as it good as I got quickly dissuaded from doing this due to another person I knew online getting her work published, only to see her and her family (they helped her finance things) fall into debt instead of actually earning anything big.
Sure the publisher got her tours and reviews and all that stuff, but if no one is buying the book it can really hurt.
I'm much more of a writer so I took the opposed road too. I wrote a lot of novels, some published, some not, but feel blocked every time I want to do something longer.
So I choose to turn my roman projects into comics. But since I'm a very slow learner in drawing and have too much projects anyways, I'll probably just returns to the roman format for some of them.
(On a side note, learning comic scripting helped me to better plan my stories. I didn't know the middle and end of most of my novels until I had written it and, if it works (more or less) for this format, I quiclkly got burried in plot holes on bigger project. So by turning to comics, I stresslessly beat my weakest point in writing.)
We did the same too (opposite direction). Spent a very long time writing an epic for a niche market and piled up a lot of rejections in the process. Rather than take the money we had saved up to print-distribute we decided to crowdfund the thing using all the print-distribution money for marketing instead. All that accomplished was to find out that publicists' words should be taken with a grain of salt and that advertisers as a whole give deliberately innacurate numbers and CTRs so they can get your money. We also found out that the niche market we had written the book for was very negative towards it. We got turned for almost every interview and news article that we attempted, in a niche that doesn't have a whole lot of news or anything going for it. Needless to say the entire process was a massive failure, especially financially. After that we stopped writing books completely. We decided to switch to comics instead because images tend to be shared on social media far more than text. So far we've found comics to be easier to grow a following for, but still, writing for Seeking Alpha is far more lucrative than anything else we've ever done in writing/comics.
When the 30 Day Writing Challenge thing came out we got some confidence back to write another book, but the results of that reminded us to stick with comics. Comics don't get the same level of writing scrutiny that books get.
