Scripting a Graphic Novel

This article was originally posted on November 12, 2019, on Victoria Ying’s blog, and has been shared with permission.

It’s November, and you might have seen people on the internet talking about NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month! I love this event, and I’ve participated in it for the last 2 years. In fact, my graphic novel “City of Secrets” coming out with Penguin/Viking in 2020 was originally a prose NaNo project!

I’ve noticed a lot of other cartoonists talking about using NaNo as a way to write scripts for their graphic novel projects, and I think that’s a great idea. I love the sense of community around NaNo and the sense of urgency and competition created by having everyone working towards the same goal.

I wanted to write this post because i remember when I was first starting on my journey into adapting my prose novel into a graphic novel and how i really had no idea how to start.

There are just as many ways to write a graphic novel as there are to writing a novel! However, I’ve noticed three popular formats that we can discuss here.

Three Popular Ways to Script your Graphic Novel

1) Thumbnail Scripting

This method is used by people who are much more visual and want to see the story unfold almost like a film. They write as they thumbnail to get a feeling of the paneling and rhythms of the book. I tried this method for my second Nano Project. The upsides to this, are that you get a draft of a project that is easily shared with others and which can be pretty close to the final product, minus the polish.

This works for a lot of cartoonists, however, I personally had a harder time with it because I felt locked into my panels and had a harder time making edits and changes when there was art. It’s a very personal preference however and there’s no right or wrong way, just the way that works for you!

In this example, I sketched my thumbnails on one page of a notebook and used the opposite side for the dialog.

2) Screenplay Format

This method is used by a few graphic novelists I know. Bryan Lee O’Malley has described this as his preferred method and Jen Wang also has a sample of her screenplay style script at the end of “The Prince and the Dressmaker”

When I was starting to write my script, I was also interested in writing for film and television. Having come from that world, I was used to reading screenplays and could visualize the final and move quickly through the script.

This is my personally prefered method. However, I know that for those who are not used to reading screenplays, this can feel very unnatural. I like to fix as much as I can without having any drawing done, so this is the method I used for “City of Secrets.”

3) Comics Format

Comics format is the most descriptive and most parallel to the comic without doing any art. In a Comics format, you make page breaks and panel breaks.

When I was working on Diana Princess of the Amazons, this was the method that Shannon and Dean used, and it was hugely helpful for me as the illustrator to not have to spend as much time thinking about how I was going to panel the pages.

I’ve used this method in the past as well for shorts. I do like how it can save you time in the thumb-nailing stage, however for my own work, I’ve noticed that I will sometimes deviate from the pages/panels indicated in the script, but it still gives me a general idea of the length of the book/project.

BONUS! Mixed Screenplay Format

I sort of made this up, it’s the method I’m using now. I realized the downside to the screenplay format was that I had no idea how long my comic was going to be. A normal film is around 110 pages and equates to one minute per page. However, there’s no accurate way to transfer that in graphic novels because pages and minutes in a film are very different things. The advantage of comics is the ability to linger on images, or to make panels with reaction shots. My script in screenplay format for “City of Secrets” was 80 pages long, but turned into a 252 page book!

I did a comics formatting for a while, but realized I was getting very tripped up in the writing process by thinking about the panels. The story wasn’t flowing for me. So I decided to do a kind of hybrid. I know how long a page “feels” now so decided to just introduce page breaks into a screenplay format. The advantage of this is that the story moves more naturally in my mind, but I also get a general idea of how long my book will be, or I can aim at a page goal more easily.

Now, perhaps you will find your own method of scripting your book. That’s totally fine! There’s no “right” way to get there, it just matters that you start! These four methods should give you a starting line. I have personally tried all four and although I have my favorites, it took me goofing around with them all to find it. Do whatever works for you, but know that it’s okay if that changes or is different than what other people are doing!