Turning You Story into a Graphic Novel
Your Stor y You will be creating a graphic extract from the start section of you story
that you wrote with Alex.You will not have enough time to complete your whole story! Your story extract should have a direction and a structure.You will need
to decide which point is best to cut off your extract where it makes sense and to make for a dramatic to be continued….! It has to be well-defined , no shortcomings in the story can be painted
over by the artwork. To be anything other than a noisy mess of colour, comics and graphic novels need a good solid script.
Your Stor y These days the graphic novels canon is aimed at those aged 16 to 60
yet within that demographic there’s a kaleidoscope of variation so large that it looks almost limitless. It’s not just superheroes.Your protagonist can be anything from a
talking cyborg dog, to an ordinary little girl and live in any time, place or dimension. It can be historical, comical or biographical. Be as imaginative as
you can, just don’t lose sight of the fact you’re writing a piece of fiction just like any other and that your job is to engage the reader. The same rules of story apply – a solid structure, good
dialogue, compelling characters.
Pitch Your Stories Try to condense your story down to a few sentences and in less than a minute
share it with the rest of the class. You need to start the hard way editing down your content! It needs to give
someone enough information to make one of two decisions: 1) This isn’t for me. 2) I’d like to know more. * Shorter is better
* Tell only the most important piece of the story * Focus on one or two characters * Don’t name the characters Here is an example to give you inspiration:
Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone: ”A boy wizard begins training and must battle for his life with the Dark Lord who murdered his parents.”
Dialogue vs Narration The difference between dialogue and narration? Dialogue is what appears in speech bubbles Narration is what occurs in separate boxes in or around the panels. Speech is what you’ll be editing the most throughout your drafts, because if you
get it wrong it’ll take the whole book down with it, no matter how good the art. It’s a fine balance: dialogue has to be engaging and has to move the plot along, but
can’t be so text-heavy that it causes the plot to drag under the weight of its own exposition or obstruct the artwork with enormous speech-bubbles. The general rule is that less is more. My advice: choose each word carefully.
Inevitably there’ll be panels and pages where you won’t need any dialogue at all. Some panels will be all action, or the artwork alone will do the
talking. This is a graphic novel after all. For instance, you don’t want a character saying “Great Caesar’s
ghost, I’m so sad!” if you have already described them as having a ‘pained expression’ or ‘ a sorrowful stare’ and the artist has drawn them as sad. It would just be a waste of words and look clumsy.You also don’t
want them to say “Great Caesar’s ghost, I’m so sad!” because no one ever says that and it’s bad writing.
Action! As with a movie script, you just need to put down the action: ‘It is raining. X crosses
the street. They push open the door of the comic book shop’ etc. Don’t get too eager and go into too much detail. Unless the colour of a character’s
clothing is of importance to the story, leave it out. Usually one to two pages of comic script (action, dialogue and all) equal one page
of graphic novel so keep in mind the space you’re using or you are going to have trouble squeezing everything in and the page will look crushed and complicated. You will need to script the sound effects (SFX) in the action and this is where you can have
the sort of onomatopoeic fun novelists hardly ever get as you make up word like ‘Splot!’ and ‘Pang!’ and ‘Kraka-thoom!’
Star t Your Planning Who is the target audience for your graphic novel? Why? What is your story similar to or inspired by? Films, games, fables etc can you
highlight examples where this is the case Are there any important historical or contemporary references that you want to
highlight in your graphic novel? Why is it needed in your Graphic novel?
e.g Society, Race, Politics, Popular Culture, Religion etc. What do you want the art style to be like? Provide examples of what you would
like your Graphic Novel to look like.(Remember, you need to consider your drawing capabilities!) Choose the introduction length for your graphic novel and justify your selection. Sketch out a rough thumbnail of how you would like one panel to look like considering
dialogue, speech and drawing to show the visual and written aesthetic you want to go for. Be ready to share this with the class at the end.