The Comic Writer’s Journal - How to use
The Comic Writer’s Journal is designed to help you plan and organise your comic before writing the script. This process consists of six important steps:
summarising your story
writing an overview
planning your scenes
breaking down your story into pages
tracking your characters
breaking down your pages into panels.
By following these steps and using the templates contained in the journal, you’ll produce a full breakdown of your story and know exactly what happens on each page.
Step 1: Writing a summary
The most important part of writing a story is being able to describe it - first to yourself and then to any interested parties, be they friends, fans or publishers.
No matter how big your idea, you should always be able to summarise it in just a few lines. Use the summary template to describe your story in as few words as possible: first as a sentence and then in slightly more detail as a paragraph.
To help get your thoughts in order, try listing the key developments that will happen in your story. Keep these succinct and broad at this point. For example, ‘Dave finds a strange hat’ or ‘Mary receives a mysterious sword from her aunt’.
A story often revolves around a question. For example, will Shinji ever consume all that cheese? What’s yours?
Step 2: Writing an overview
Now that you’ve summarised your story, the next step is to get your thoughts onto the page. Don’t worry about making too much sense at this point or even working in chronological order. Just describe everything you want to happen in your story, as it occurs to you.
The theme of this step is ‘freedom’. At this point, your ideas can be as vague or detailed as you like. All that matters is that you write them down.
Use the overview template to write down everything you need to happen in your comic. Leave the column on the left blank for now (we’ll come back to this later). You can use the ‘notes’ box at the bottom of each page for random ideas and questions.
Step 3: Using the scene planner
While not an essential step, using the scene planner is a great way to get your thoughts in order when writing your overview.
The scene planner allows you to write a short description of each scene in your story, along with the estimated number of pages needed to bring it to life. As with your overview, don’t worry about getting your ideas down in any particular order - you can rearrange scenes at any time by numbering the circles.
Feel free to move back and forth between your overview and the scene planner as you decide upon the order of events and the number of pages that each scene requires. This is where the left column in the overview template comes in handy, allowing you to estimate the page count of each scene as you go.
Step 4: Using the page planner
Now that you’ve written your overview it’s time to break it down into individual pages using the page planner.
At this point, you should have a good idea of how many pages each scene requires but don’t worry if you need to go back at any point and make changes. This is a fluid process, with plenty of space for edits.
The page planner templates come in a variety of sizes, ranging from 8-pages to 22-pages to free-form. To complete the planner you will need to write one sentence per line describing what happens on each page.
The symbols next to a page number will help you keep track of pagination. This symbol means that a page stands on its own…
…while this symbol indicates that two pages make up a spread.
The ‘scenes’ box allows you to group pages under a title or phrase. You can also draw thick lines between scenes and/or fill in the tab on the left to better delineate between them.
If you’re planning to include any splashes (full-page images) or double-page spreads (two-page images) you can fill in these markers to indicate where they fall. Remember that double-page spreads can’t fall across a page turn!
Step 5: Tracking your characters
While by no means essential, keeping track of your characters as they come and go between scenes can be a useful step when planning your story - particularly if you want to ensure that your cast members all get equal ‘screen time’.
The character tracker allows you to keep track of who is present in each scene. Simply fill in the marker below a character’s name to indicate their presence at any given moment.
Step 6: Using the panel planner
Now that you know what’s happening on each page of your story, and how long each scene is going to be, it’s time to start breaking down the action into individual panels.
The panel planner functions much like the page planner in that the goal is to write a single line of text describing what happens in each panel. As with the previous steps, don’t worry about working in chronological order - you can rearrange panels at any time by numbering the circles. You can also draw thick lines between panels to indicate page breaks.
Conclusion
The purpose of the method described in the Comic Writer’s Journal is to help you produce three key resources:
a summary
an overview
and a completed page planner.
While the challenging but fun task of writing dialogue, action and emotion still remains, with these tools in hand you should now be free to focus purely on creativity, knowing that the plot and layout of your story are taken care of.
Best of luck!
Jon
The Comic Writer’s Journal
A customisable journal designed to help comic writers of all skill levels bring their stories to life.
