Help with writing script for comic?

[krushelnitskreee]

i recently started writing the second draft of a script for my comic, and i have been having some trouble with the actual re-writing aspect of it. i get stuck on each dialogue tag, i'm not sure which parts to keep and which parts to scrap. it's making the whole process a lot harder than i'd like it to be, and of course a healthy challenge is a good part of the creative process, but i'm just getting a bit discouraged. i'd like to keep reminding myself that the whole point of this comic is to have fun and practice, but it's really sucking the fun out of it, and i'm having a hard time discerning what i should really be focusing on and which parts are the fat i can afford to cut. does anyone have any tips, experience, or encouragement they could pass down by way of planning a comic, and specifically editing/re-writing of episode scripts/scenes?
thank you!

[33rdCenturyCaveman]

Editing am like cleaning house or exercising. Not necessarily fun, but you do it because you enjoy the results.

And generally speaking, professionals do things long past the point of them being fun. That what separates them from amateurs, who literally do things out of love.

[adrienclifton]

I have my whole comic written already, and have for quite some time...
Sometimes I get bored with my comic as a whole and reread my script to remind myself where the story is going next and I'm always surprised at how new the story feels after.

I wrote the majority of it in quick bursts over a few weeks before I could lose the idea and just stuck it in script form in google docs. This meant most of it was a complete mess from the get go, but at least it was on paper! I asked my friend to help me work on it from there and it pushed it from barely coherent to something I could really invest myself in.

I knew what events needed to happen and had a vague idea of most of the conversations that needed to happen and filled it in by section until it read smoothly. Sometimes I jumped around. If you know how it needs to start and where it needs to end you've already won the hardest battle!!
My script roughly looks like this:
Chapter summary paragraph
[panel description]
person A: dialogue
person B: dialogue
[panel description]
And so on, for the entire story. I also color code the sections, one color for panel descriptions, another for dialogue, another for summaries, and another color to highlight sections ive already finished and posted. This way I can see where I'm at without even reading, and I can scroll really quickly to specific sections.

Just about every instance of dialogue changes in some way when I actually draw it out. Sometimes whole lines get cut because once I get to the panels I see that they're actually redundant, or just too wordy, and I need to make them more concise. The script for me isn't the "final copy" and in this way I'm not locked in to anything except the big details.

I would say my best advice is to nail down the big details, because consistency matters! But don't worry as much about every line of dialogue being perfect before you ever start drawing, because what works beautifully as a paragraph will be a train wreck of speech bubbles.

My second best advice is to ditch grammar, spelling, capitalization, punctuation-- anything that slows you down while you're writing, throw it away until all of your ideas are on paper. As long as you can read it now you can fix it later. If your script isn't hot steaming garbage at first you've spent too long on formalities and not enough time on the story lol
When you do revise it I still don't feel like the script needs to be pristine. My script is kind of awful, at least in the sense that it's written precisely how I'd message my friends over discord and I didn't give a shit about apostrophes or spelling my own characters names correctly.
As long as your finished pages have the finer details the script can wallow in linguistic sin.

Lastly, if you're feeling stuck, or bored, or like you've read your script so many times it doesn't even look like words anymore... Bring a friend into the mix. Have someone else read it, let them give you notes about what they liked, what's confusing, what's absolutely awful. I'm certain it will help!

[IndigoShirtProd]

A good way to know what needs to be kept and what needs to go is referring back to your outline, which you have hopefully written out. Some of the things I keep in mind when editing scripts are character interactions, word choice, and plot importance. Most of what I say here focuses on dialogue, but some tips can be applied to visual storytelling.

Write your character interactions so that they inform the reader as well as entertain them. You want to keep the reader engaged, so make sure when you're writing, dialogue is either relevant, dramatic, interesting, insightful, or comedic. It can be more that one of these things depending on the tone of the scene. It's important to remember what the reader is there for, so make sure their getting something, even if it's not plot relevant, out of each scene.

Word choice, or diction, is relevant to two aspects of script writing: character voice and interpretation. Hopefully, all or most of your characters are written in a way that a reader can distinguish each character from each other. One character may say one sentence one way, while another will say a sentence another way. It's the difference between "Yea, I've been there before." and "Yes, of course, I've seen that region previously." I personally think it's fine if only your main character are distinctive from one another but that's up to you. For the interpretation portion, it's more or less about how the reader and the characters comprehend what other characters say. Does a piece of dialogue trigger a memory or emotion, is it such a specific phrase that it comes into play in some way, it's all a matter of interpretation.

Plot importance: is what being said or shown progress the story or inform the reader about the characters or world? Is the world building relevant to this scene? If I cut this scene, will it affect the plot? If the answer is no to any of these questions, then you don't need the scene or dialogue.

I hope this helps. It's hard to edit scripts, because there's always some part of your brain that think the first draft is great, but it usually isn't

[Iris-Grimoire]

First tip that someone else didn't cover already, don't do it all at once. I noticed that even though I know my outline from top to bottom, I constantly throw out bad dialogue because I just haven't brainstormed enough yet, and that's when I should give myself 5 minutes and think of the scene in my head again.

For big editing, I like to copy the text that needs changes, paint it red, and use that as a workshop version. I cut huge chunks of dialogue, change the subject the characters are talking about, whole scenes sometimes, and then I read it skipping the black text until the next chunk of dialogue to see if it still looks good. If it doesn't work, I just delete the red text and go back to where I was; if it does work, I remove the black text and that one becomes the new sequence.

[DokiDokiTsuna]

i'm not sure which parts to keep and which parts to scrap.

My first tip: figure that out before you start editing. ^^;
You can't just trawl through the text and indiscriminately look for things to "fix". Editing is a process that requires a goal, and every goal is easier to reach when you have a plan.

Like I always say, start by looking for things in the script that you don't like: parts that you kinda feel like skipping instead of re-reading, parts that feel weak, parts that make you go 'eugh'.

Mark those, and think about why you don't like them. Are they 'tropey'? Are they just boring? Do they make a character seem like something they're not? Are they unnecessarily misleading?

The next step is the hardest: deciding whether or not that reason for dislike is strong enough to overrule the reason you put the line there in the first place. But once you've decided that the line needs to come out, you have to look back at that initial reason so that you know what to replace the line with, if anything.
Everything you write has logic and context behind it (at least, it should). And one of the most important things to keep in mind while editing is to avoid editing your story into pieces by neglecting that context.

i'm having a hard time discerning what i should really be focusing on and which parts are the fat i can afford to cut.

My second tip: Yeah, you should figure that out beforehand, too. 6v6;

Really, it's no surprise that you're in editing hell if you still have all these things you're not sure of. It's like being asked to grade an essay without a rubric...

Okay, for one thing, you gotta decide on a focus (or multiple focus points) for your story all on your own. There's no way around it; you just gotta do it. Determine what you want your story to be about, first and foremost.

Then trimming the fat just becomes a matter of "does this line help or harm the focus of the story/character arc/overall theme?" Writing a story is like building a machine; you should know what each component does and why it needs to be there.
Like, you should be able to point at different places in your script and say 'this part is for levity' or 'this is setup for a future plot twist' or 'this is to help the audience understand this character's motivation'. If you're not sure what a certain part does, or if you have several parts that do the exact same thing, that's a sign it might be time to get out the carving knife and...well, see the editing advice above.

[Mallory]

Some things I learned from editing my long-form fiction I found applied to editing my comic draft.

1. Answer the questions "What does your character want?" Now answer the question "What does your character need?" The conflict between the want and the need is the driver of the story. With that lens, you can get rid of almost anything that doesn't pertain to this conflict (or at least mark it non-essential).

2. Write a one paragraph pitch summary for your story. Look in to how to write one for a publication pitch - you're supposed to sum up your entire story in like 5-6 sentences, beginning to end. Refer to that to see what is essential. Doing that for my novel really helped me figure out what to edit out.

3. Look at every page of your script. There are three things that every bit of fictional writing should do, and that is a) Progress the Plot b) Develop the Character and c) Establish the world. In long-form fiction, every scene that doesn't accomplish at least two of the three should be cut or collapsed into another scene. I think comics can often accomplish all three, but I would settle on anything that isn't a part of moving at least two of the three goals of writing to get cut or edited. Like you I struggled with dialogue - I like writing dialogue, I like writing quippy characters, but dialogue in books is worth a different amount of effort from dialogue in comics so it has to be a lot more trim. So even the funny/quippy character dialogue needs to move the plot or expand the world-building. That helped me make my dialogue a lot more dense, and I went from having like three separate five page scenes to having half of that information conveyed in page 1 of chapter 1.

[konori]

Normally I just write down the general outline of my comic and save the scripting for when I start drawing the thumbnails. In my general outline, I write down a rough idea of what my characters are going to say/do for each scene (eg: "He agreed to the request," "She objected,") and when I do write a proper script, it's when my characters are saying important stuff that I do not want to forget.

When I get to the thumbnailing part, I write the dialogue as it flows with the scene. It does not have to be perfect, and I can go back and edit some parts after I've drawn out the rest of the thumbnails for that chapter/episode.

After finishing the thumbnails, I move on to drafting the actual comic pages. This is where most of the edits to the dialogue happen. If some dialogue is too wordy or does not fit into a panel, I trim it or split it. If I find that whatever a character says is redundant or irrelevant, I replace it with something better suited to the scene. There are cases where I changed dialogues even after I've inked and coloured the pages. (Not recommended but thank goodness for the digital medium!)

So... in short, I check the scenes/dialogue each time I move on to the next stage of making a comic episode/chapter and edit them accordingly.

[EdmundOkoroka]

I think I can help be your storywriter.
I dont need money and I would love the exposure and everything.
Lets see where this goes.
Would love to work with you!