I will usually start with a couple characters I've designed, and i'll usually think of character traits and such when I'm drawing. I need a visualisation of my main characters.

I'll then try to find the goal of the main characters, and the end goal of the story. Usually I'll think of what the overall message of the story is. I usually listen to music for ideas. I will mentally figure out my big turning points.

Then, I start outlining the story in order to get the sequential order of events, and it also lets me know what needs to happen in between big plot moments. I usually outline the entire story, mainly in dot points with occasional dialouge if I know I don't want to forget it.

I'll work on my script occasionally when I'm still outlining. When I finish outlining, I will give myself a set goal of how many pages of script I want completed so that I can fully complete the script in order to know my entire story from start to finish. I then edit through, add and remove what I think is necessary.

I also have all my assets such reference sheets and 3D models completed before I start the comic.

Let's just say I took ages to get my story planned for my comic, but I feel confident that scenes and characters will be portrayed like I envisioned them. I just do not like writing week to week, I need time to get my writing to what I concider good

1. What do I want to tell with this story?
2. How do I want to tell this story?

What / How are the two most important questions.

What will focus on the message you want to convey, because creating a story without a message, is just telling a series of cool events.

How will focus in the methods you use to transmit that story, meaning the nitty-gritty technical details, the setting, genre, etc.

For example, my novel Centris, is a story focused in overcoming adversity even against a society designed to bring you down. It was my guiding light from day one, as one of my characters as his struggle became the basis for the world.

That's the what.

The how took me ages to hash out, because I constantly modified, refined and altered how I wanted to convey the message. I created a world, characters, culture and magic systems using my "what" as a compass to guide myself.

I just come up with an idea in my head, and then I write it down, and then, providing I can find a connection between one idea and another, I compile them as part of a summary.

I come up with the plot and the characters, then I do an outline of the entire story (like episodes and all that), then I do multiple drafts of that outline, then I begin writing my story, everytime I finish an arc, I go back to my outline and I change things in order to keep the plot consistent and so I don't have to worry about following one rigid narrative.

When I write my story I cut out an outline so it can be 20 panels long and then I look over the outline. I do page breakdowns and panel progressions. I then go on and write the story.

Here it is folks:

And here's the final result:

Groovy jazz beat

I do what I feel like B-3

Then...

Planning

After I've figured out which concept I want to work with (subject matter, a specific location, time period, etc.), I write it all down in the order it pops into my head. If I get an idea that doesn't fit, I'll sort it in somewhere else and use it later on another story. I collect as much information as possible about the subject, and file it away so I can read it over the next month or so.

Research

I watch a lot of TV, documentaries, movies, and I read books or visit locations (bars, museums, etc.) that I think will help me get into the right 'headspace' or teach me something important about the subject, and how people in the world interact with it. If I can't go somewhere, I find pictures of it. I set my phone and computer's wallpapers to a photo of the place I'm thinking of, or the idea, so I don't forget it. I clear all photos from my phone and back them up to cloud storage, leaving only what's relevant. I want to stay as focused as possible. One of the best things you can do is find a playlist on Spotify or Youtube and just immerse yourself in it. I still have Spotify Free, so I have to hear ads. Same with the radio. I can't afford Premium, I'm unemployed. But you know what? That's marketing research, too. Multitasking!!

Gathering Opinion

I talk to people about the subject and how they see it, whether it's something they interact with for fun or for work, guage how serious it is to them, and take some unofficial polls for opinion. People might sort of know what I might be doing, but I don't say it explicitly unless they get worried about why I'm asking. The less conspicuous the process is, the better. Don't disturb anyone's routines, don't try to alter their behavior (ie. asking them to read/proof-read my book). If my book is good and my marketing is on-point, they'll hear about it on their own without any intervention from me.

Integration

I figure out how the subject (whether it's dragons, spicy food, or superheroes) finds its way into my life and the lives of everyone around me. I try and see which parts of the idea can be brought into my life naturally, without upsetting any kind of balance (without making people upset/weirded out). Dragons? Light some candles, get a stick-on tattoo of a mythical serpent, or go for a run and pretend you have wings. Spicy food? Time to learn the difference between Cumin and Curry. Superheroes? Spandex underpants. Not kidding in the slightest. I try to discern exactly how much of real life is already involved in the fantastical subject, and vice versa, seeing how close I can bring them. The more I experience, the more material I'll have to work with when writing multiple perspectives.

Drafting/Storyboarding

I don't waste too much pen or paper jotting down ideas. I've researched how story arcs and beats work (Save the Cat, Story Circle, Golden Theme), so I can pretty naturally find the flow of where the story is going. Is the MC going to be the good guy, or are they going to have to learn a hard lesson? What inconsistency between fantasy and reality is going to result in an embarrassing assumption or an injustice? What difference of opinion is going to create conflict? Who's going to bring that opposing view? This phase is about laying the story's train tracks so it can cruise along when I get to writing. At this point, I want to know how it starts, gets rolling, gets complicated, and ends. Three-to-five acts, usually.

Writing/Drawing

I just go. I don't re-draft unless something "stinks" to me, in which case I need to go back to one of the previous steps until I know what I want. I get a blank notebook and a pen or pencil and I just go for it. If you draft too much, you'll drain the fun out of writing, and you won't want to do it because you kind of already did. In the past, I used to draft works so intricately, it was only looking back that I realized I'd already finished the work... I just wasn't confident enough in it. I wasted a lot of time hiding stuff that was perfectly fine because I didn't think it was "finished", but it actually was the whole time.

So, just write. Pen to paper, go. Do it. Don't waste time. Take care of your needs (water, food, rest, excercise), and if you don't feel like writing, don't write. But keep asking, "do I feel like writing today?", and try even if the answer is "no". If you really can't, don't force yourself. Take care of one of your other needs. Create some empty space in your life for your writing habit to take up, by organizing everything else. The more aspects of your life that you enjoy (cooking, cleaning, talking with friends, going to work), the more you'll have to write about.

I write in LibreOffice, it's a free office suite not just comparable to Microsoft Word, but in some ways better, especially for novelists. The only thing it currently lacks is online functionality, unless you count Collabora, which is in Beta but does have a working iOS App. Then I copy-paste to Wattpad, then to Tapas (Wattpad clears a lot of the formatting for me so Tapas can "read" the text cleanly.)

Editing

This depends on how long you can hold out without feedback or validation. Did you post your story as soon as it was written? I usually do. Then I go back and change it after, while it's sitting on the platform. Even massive changes are fine with me, cause it's all digital - editing is way less costly than reprints, so do that shit now! As long as I don't annoy the readers with Update notifications (there's a Don't Send option for a reason), they'll be fine. I always edit the manuscript (.ODT/.DOC file) itself, NEVER the online post, because tracking changes across multiple locations is a hell of a memory game. Edit the manuscript, THEN copy/paste the entire chapter/post to online all over again, unless you can remember the SPECIFIC changes you made.

Editing visual work is much more difficult, but it's the same idea. Edit the source file, not the .PNG or .JPEG you exported. You have to make those sub-files all over again, every single time. It's a process that teaches you to be dead certain about every single change you make, or else you waste your own time.

Don't Quit Your Day Job... Use It

If you think your dead-end job is in the way of your writing career, you're not a writer. Because that dead-end job is material. That conflict you feel is what fuels good stories. Change your situation on paper until you're comfortable engaging with it (a job at the gas station becomes working as a jet-fuel operator IN SPACE), and then go to work every day knowing that you're lucky to get paid gathering that experience, because if you can channel it, it will MAKE your writing career. You know what everyone who reads books is doing when they aren't reading? Working at their dead-end jobs. Your efforts to cast off that burden will make you entirely unrelatable to your audience, so don't do it. Keep your job, and make it work for you. Put aside your pet project if you have to, until you've become strong enough that it feels like a "matter of time" to build it.

I've been struggling to find work, so in the meantime, I keep the house I live in clean as a whistle. I treat it like it's my job, and the only thing in my way is roommates/siblings who'd rather have a mess (it's a camouflage tactic for their shitty personalities). Not only does it help me earn respect around the house, it makes everything easier, and it gives me exercise that keeps my brain from shrinking and my body from atrophying. I need that muscle and clear-headedness to create. If anyone else tries to do it for me, I jump in. My mom hasn't loaded the dishwasher in an entire year, and my room-mates got to do it maybe twice when I lived with them. MAYBE.

Just don't write anything so close to your real life that it would offend or concern the actual people you work/live with. Allegories are about applicability for EVERYONE who reads your story, not just now, but decades from now, and maybe even across the world. That's timelessness. Everyone has "a boss" and "a sassy coworker", you need to generalize your characters and broaden your horizons. Otherwise people will pretty much be reading your manifesto, and they're gonna think you're the next Zodiac Killer.

"So he's a barista named Sandy with an undercut and a dog named Skip..."
"Yes."
"Is that supposed to be me? Cause my name is Randy and I have an undercut and a dog named Rip. Also, I noticed he gets eviscerated by bullets in like, the first scene, and then his head is stomped into chunks... are you upset with me about something?"
"No, they're totally different... uh... excuse me." Runs away awkwardly

Manage Your Time, Know Your Budget

Don't take on a project you can't afford in time or expenses. Just don't. Why should you have to? You're not a member of a production crew, like the kind that put out things like Steven Universe, Kipo: Age of Wonderbeats, Encanto, or even your average soundtrack. You're one person. So make something one person can make. Keep it short, small, and manageable.

If your job eats up your time, invest some time in getting better at your job. Like I said before, organizing the rest of your life will help you make empty space to put your writing habit in. You don't like your job? I believe that's what the shonen heroes call "a challenge". You think Mr. Miyagi was ever gonna tell Daniel LaRusso to just "wing it"? Nah. He got that kid to wax those fine-ass cars and finish his deck because work takes practice, and fun is what you get when you've practiced so hard it's no longer work. You wax those cars and finish that deck and paint that fence, and you'll be doing karate in no time.

Practice at your job until you start getting attention, and your coworkers start acting like you're taking this whole thing too seriously, and your boss starts asking you to put in more hours, and go through with it. Do the whole thing. I swear to God, this will help you become a better writer/artist, because it'll teach you what every character you'll ever write/draw is doing: navigating their circumstances and trying to improve the skills they need to change their lives for the better.

Then, when you finally have a well-rested moment to write/draw (you might have taken a literal year off at this point, that's honestly okay, lots of people get successful in this later in life), count how much time you have and guage how much energy you feel like you have. Write it down, "two hours on sunday, an hour on thursday, I feel like I could probably write a few pages, as long as I'm in my room/at the kitchen counter/at the library." Then do that, every week, because now you've found your creative space.

Make note of what you accomplish each time, and plan your story's scope around it. You're not going to make the next Lord of the Rings trilogy or Harry Potter septilogy running on a budget of $5 in supplies and a few hours a week, so make something only a few chapters long. If you have a rocket, shoot for the moon. If you have a bike, shoot for the next town over. You'll be surprised what you can accomplish in smaller, more achievable steps. The more small stories you make, the more you'll get used to the feeling of starting and finishing a work, and have a better sense of what you like and don't like about making them.

Snack Food

"Tapas" is a word that means something like "a bunch of tasty appetizers brought by a caterer". That's what we're cooking here: snacks. Do you like ribs? I don't, but you might. Cool. Do you like chicken wings? Great. Do you like picking apart a massive, rubbery t-bone steak at the movie theater with a dull knife? No? Then don't feed it to people who just want something to scroll through on their tiny phones.

The thing is, the digital age PREFERS smaller, more easily consumable stories. Even the longer novels are broken up into smaller pieces (Episodes). Back in the day, people bought physical books with their hard-earned fishin' cash, so they wanted an investment. The longer the book, the better.
"An entire tree died for this? Fantastic. Now I have a way to fill my Friday nights."
Now it's all accessible from a device (or devices) with basically infinite surfing-capacity, and it's free, except for digital tokens, which if you're in this forum, you probably don't make off your books. So it's the perfect time to make smaller, more diverse and varied works, to see what sticks.

When you're big enough to sell physical books and eBooks, you can start worrying about your book's length. People will want an investment for that .PDF or DRM'd Amazon Kindle file the same way they wanted Mother Nature to suffer so they could chill with Frodo and watch every Game of Thrones character die.

Personally, I have a core concept (supernatural & agriculture), but I change the premise every single book. Nothing sits still for long, or it gets stagnant.

Know Yourself

Give up on your magnum opus for now, and put it in storage. Make something you don't care about. Then when you're better and stronger, bring that sparkling idea out and see if it still glitters. If it does, and if you feel like you're capable of tackling it, then go for it. This isn't a job that requires you to come out swinging, taking names. All those young hot-shots you keep hearing about had publishers working on their behalf to sell them as the best thing since spaghetti sauce and garlic bread, when they feel just as uncertain about their work as you do, sitting in your boxers eating Lucky Charms with a fork from a styrofoam bowl, with your coffee-stained Hilroy notepad. Most of them started there too.

The most important thing about creating a story is knowing your own story. If you don't, you're likely to waste your time crafting intricate bullshit that doesn't track if you think about it for five seconds. A lot of people get rich making stories like that, but they don't get remembered. Why? Because they're not actually telling the stories at all. They hire ghost-writers to write for them, out-of-work college kids addicted to caffiene who hate themselves because all they can do to make $15 that week is write some dude's fluffed-up fantasy autobiography, The Story of How I Definitely Didn't Cry That One Time and Also I Have Superpowers and Am A Werewolf. The guy who hired that ghost-writer will probably make a cool ten grand from selling the rights to it, before it gets dropped off a cliff into oblivion by Hollywood's ever-shuffling maze of completion. He'll waste that money on something stupid and then do it again, hoping to strike the same gold with another tired ghost-writer. He probably won't. Same goes for most comic artists, who end up getting ground up to paste in Marvel/DC's talent mill after a fascinating 'Ant-Man but He's Also a Gopher' one-shot. They get exactly what they wanted, for about a year, and go back to working their dead-end jobs.

Bottom line, tell YOUR story, or you'll end up telling someone else's. The cool thing is, if you do tell your own story, you'll probably also end up including the stories of the people around you (albeit generalized), and it'll be kind of like you're telling everyone's story. Which is way better than getting stuck making pennies, being uncredited for making unreadable garbage.

In Conclusion

Just do what you feel like B-3 (also don't do drugs unless your story is about drugs)

I watch a lot of anime and I do research on it while writing

I always imagine all the time creating a plot and scene, and whenever an idea comes up I always write down in the file and in the app called story planner. I use reference from book and manga and alter it. Any flaws or plot holes shall be edited and meticulously checked before completing it. Here’s my work:

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I listen to music and I think of scenes as if it was an anime playing on TV. The scenes start in my mind as trailer shots, then they get fleshed out as I go.

Music is an important part, though. It evokes the emotion I'm going for and makes me go, 'what kind of scene would go with the emotions that the music creates in my heart?' and I work it out more.

The second I have some good lines on my head, I write them down on notepad. And later on, I write more stuff to connect the scenes together.

But truth be told, the biggest helper is WRITING IN ADVANCE. My series is 200-300 episodes long, and I am currently on issue 13. So the fact that I am already writing and polishing the dialogue on issue 180 is a big help for having a lot of time in making the scene the best it can get in terms of dialogue, writing and emotion.

Editing- lots and lots of editing. For me I also try and revolve the story around a theme and make important characters arcs match said theme. I usually start with the beginning and what I want the end to be and fill it in, then edit a bunch!
Here’s a video that helped me a bunch

Also feel free to take inspiration from things that have inspired you! For example I took inspiration from the Owl House when it came to transporting a human to a demon realm (but it reads more like amphibia because I filled said realm with bugs for no reason other than I like them, I did come up with a plot reason too tho), also my story is heavily inspired by Dante’s Inferno.
I’m not the only one doing this tho, as you likely know The Lion King is a story heavily inspired by Hamlet.

Also have a little book! I have a book where I outline my 2nd sketch drafts and wrote my plot summary along with outlining my characters arcs.

You guys plan stories?

I just yolo it and hope something good comes out. /s

No no, I always have a start and an end, but what is in between is truthfully a mystery to even me. I enjoy the feeling of writing and formulating a scene without ME even knowing what is going to happen next.

My approach to building stories is inspired by some of my favorite videogames. I tried a more standard approach and it didn't fit my bill. I really like the talk Yoko Taro gave at the Games Developers Conference (linked). His idea summarized is plot doesn't matter, but the core emotional beats do.

Generally there is either a feeling or a specific scene that drifts through my mind that I center my stories around. I use that scene as a centerpiece of sorts and then sorts spiral out from there creating characters, places, and supporting scenes all to culminate in that end goal in a way that I feel is most natural - so sometimes the stories will evolve beyond the original idea. I have grown greatly on the idea style and substance are everything, the actual story and ideas aren't terribly so.
For instance, with the title story of my shorts series, it started with me wanting to bring my somniphobia (I have occasional insomnia stemming from an irrational fear that someone else will wake up in my body if I fall asleep) to the page. From there I built the concept of turritopsis, and then built a world around that concept and the dread that birthed it. Can I tell you why I chose to center the story around a dead guy in a closet? Nope, it just felt right.

Longer stories are similar but imagine instead of one puzzle, it's a larger puzzle made up of smaller ones.

I sketch something

Then I sketch some more

Throw out all of the sudden ideas I have

Somehow end up with a story