The interior resistance I feel to doing a really thought-out thumbnail, and then revising, is insurmountable for me. But if you’re a writer? Or even if you’re a cartoonist like me, and just seems to function better when writing scripts? If I’d been able to implement Matt’s comprehensive and serious thumbnailing technique (that we also teach to all our students) in my own work, I would have never embraced this method of writing. Especially if you’re writing for yourself, you need to work in drawings, panels, and pages. That is one answer, and it will make all the slack between intention and execution go away. Of course, you can (and should) write directly in thumbnails (aka layouts, aka storyboards (if you’re French)). And when it does happen, as often as not, the reality doesn’t match up to what you envisioned, when you finally draw it. But actually seeing how it will lay out on the page, in your head, while writing…it happens, but let’s be honest, not all the time, even for very experienced cartoonists. We think about where page breaks would work well, and try to fit the right amount of information in between one page break and the next.

That comes later, as we sit down and try to figure out how to break the action into atoms, and then into panels. We think about getting our protagonists from one point to another in terms of narrative, but not in terms of a certain number or arrangement of panels. Could this be true? I’m not sure I even want to know.) Most of us think in drifts of motion, action, emotional exchanges, which translate in some ways most directly to film or theater. Most of us don’t. ( Chris Ware has seemed to indicate that he doesn’t do layouts for his incredibly complex pages, he just starts at the top and draws. There are a few people out there who seem to think natively in comics pages. You create a template that matches your print size and shape (which forces you to think about ratio and readability, as well as the effect of format on the work), lay out guidelines for your standard grid (which gives your overall work coherence, even if you often break the grid), and block out scenes according to pages and space as opposed to just going as you go. This is a method that uses InDesign (or other graphic design software, I suppose) to allow you to write comics directly in page layouts, with continuous awareness of panel layout, page breaks, spreads, density of text on the page (or the “color” of the page, in a term I learned from Howard Chaykin), and the scale of a scene relative to the overall work, but without (necessarily) drawing. Using a visual script template to write comics This is an incredibly long post, so I’m actually going to make a table of contents. Since then, I’ve made a few refinements, and I’ve come up with a name for it, visual scripting. (As an aside: I’m proud to say I was able to simplify her life slightly by suggesting Adobe InDesign as opposed to Illustrator as a basic tool!) I wrote up Alison’s technique in detail in Mastering Comics. See the first couple of minutes of this video of Alison Bechdel walking you through her technique for glimpse of it. It was the idea of using graphic design software to create a mutable, flexible script with the initial stages of visual storytelling built in. And no, it wasn’t the part about photographing herself posing for every single one of her characters. What’s the Bechdel Method?īack in 2009 or so, I was talking to Alison Bechdel about her writing process, and she told me about a new technique she’d developed that has since turned out to be absolutely transformational for my comics. Between the Bechdel Test and the Bechdel Method, she’s more than earned her place in the comics pantheon, and her Guggenheim Fellowship. Second in the series: a video training for how to make a template.Īlso, you might be interested in Using Scrivener to create fictional comics.Īlison Bechdel is an not only a cartoonist, she’s an inventor.

If you are really interested in all this kind of stuff, I mean enough to get all the way through this post, you should definitely have my two textbooks on how to write comics, Drawing Words & Writing Pictures and Mastering Comics. I’ve gone through a long (and ongoing) process of development of my own process, and finally have arrived at a method I think is very worth sharing.

Simple comic page margin