In a constant state of Bloom

SHORT STORY/ONE-SHOT/ONE CHAPTER/COMICS 101 CRASH COURSE RAPIDPUNCHES’ STYLE

I’m NOT an expert but I have some working experience I can share. You need experience to become great. Here is my set of instructions, tips, and notes towards making a 12-page comic.

My method is to work backwards. Personally I work “backwards” because the end is the only wholly necessary page or set of panels in the story. Everything in between is open to editing and hacking as the most important moments are emphasized and chosen.

I even plan/draw the end page first. The end is the last page a reader sees- so spend your freshest energies on making it as epic, memorable, poignant, and beautiful as #$%^&.

If you draw the pages from 1 to 12 sequentially you run the risk of fresh to burnt out- an uneven distribution of drawing skill. (treat the first page and the 2-page splash as you would the last).

Roughly… the steps to making your comic is

WRITE

PLAN THUMBNAILS

DRAW

…BEGIN THE WRITING (DO NOT SKIP NO MATTER WHAT) like this, in this order:

How does it end?

Does the protag succeed or fail?

What is the turning point of their story?

What the protag do that led them there?

Where does it start?

Who is this protag?

EXAMPLE:

Guy gets mauled by a bear.

This is a fail on the guy’s half.

The bear must eat something or he’ll starve to death.

It’s the guy’s fault the bear can’t find other food. He caused the avalanche that buried all the cabins.

The guy is yodeling in an avalanche zone.

The guy is some guy.

CREATING “THE BEAT SHEET” Take the above stuff and reorder it to make sense.

This guy yodels.

Echoes roll.

Snow slides down.

Avalanche buries the mountain.

Cabins are engulfed.

This bear has no access to cabin food and garbage.

Bear eats this guy.

Expand. Blow up important beats for emphasis. Keep less important beats brief.

This guy is hiking in the snowy mountains.

He comes across an avalanche warning sign.

There is nobody around but him.

A dumb expression forms over his face and he yodels.

Echoes roll but nothing nearby is moved.

At the top of the mountain the snow drifts twitch.

Guy, satisfied, hikes away from there still yodeling.

Frozen snow cracks.

Snow puffs billow and great slabs of ice crash down the mountain side.

Guy sees this and hightails it to safer ground.

Animals, people, are all panicking and getting pushed over by the rushing snow.

Cabins are destroyed.

The guy takes cover by an outcropping of rocks, fastens himself securely to the rock face, and waits for the avalanche to die down.

Avalanche dies down.

A lone bear shambles over from the other side of the mountain.

The bear goes to where a cabin used to be (only roof tiles are left). Bear sniffs a dish satellite.

Bear forlornly eats a food wrapper.

Bear tries to dig.

Guy comes down from the rocks he as climbing and sees bear.

Bear stops digging and sees him.

Guy runs.

Bear chases him down.

Bear eats the guy.

BEAT SHEET COMPLETED!!!

After the beat sheet, write up all the sound effects and speech bubbles and conversation/dialogue you want to be in your comic.

Since comics are a visual medium, highest priority is given to the beats. If a story can’t be told with the art without the dialogue– you messed up and it’s time to rethink your life choices.

Try to keep all your text chunks as short as a tweet. Professionally you don’t want more than 25 words per speech bubble and no more than 250 words per page.

Next is translating the beats to pages…

STRUCTURE OVERVIEW:

[1] point of entry, in media res, hero intro

[2][3] conflict. establish conflict, setting, and mood by the third page. [4][5] rising action/false resolution to conflict/investigation

[6][7] turning point/plot twist/epiphany (this one epic image, to page spread is pivotal, spend a lot of effort into creating this)

[8][9] aftermath/“darkness before dawn”/struggle [10][11] recovery/“rise and conquer”/“fall”

[12] resolution/final end/cliffhanger

[front cover][interior] [interior][back cover]

——————–

My maximum per page is nine panels but I’ve seen pages that have way more. I like to have about 3 to 4 panels per row or less but I’ve seen the “rules” broken before. Advanced comic book artists manipulate time with the number of panels and the size of each panel.

remember, DIAGONALS!!! open up an issue of batman, superman, spider man, deadpool or whatever youre reading theyre everywhere.

———-

…DRAW IN THIS ORDER:

Page 12,

Page 6 and 7 (this is typically one large image that takes up the space of two pages),

Page 1,

and then the rest.

ONLY “DEVIATION” ALLOWED:

Page 12 and 1*

Page 6 and 7,

and then the rest.

*Draw the first and last page as a spread in situations where the beginning of the story mirrors the end of the story.

Cover is dead last.

———-

(If at the very end you find out you need more pages and it’s absolutely unavoidable and totally necessary you have to add them in fours. Try to stick to 12 pages for this crash course.)

——————–

FURTHER NOTES:

Plan and draw the pages in spreads (the twos) since this is how it will appear in print and when you submit them to an editor for review guess what, the pages with an exception to the first and last will be reviewed as spreads.

You at most only need one establishing panel of the setting and environment (scene) per page.

Forget “true to life” perspective outside of the establishing panel). Practice diagonal composition of objects and subjects within panels. For dynamism.

You don’t have to present the text all in one go (one paragraph or bubble). You can and should break up paragraphs, sentences, and if you need to single out words– to make smaller, more easily managed bubbles to scatter through the panel.

Less important moments have smaller panels and or lesser detail. More details (or more word bubbles) slow down time. More drawn detail also creates a concentration of values (it’s darker and sometimes combines together as one shape or mass)

Know your light sources. Control the blacks. Control the values.

TIPS | COFFEE? :3 | dA | IG |  ♡ |  ❤ |  ⋆

Wait.

Hang on.

Sorry.

Bit confused here - I keep seeing posts saying things such as 'Neil Gaiman has no social media' and other words that come to a similar conclusion. However, Mr. Neil Gaiman does, in fact, have a social media. Mr. Neil Gaiman has multiple social medias. I have seen them. They are easily found on Google.

So why do you supposedly not have any social medias? And if you do not have any social medias and this is all an elaborate hoax set up by the ghost of Sir Terry Pratchett and the not-ghost of Michael Sheen in order to play an amusing trick on Mr. Neil Gaiman by convincing the world that he has a Tumblr account, along with various others on various other social medias, then please inform me. I would be most grateful.

Sincerely, a rather confused being

It's hard to explain, especially because the original post has now vanished. But I have searched the web, from lowest to highest, and found this for you, which will, I hope, explain everything.

The poor man.

Many magazines have closed their submission portals because people thought they could send in AI-written stories.

For years I would tell people who wanted to be writers that the only way to be a writer was to write your own stories because elves would not come in the night and do it for you.

The poor man.

Many magazines have closed their submission portals because people thought they could send in AI-written stories.

For years I would tell people who wanted to be writers that the only way to be a writer was to write your own stories because elves would not come in the night and do it for you.

Now come the days of the King! May they be blessed.

something interesting about willy wonka experience scam is that some were tricked by ai art. goofballs loved to say ai 'art' will make EVERYONE professional artists but when you see an add with ai art your brain already thinks 'this is a fake company'. it already signals 'cheap'

what scoundrel techgoofs never seem to understand is that most successful art that buds like is not entirely about technique it is about taste, and you cannot fake taste. the ai art my look 'technically' proficient, but it also evokes 'scam' 'cheap' and 'things i block on twitter'

Everyone: No, she’s one-dimensional and still only exists to please the hero’s ego

Male scifi and fantasy writers: You’re never happy! This is how characters are written! Besides, it’s much harder for us to write women because we are men!

Terry Pratchett: *creates a female character who is literally the embodyment of a dog, sets her up to be the love interest of Protagonist Hero Man.* *writes her as clever, emotionally tortured, lonely and powerful* *uses her to explore difficulties of bisexuality and masculine dominated workforces*

Terry Pratchett: *Creates a pair of old witches, one of whom is a virgin and the other who has slept with lots of men.* *makes them best friends, never dismisses one lifestyle of the other, explains lifestyle choices based on characters history and personality, uses this to develop each character as the books progress*

Terry Pratchett: *Writes Sybil Rankin* *makes the powerful rich lady heavy set but beautiful, never plays her by her looks, develops her as she ages, acknowledges the way society views such people and then spits on their attitudes* *does it again with Agnes*

Terry Pratchett: *Writes a book about an entire army secretly being women, creates complex female relationships, introduces same sex relationships completely naturally*

Terry Pratchett: *takes old joke about female dwarves and uses it to explore gender identity without making it seem forced or unnatural, carefully discusses some of the issues and complextities whilst still making funny and witty observasions and maintaining genuine fantasy tropes*

(from: https://comicbook.com/comics/news/poison-ivy-batman-guide/)

Want a fabric that doesnt fray from being gently caressed? Want yarn thats not 100% plastic and splits if you touch it wrong? Good luck finding that if you dont have a genuinely good crafts store near you.

Go on any thread where people are trying to figure out where to buy fabric. 50% of it is people saying big stores are servicable, online stores work, or the like, and the other 50% are talking about how bad the quality is or how the quality of a website dropped because it was bought out

Also it begs the question: if your fabric, trimmings, beads, trinkets, yarns are all made in the same factories as fast fashion, can we really talk about it being "handmade" and "sustainable"?

I went to the Craft market, where people sell their own craftwork, and there were some beautiful earrings, but I could tell they bought the parts on aliexpress, such as wires, beads, pendants, then put them together into a product. Is this custom work?

I’ve been struggling to write for years, but telling stories is all I want to do. I have ideas and plots and characters all figured out! But actually getting the words onto paper? I just can’t do it. There’s a mental block or something getting in the way.

I want to write, I so badly do. I want to tell my stories! But no matter how hard I try, no matter how much I love the story, the words never work properly. I can day dream scenes up perfectly, but as soon as I’m near paper the words all vanish.

I guess what I’m actually asking is: how did you defeat the blank page?

Well, first of all, I can confidently tell you that your storytelling per se is working just fine. You just told me a perfectly cogent story right there, in writing. So that's good to know.

Now let me put your mind a little at rest by telling you something reassuring about the Writer's Brain:

It's not the sharpest knife in the block, if you take my meaning. It can be tricked. It can be fooled. It can be bamboozled into working when it doesn't want to... sometimes with embarrassing ease. (And this approach is, by and large, far preferable to sitting around over-analyzing one's interior life to figure out what went wrong with your developmental process somewhere in the dim lost past. Just hornswoggle the silly thing into working and then do the analysis later, if you can be bothered.)

Sometimes just changing something basic in the process the Writer's Brain is expecting is enough to make it lose the plot (so to speak...) and let you get on with work. And in your case I'd say, more or less immediately: Have you tried telling the story to yourself out loud, recording it, and then transcribing the recording?

Because this problem is a commonplace among storytellers. Sit them down in the pub and give them tea or a drink and start them going, and you'll get half an effortless hour of hilarious prose about What The Cat Did In The Middle Of The Night or When The Neighbors Were Fighting In The Street Again Yesterday. But show them blank paper, or an empty screen, and (now that the pressure to perform is suddenly in place) they freeze.

So try doing an end run around your writing brain. Borrow or otherwise procure a little recorder of some kind. (Or if you've got a smartphone, add a voice recording app to it.) Go get comfortable somewhere and get yourself into that daydream state, and then—making sure the recorder's on—start talking.

It doesn't have to be perfect unblemished prose. The pursuit of that comes later, after draft zero-minus-one. Just tell the story... or some of it. Or a fragment of it. Even a few paragraphs is a triumph, in a situation like this. You may, during the recording, have to talk yourself into the story stage by starting out talking about something else first. Let that happen.

Then when you're done recording, listen to it and transcribe it (typed or handwritten, as you please).

And maybe a day later, do this again. And a day or two later, once more. And so forth.

You're going to have to keep at this, because your Writer's Brain may start suspecting what you're up to, and try throwing spanners into the works. (Its favorite being "Oh, this isn't working, I may as well give up..." Pay no attention to that nagging little voice behind the curtain. Just keep doing what you're doing. Persistence is a superpower.)

The thing to keep reminding yourself, as you settle into this process, is that sooner or later the WB's resistance is going to flag, because you really do want to tell stories. It does too. What you have to teach it is that—to coin a phrase—resistance is useless. :)

Anyway: give this a try. You'll need to be doing this daily for at least a couple of months to find out whether it works or not. So let me know how it goes.

(BTW: once you've broken through the barrier, you may well find that dictation is a good routine way for you to generate your first draft. At that point—should you feel inclined to go a little higher-tech than recording and hand transcription—let me recommend Dragon Anywhere. This is a month-to-month subscription version of Dragon's flagship text to speech program—the one @petermorwood and I got Terry Pratchett to use when he started having difficulty typing. I use Anywhere a lot, on days when it's easier to write stretched out or lying down than it is sitting up. It transcribes what you say, and then you can just email it to yourself and cut-and-paste it into your writing document. Very handy.)