OMG YES STORY TALKIN TIME~! (Sorry y'all story just gets me so pumped!!!)
Okay so when it comes to writing comic scripts I'm a wierdo and use the screenwriting method to get my stories finished. Sorta like what you do @snyorf. Blake Snyder's Save the Cat has a good template, and it's a good place to find the bones of your story - so srsly everyone give that a look over.
I think GRRM had this thing he said once that there are two kinds of writers: Architects and Gardeners. Gardeners write and see where the story takes them. Architects plan everything out and know where they're going once they hit the ground running. There's also a mix of the two as well, where you have a person who plans to a point and then wings it.
I'm a hardcore architect. I love knowing where I'm going, so that means every comic 'book' I write is actually written out in FULL before my team starts putting pencil to page. Along the way I'll tweak things here and there, but not much. Here's the process I go through:
When I have the basic idea of what my story is I break it down into beats. Beats are an event, decision, or discovery that alters the way the protagonist pursues his or her goal. I use this awesome site called Trello to help me take my beats and arrange them into acts like so ->
Trello is amazing because it allows you to move cards around, label stuff, write additional ideas, add images, collaborators can comment and share things with you. It's so helpful you guise! Please use it! \o/
Once I have my acts laid out, then I start working on my scenes. Now, multiple beats can happen in a single scene, or they can be a scene to themselves. It just depends on what you want to do. Using my breakdown of the script in Trello I start writing in the most bare bones way possible...
Yeah...that's just your normal notepad text doc.
It's so devoid of any formatting bells and whistles that I can't get caught up in making it "look nice." It's supposed to be ugly, which gives me the freedom to focus on JUST the writing. I'll write out each scene piece by piece. The cool thing about planning your work out in the beats and scenes method is that you can literally start ANYWHERE in your story. You can write the end first, or the climax. You can start in the middle and then hop around to the beginning. It's really freeing!
Once I've got all of my scenes written out I take each of these little pieces and throw them into a program called Final Draft. This program is what I use in my daily writing on other gigs, so know you don't HAVE to use this specific screenwriting software if you don't want to. There's free screenwriting software out there like Celtx and more that are perfectly find to use.
Once everything is plugged into Final Draft I print out everything and revise the hell out of it, until I have something I like. Then it goes over to my hubby who's my first editor. He'll give me feedback and I'll revise again. From there it just keeps going until I have a draft I'm more or less happy with. Then I send it to my second editor Rachelle. She gives me hardcore feed back that is always helpful.
When the draft is ready and I'm happy with it I get a bunch of friends together and we sit down and do a live read through of the script! It's SO much fun! And it's super helpful because hearing dialogue read aloud helps me figure out if it works or not. If my reader is stumbling through it, or my reader isn't sure why their character is doing A or B then I know I need to tweak things. My readers will also write in the margins of their scripts anything they see as a problem - from spelling and grammar errors to questions about characters lines and more. Usually we go through each act, one at a time, stop between them and discuss what works and what doesn't.
Then I take each script and compile all the notes into my master draft. And then it's time to chip away at the final revisions.
And then finally...the script is finished! From there I'll sit down and break out the whole script into segments of comic pages. This 'translation' process is probably my favorite part! I work from the master script and usually the corgi is there to cheer me on.
Once my pages are blocked out for comics, I pull them back into the old text document and write each pages script into comic format like so ->
And that's where we go from comic script, through the art process and to final page!
...whew! It's a long process, but I think it makes a big difference in my comics storytelling. If any of y'all wanna see the results feel free to check out my comic and let me know what you think of the writing! <3