I hadn't realised how sparse a graphic novel script could feel. I brought myself over from the radio script which I passed my word count total for and started in on my Manga and, geeze it's going much more slowly and the word count per page, even when describing panel shape and perspective are so small.

It feels like I'm barely making any headway. and I'm also worried that a good peice of the introduction is silent panels. as a great many things have to happen to set the scene for the rest of the story. I'll have to review it a little more and see if there is something more needed. Narative panels or something. It seems that one person talks once or twice per page for the first eight pages. That doesn't seem right.

Have you ever read a Frank Miller script?

http://fourcolorheroes.home.insightbb.com/killingjokescript.html

If you feel this is more your style, go for it. I write as much as I think a panel needs without making the artist feel they don't have any creative power.

Medjai,

I think that's an Alan Moore script, isn't it? But yea, he does go a little overboard on the detail, me thinks (an understatement). I bet the poor artist feels like he can't breathe.

Like you, I'm trying to get in what's needed without restricting the artist, but I'm always thinking "is this enough?". I feel it's more like being a film director in many wys than a writer, as you're actually calling the shots in a comic script as well. I'm adapting a few short stories and screeplays for mine, so at least the story's there, but it's still quite a challenge breaking it down into the most effective "moments"... But most creative and satisfying too...

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/216460
http://clix.to/chrisharveywebsite
http://pc.celtx.com/profile/ChrisHarvey

You're right, Chris. It is Alan Moore's The Killing Joke. Sorry, its been a long day and I was reading 300 earlier. Well in the opening paragraph Moore tries to make the artist comfortable, but I know many artists who wouldn't feel comfortable after having to read all that. Again, I try to stay somewhere in between.

The thing is that I full intend to be the artist. So I don't have to be careful to leave room for cocreative license. It's just no matter how hard I try I cannot use more then a few sentances to say That we see Natsuki with a startled expression from slightly above and to the left. The panle is angled toward page center and rises above line one and below the center line. I mean that's the bloody panel. The look of surprise is all that needs expressing and there is nothing else to describe. Now a page of these type of panels amounts to so few words and you can get upwards of nine panels sometimes per page.

I could very well run out of material for the story before page twenty.

I know what you're feeling and I agree, sometimes it does feel a little odd knowing that the script for a page or 3 is so spare but that it's conveying a lot in the future visuals. Look at this as a good thing, though. Unlike NaNo where you can write Steinbeck-like descriptions and reach 50K when you're only 1/3 through a story, this Graphic Novel format forces you through to see what will happen next. Where is that story going? And, if you truly finish the story arc at 20 pages of script, write a sequel, take a page from Piers Anthony's "Incarnations of Immortality" and tell another characters intersecting story, but from his or her view this time. Explore your world and the people in it.

Everyone has a story that can be told, our 'job' is to find the most interesting way to do it :)

--Jenn

SF! '08 Adaptation of NaNo '04: Wedding Tarot
http://www.theweddingtarot.com/blog