A Brief Guide to Scripting Graphic Novels

A Brief guide to Scripting Graphic Novels
Welcome to the future…


The Theory:

Put quite simply, the only thing, as a writer, that you can afford to lack is the ability to draw. You must approach the project with the mind of an artist; with a feeling for colour; an awareness of the significance of mise-en-scène; an appreciation of detail; and above all the assumption of nothing. If it isn’t in your script, your artist won’t put it in the panel, and you will be solely to blame.

The main benefit of writing a graphic novel instead of a novel lies in what you don’t need to do. Every writer has strengths or weaknesses. Some writers are great describers of the appearance of things; some create multi-layered characters; some are plot wizards who can keep you guessing page after page; others are superb transcribers of dialogue.

If you fall into the latter category – as, I believe, many younger, less experienced writers do – then turning your talents to the GN format might be wise while you sharpen your skills in the other areas.

I’m not saying that writing a Graphic Novel is a cop out, or even easier than writing a novel. It simply requires a different set of skills; a set of skills more often developed early in your career due, quite simply, to the experience required to understand the structure and pacing of a novel, which is far more rigid and necessarily consistent in its execution, than that of a graphic counterpart.

One of the common errors made by young writers is the tendency to ‘ham things up’. Whether it comes from the desperation to create something artistically mind-blowing, revolutionary or wholly representative of one’s potential, or somewhere else matters not. Flowery prose; ornate descriptions; page-long sentences and manual upon manual of technical information to back-up every original artefact in your novel are not only unnecessary, but distracting.

Ernest Hemingway, one of the most celebrated authors of the 20th century believed wholeheartedly in the economy of language – in saying only what needed to be said, and allowing the reader to interpret what was omitted. Hemingway’s tactic meant that one word on the page could be worth ten in the reader’s mind; by indulging your vocabulary to describe a ‘mobile’ as a ‘revolutionary, handheld, cellular communication device of previously thought impossible capabilities’, does the opposite. And makes you sound like a prick. If it’s a mobile, a car or a gun it is a mobile, a car or a gun. Your ideas will bring your words to life; it doesn’t work the other way round.

And honestly, that is where the Graphic Novel excels: it is a perfect platform for the realisation of ideas. You can synopsise a new notion in a matter of days and then, with either the help of your creative team or eight espressos, flesh it out to the point at which it works as a one-shot (a single issue comic), a full Graphic Novel, or the first installment of an either closed- or open- ended series.

The Graphic Novel is being looked to by film and TV execs to provide innovative concepts that are effectively storyboards in waiting. Just look at the success of The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman. He produced that series with a small creative team and published through Image Comics (www.imagecomics.com) and now he has a hit TV show. The majority of the major blockbusters of the last decade have their roots in comics and graphic Novels.

With the bookshelf bowing under the weight of the mindless ‘poolside fiction’, that is so vapid the word pulp has too many positive connotations to be suitable anymore. Talented novelists – especially young ones with little or no experience – are going to struggle to get their work the exposure it deserves, because major publishing houses like a safe bet, and nothing sells better than a name that is well known.

The Graphic Novel and Comic industry, however, is less stuffy and, thanks to the lower investment costs, are willing to gamble on fresh talent coming through the ranks.

When I first turned to Graphic Novels, I did so solely because the opportunity was presented to me. I knew nothing about the industry; much less about the conventions of scripting (something that, retrospectively, was responsible for my slightly ‘unusually exhaustive’ style). At first I too was bound by the uppity values of my upbringing: novels are good; everything else is inferior. The feelings I had towards the medium were almost racist, such was the ignorance that had sired them. As I delved deeper, started to work on my first GN script (The Count of Monte Cristo, published by Campfire 2012), I realised that the medium not only suited my flair for dialogue and allowed me to side-step the problems I’d experienced with toning down my prose by eliminating its presence almost completely, but was far more expansive than I’d realised.

It seems obvious now, and if you’re reading this you are probably further along in your exploration of the medium than I was then, but I had never given Graphic Novels, or, should I say, the art of storytelling through sequential art, the credit it deserved. Being brought up on Hollywood movies, when I wrote, I was effectively novelising a film that already existed in my head. Never before had I appreciated quite how much my mind worked in sync with the production of a GN. I imagine this is true of a lot of guys in their twenties now; children of the 80s, who remember Star Wars, Flight of the Navigator and Indiana Jones as the action epics that first whet your appetite for the creation of a new world.

I began to think that the medium offered me the education I had long desired as a novelist: working to strict word limits per panel, I was encouraged to prune away the inessential, and focus on directness (something my work, through inexperience and arrogance, had always lacked). A picture tells a thousand words, they say, and boy, they are right. Panel descriptions don’t need to be pretty or even grammatically perfect, as long as they are clear and exact. Throwing the form book out of the window is a good start. Short, sharp, unambiguous sentences are required. Do this for 6 panels a page for 100 pages and then write something prosaic. Notice the difference? Gone is the bullshit, and in its place? Clarity.

But is an education all the medium offers young writers? I no longer think so. Now I believe it is not a road to the future, but the future itself.

Art is of the times. It has to be if it is to have relevance. There’s a reason why the medium struck such a chord with me: it’s because it’s the medium of my generation. We want, perhaps more than ever, to be transported to another world by the things we choose to read. Maybe we’re lazy, or maybe we just don’t have the time to labour through 900 pages of a 19th century French epic, but we certainly have time to ‘experience’ a Graphic Novel or comic. They can be read and understood in a matter of minutes, and rather than leaving you cold, the imagery can enrich your mind in a way words never can.

Writers have, since the dawn of the craft, been restricted by the limitations of words. Graphic Novels are not so chained. Dive in, and let yourself be transported to the future.

I’ll see you there.


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