How to write a great comic or graphic novel script: five do’s and don’ts

Don’t write too much

There are no strict rules about how much text to include in each bubble/balloon/box, but most people suggest it shouldn’t be any more than a few sentences. A big block of text can look a bit intimidating and too much text on the page might also begin to encroach on the space available for art.

Don’t be tempted to just split your overly long piece of text over multiple balloons either. Fred Van Lente, in his Anatomy of a Comic Script for Creator Resource, suggests numbering them to keep track: “If you find yourself typing ‘20. CAPTION’ start looking for dialogue to cut. Twenty balloons (counting SFX) on a single comics page is too damn many. Give the art some room to breathe, Talkypants!”

Allow the artwork to tell the story too, and try to avoid including text that duplicates it – for example, including narration that tells the reader, “When I arrived, it was still the middle of the night…” when you plan to fill the panel with artwork that establishes the character arriving at the location under a night sky.

Do be clear (but not too prescriptive) with art direction

If you’re both the writer and artist, this one won’t be a problem for you. But if you’re a writer working with an artist, you’ll need to include some art direction in your script – and it can be a difficult thing to get right. There’s a balance to be struck between making sure they have a clear description of the action happening in each panel, and any vital background information, but also leaving room for the artist to work their own magic. Work with them to bring your story to life, rather than dictating how it must be done.

Reimena Yee has an excellent article on her website about her approach as an artist (How I Art Direct a Graphic Novel: Cooking the Onion). As she says, “The artist is not just the pretty hand that makes pictures – they are also an author in their own right. Telling a story using pictures requires a different set of knowledge and skills – in comics, it’s the ability to convey tone, portray emotion, control pacing (and essentially, time), set mood, create tension, encode symbolism and subtext.” You don’t necessarily need to include all of that in your directions for every panel!

Don’t forget your characters’ perspectives

In a written novel, the story is often told uniquely from the perspective of one character and we come to know them intimately, sharing their every thought and experience throughout the events of the book. We might, for example, see the character’s dislike of what is objectively a fun social event, even if their friends are having a great time – “In the end, I forced myself to go to the party. But the smiles that greeted me felt shallow, the laughter fake. I danced along with the others, but I ached for the quiet dark of my own bedroom.”

In a comic, we might get glimpses inside a character’s head through thought balloons/bubbles, and perhaps through narration, but without anywhere near the word count of a novel. Otherwise, we have to rely on dialogue and visual cues, and take every opportunity to tell readers who your characters are and what they’re feeling. Consider the different ways you might portray their viewpoint without words – might this character be drawn in muted monochromes while the party around them sparkles with colour, for example?

Do consider page positions and turns

You need to be conscious not only the flow of panels on each page, but also the position of each page within the book (on the left or right). This will help ensure that transitions within a page are sensible, and that you don’t accidentally misplace any of your planned double-page spreads.

Page turns can also be a powerful storytelling tool, giving the reader a reason to keep going. That might be by hinting at a coming reveal – as David Harper says in The Art of the Page Turn for Sktchd, “Comic readers naturally turn and look at both pages in full before engaging with the panels that comprise them. This guarantees that anything not protected by the page turn will immediately be sniffed out,” meaning over the page may be the only place you can safely hide something! Or it might be the promise of a new scene that keeps them reading, since it’s more satisfying to close down a scene at the end of a righthand page than partway across a spread.

Do copy-edit at this stage

If you copy-edit your text while it’s still in script form, you’ll save yourself lots of time and hassle down the line. You should, of course, still do a final proofread when your work is ready for publication, but it’s far easier to make changes and corrections to a Word document than it is to make them when the lettering is already on the page – or worse, when an incorrectly spelled word has already been incorporated into finished artwork…

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