What is your comic writing process?

[thehopefulcynic]

I'm new to making comics, and am working on my first one. I've been stuck in the writing phase because I want my writing to be really good. What is your comic writing process? How do you manage to juggle story, characters and worldbuilding and not be overwhelmed?

[mikesakatamaki]

I create my essay manga in the following order: story, dialogue, panel layout, rough sketch, line art, and coloring.
After I think of the story in Japanese, I translate it into English. Because of this, I have one extra step compared to everyone else.

Since my work is an essay, I don't need to build a fictional world. What kind of world do you want to create in your work?

[thehopefulcynic]

Oh, cool! I'm aiming for a modern fantasy type world, similar to RWBY. Which makes worldbuilding much harder, haha. I want the main focus of the story to be the characters as well, which is equally as challenging as worldbuilding, because I want my characters to be likeable and interesting to my readers.

[Zaza]

I generally start out with my characters, conceptualizing their personalities, flaws, fears, conflicts, and archs.

• my characters, Abigail is a young witch who lives isolated in the mountainside with her grandma due to humans abhoring the magical. She is lonely and never had a proper friend, she reads a lot of novels as a pastime, so she yearns deeply for those relationships she never had.

• Adele is an wizard of the old world who caused a war to take place, and was cursed to be a magpie and watch the consequences of her sins, long time being a magpie she has become burdened with guilt, thinking she deserved the punishment, after being turned back into a human, due to abigail's magical mishaps, she wants to be turned back into a magpie.

With that in mind i start making a rough outline of what are the essential moments/beats to complete those archs.

• So through my 3 planned volumes I will develop those conflicts, and most importantly they intertwine alongside their romantic development. So I think of the beats that need to be hit to get there.

• find the "cool" moments you're so daydreaming about and think about what you need to achieve before getting to them, what connect them to the major story and what fuels them.

Then I start considering the world building and what I want to explore and develop in the story, which I then carve into my outline.

• some world building comes as early as character creation, Adele and the wizard war for example, from there it's easy to weave together the world.

• though I also like to design and conceptualize creatures that inhabit the world. I decided to focus book 2: the beasts of yore, into developing more into them. Though book 2 is still developing into the girls relationships and brewing internal conflicts.

And so on.

It has worked so far for me, I have the whole 3 volumes, which I have been calling books, whole planned and I know what has to happen from start to end, though I haven't started producing the comic pages just yet.

[Lensing]

First draft advice which works for me:

I write my first draft of the comic / episode as a 12 panel storyboard.

1 establishing shot
12 end

Then I fill in 2-11 like puzzle pieces.

This helps me to focus on the big picture and not get lost / overwhelmed

[mikesakatamaki]

RWBY is set in a different world. In a world where magic exists and monsters roam, there are unique rules that govern it. It might be a good idea to decide on those rules first, then think about how your characters move and act within that framework.

As for creating the story, I think Lensing's comment is excellent.

The key to making your characters appealing is to create someone you’d want to marry yourself. Pour all your preferences into the character!

[BellaTheCow]

I come up with a joke (since my comic is about one shot comedy) then I do the sketch, the line work, and then the coloring.

[BellaTheCow]

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[BellaTheCow]

I also agree with @mikesakatamaki, write something that you would enjoy as well as something you think others would enjoy, because firstly, if you like it, there is a high probability that others might as well, and secondly, you want to be able to like what you create so you can continue to feel motivated to create more rather than making the process feel more so like an unwanted chore, which could possibly lead to procrastination, thus ending your comic’s consistency and quality. I wish you much luck on your creating journey. ️ ️

[justincarbunkle]

For a chapter, generally its:

-Think of a premise
-Create the basic structure (exposition/inciting incident/rising action(s)/climax/conclusion)
-Make a list of all the story beats
-Turn the story beats into a script + dialogue
-rewrite until I feel satisfied
-take a break
-rewrite again until I feel satisfied

I have a general idea of where the series overall story will go, but nothing fully set in stone. You don’t need to have your entire story planned before writing, but you should have plenty of ideas in the back of your mind so you can set up events/character arcs early on to build on as the series progresses.

I like having all the premises for my current volume thought of before starting it (usually 10-12 chapters) then I work on each chapter individually. It’s enough material to make progress in my story, but not too much to feel overwhelming.

Conveying character is pretty difficult. I usually make a first draft just getting across the basic story/emotions of the scenes, then go back through each line of dialogue to try and make the characters sound distinct (different manners of speech, character specific details/interests).

I’ve had a lot of character/worldbuilding come from after the writing phase. During the storyboarding/inking phase, I’ll think of a lot more ideas from trying to make the backgrounds/character acting interesting. I’ll also usually edit all the dialogue subtly when I insert it into the comic page.

TLDR
Keep thinking of what the perfect version of this comic should be.
Write until you make something as close to that vision as possible.
Take breaks. You’ll often think of better ideas an hour/day after writing a draft.
Your comic doesn’t end at the writing phase. A good comic can still be formed from a flawed script.
Your early chapters will suck. That’s okay. Just focus on making the next chapter better than the last.

[Leyelle]

Since I'm making a comic strip in the manner of old newspaper funnies, I write the joke, add a visual description to accompany the dialog, make a rough sketch of all the panels for the strip and then finish illustrating them one by one

[Thumber]

My process? I smash my head on the wall for an hour straight, then it's just a matter of picking up the ideas from the floor...

[kyupol]

1) daydream. My job allows daydreaming as long as you get the job done. One of the perks of being a welder-sandblaster.

2) write down the ideas somewhere. I don't usually have to they keep playing in my head like broken record. And I laugh or cry or get mad because of it.

3) then it gets organized into a script

[SagaHolmgaard]

I start with a synopsis, trying to summarize the whole story in about one page of text. It helps with knowing the most important things that happen, and to make sure I know how it ends before I waste any time writing or drawing anything.

After that I write smaller summaries of all the story beats I want to include. It'll be something like:
- Character A and Character B have a big fight
- Character B kidnapping
- Character A rescues Character B
- Character A and Character B become friends again

It usually gets more complex than that, with a lot of scenes that I end up reorganizing when I start having an idea of how all the scenes and story beats might affect one another. You can use Trello for this, or write the scenes on postits and organize like that, or just use your writing program.

Along with this I also start breaking it up into chapters if it's a multichapter work, so I get an idea of how long the story is going to be.

After THIS. I start writing the chapters with dialogue. I don't decide page and panel breaks until it's time to start thumbnailing the pages, be that after I've written one chapter, or several chapters, or the whole story. I find this easier than being too locked in from the start.

For balancing story, characters and worldbuilding, I'll usually work on everything in tandem, so if I get stuck in writing, it might be because a piece of world building or a character isn't developed enough yet, so I just focus on that for a bit and it usually helps with solving the issue! I swear, the times a character design fundamentally changed a story because it made me realize the character wasn't at all what I initially thought.... lolol

ALSO, the final product is a comic, so don't get too caught up with the writing itself being good! You can write really shit sentences describing what happens, it doesn't matter as long as you know what to draw when the time comes. No one is going to read the script lol, so it's fine if it's just the bare minimum of description in there, if that's what works for you.