GRAPHIC NOVELS
AN INTRODUCTION
THE WRITER’S DESK © Chad Corrie
This essay kicks off a mini-series dealing with graphic novels, namely how to create them. Having had some experience with the medium I thought it would be fun and perhaps beneficial if I shared some of the aspects of what goes into making graphic novels in the first place. The idea is to pass on a little about each step along the way and provide enough info to help you get a clear idea of what you’ll be in store for if you travel this path.
Graphic Novel vs. Prose Novel
Before we get much farther let’s look at a question I get asked from time to time and one I think is helpful to evaluate if you plan on crafting your own graphic novel. That is: “What are the pros and cons of graphic vs. prose novels?”
For those who might not know prose simply means stories that aren’t told in a graphic way, that is with tons of pictures used to tell the story. You can still have illustrations in prose books but they aren’t the means by which you “read” or experience the story. In prose works you have to read what a place looks like, read who says what and how, and so forth. It’s not the same as having all that drawn up for you and all you have to do is read dialogue word balloons, sound effects, and captions.
That being said what are some of the benefits of graphic novels over prose works? Well, for one, you get to tell the story through pictures, making sure readers get a certain view of things if that is important to you as the author. They are also much faster for many folks to read as there is less text to wade through and more pictures to look at. They can be easier to write in that you have less of a set up to convey your ideas (we’ll get to that later when we talk about scripts). You can get more story in less pages—that is to say you can have a page in a graphic novel showcase a whole host of things that might take a few pages or more in a prose work—in some cases a whole prose page could even be condensed into one panel on a page (more on that in future installments).
What are some of the cons then? Well, for one, you have to work with a few other people to bring your story to completion. This isn’t too divorced from the editor relationship in prose works only in graphic novels you’re asking another to visually interpret your work—sometimes again and again—to bring a final product to pass. You also lose some of the control of the flow of the work—that’s to say it’s harder to control the speed with which one reads the work as you could with prose writing in which one has the power of punctuation, paragraph breaks, page breaks, and other tools to sort of set the pace or mood for what’s being read. Graphic novels lend themselves to being read as fast as the reader can go. And many speed through them without much of a second thought, which could be good or bad depending on what you what the reader to experience.
Graphic novels, as I stated, are condensed storytelling, that is they’re able to take larger chunks of story and condense it into something more bite-sized. When this happens new writers can often find they have less story than they thought to fill up a set number of pages. The big con, however, is the time constraints associated with graphic novels. In short, the more people you get involved in the creative process the longer things will take. Each will have to do their part for the story, and each contribution will take time, which often will extended the production cycle of a graphic novel beyond what’s more common for prose work where it’s just one author and an editor.
While it’s good to know a bit about the pros and cons of prose and graphic works it really comes down to what sort of story you want to tell. Some stories are better suited to the graphic novel medium than others. Having some pictures and means to share the story more directly can really make some tales shine. It can also diminish or weaken others. The choice, ultimately, is up to you.
Formatting Your Story for Graphic Novels
Once the graphic novel option is selected the writer has to make up their mind as to how large their work will be (in page count) and set up their story around that. The page count will serve as a sort of guide to the progression of the story: conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and so forth.
Sometimes this will be preset for you, such as if you wish to write a traditional comic book, which has twenty-two pages of script or if a publisher looks to publish graphic novels of only one hundred and twenty pages. Other times you are left with making up your own mind on the subject. Be aware, though, that it is better to have a number of pages that is divisible by eight to make it easier when it comes time to printing it up (if you’re going the standard publishing route) as printers operate on the divisible by four (or sometimes four) rule. If you fall short of this number they’ll have to add additional pages to reach the next page break.
So unless you want to have a some extra material enclosed with your story that goes beyond the script itself, then look to have numbers like 64, 80, 96, 120, 136, and so forth. This does not count the covers of a graphic novel or comic (which you can print on as well and count as four more pages—the front and back of each cover), which are added to the total page count. Again, this is for traditional printing. If you’re looking to do digital or other forms of publication for your work then you’re open to a wider selection of options.
So now that we’ve gone over the basic introduction to starting out in graphic novels take a moment and decide what you might be able to do with your story's page count. Plot and flesh it out according to what numbers you think you might need, and play around with some ideas. And yes, you’ll find that this is a fluid thing as well—the story condensing and/or taking a little twist here or there as you move forward on your first few ventures. The important thing is that you now have a general idea of the borders of your sand box and that allows us to move ahead by putting the story into center light.