I wished someone had told me years ago what I should do after next. This next step is what’s kept me back from having completed my graphic novel years ago I think. That’s not completely true, only partly, there were of course many more reasons but this is a big one.

Once the entire story has been mapped out in a series of single sentences, the heavy lifting begins. As before these sentences are grouped in Acts, like in a movie where you have scene changes, I consider each act the stuff that happens been a major scene change. In ‘Aitus Moralis’ these scene range between 5 and 10 pages each and total around 60-70 pages. So in total I’ve got around 70 lines of text. Each line describing a page.

At this stage no dialogue is put, no real descriptions, just ideas. Years ago, Bob Gale (the writer of the ‘Back to the Future’ movies, and one of the architects of the Batman: No Man’s Land year long story) said that it is wise to know where you’re going with a story before you’ve begun it; how you get there can be filled in later.

This has always been something I’ve driven towards. The problem is of course that in the past I honestly thought that the best way to get the process underway was to keep writing. I would do various exercises to get me to write. I’d write a page a day. I’d write random thoughts, I’d just write. I ended up with 100s of pages of script and character descriptions and no graphic novel.

When I came to drawing at the beginning of this sabbatical, I found my scripts didn’t connect with me. I couldn’t visualise what obviously was in my head at the time I wrote it. The problem of course was that I’d written this years ago and so there was no way to come up with the actual result.

The method that I stumbled upon, was to basically take that single sentence and start to scribble my thoughts onto the page. Bits of dialogue, doodles of faces, structure of the page. Panels. Anything that I thought that I wanted to happen. Camera shots that I wanted to achieve. The page then would basically grow organically. These effectively show you what is going on the page indicatively.

Often times I go back to previous pages as I get an idea. It’s all scribbled down. What I end up with is a collection of pages that more or less map out the entire book. From start to finish. Obviously the only person that has any clear idea of what is going on here is me…but that’s ok. I’ve visually created a draft ‘script’ that I can then start building upon.

I wish someone had told me about doing this as I was writing those 100s of pages. I might have had a visual script to work from, rather than 100s of pages of text with no context.

What amused me was when I was at the bookstore a week ago and i saw the Herge ‘Tintin and Alpha-Art’ book which basically showed his ‘script’ to final page methodology for his final unfinished book. The script was pretty much done in the same way.

At the moment, I’ve finished 45 pages in this draft method, seeing as I started this process little over a month ago, I’m on target to finishing off the whole first draft by the end of the month.