Thrilled to say that my article about writing graphic novels was published today by Women on Writing. Ta-da!
To learn more, check out my Fundamentals of Graphic Novel class. Sign-ups open now through the first day of class: Friday, October 30th.
“3 Common Myths about Writing Graphic Novels”
By: Melanie Faith
I’ve enjoyed reading graphic novels for the past ten years. These character-driven books are often humorous and fun-loving, but they can also be thought-provoking or even gritty and dramatic page-turners. They might explore historical landscapes, our current world settings, or a future planetary colony.
The astounding variety of graphic novels earns this genre a coveted spot on my overflowing bookshelves, always.
If you’re anything like me, though, you might initially have thought, this is so cool, but I can’t even draw a person to scale. I could never do that.
Let’s dive into three of the biggest myths about crafting graphic novels and take heart that not only can we read graphic novels, but we can write our own quite well, too:
1. You have to be a great artist who gets compliments on their drawing talent. False. By far, this is the myth I hear most. The thing is, if you can draw a stick figure, you can craft a comic. If you can sketch a caricature, you can create a comic. If you can run computer software, you could also make a graphic novel using software. If you have a pal who loves to draw, you could team up (you craft the story, they craft the illustrations) or you could hire an illustrator to bring your dialogue and characters to life for a collaboration that way.
Comics are an elastic, vivacious art form, made in all of these ways and more. For example, sometimes elements such as photographs and collage are also the art in “drawing” a comic.
There are as many styles of comics as you can imagine: from hand-made photocopied zines to computer-drawn animations and figures, from works produced on a shoestring budget of a single author with a day job in another industry to comics backed by an international corporation or a local small or regional publishing house, and everything in-between. Best of all: they are all legitimate art forms.
Just as we wouldn’t say that Gertrude Stein was any less of a poet than Shakespeare, they just both had vastly different literary styles and subject matter, a one-person, hand-sketched comic still belongs to the art form.
We can always take art classes later to improve our drawing skills if that’s our aim; what’s most important is that all of us, starting where we are, today, with whatever our native talent, can create an outline or caricature with personality and have fun exploring just what and where that drawing will take us and our stories. With the skills we have at this very moment.
2. You have to have an earth-shattering plot to begin a project like that. False. There are graphic novels about as many happenings under the sun as one can imagine, from cooking (Relish: My Life in the Kitchen) to living with mental illness (Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me). While some awesome comics do celebrate celebrities (Josephine Baker and Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide) or are set against a backdrop of political revolutions (Persepolis), just as many great comics detail what it’s like to be an everyday person with hopes and dreams that are frequently dashed in this topsy-turvy world.
There are graphic novels that explore familial and relationship turmoil, what it’s like to be a teen or a college student living away from home for the first time, or an immigrant learning a new language and culture, or a struggling middle-aged father who has lost a child, or someone living with an infertility struggle.
If it’s happened to you or someone you’re close to or if you’ve observed a truth about life, it could make an excellent graphic novel. Comics are about human experience, and the range and breadth of human experience is vast and breathtakingly promising for a writer.
3. You have to have the entire plot figured out before even bothering to start. False. One of the great aspects of writing comics is that you can begin by brainstorming a protagonist. Someone with a personality. Someone with struggles. Someone with a set-back and hidden (or not-so-hidden) dreams. And that protagonist’s little (or big) corner of the world (aka: setting). And that protagonist’s antagonist. One spark of inspiration builds and leads to the next.
And hey, you don’t even have to create a fictional character from scratch if you don’t want to—you can be the protagonist of you own story in graphic memoir. Many established and award-winning graphic artists, like Alison Bechdel and Lucy Knisley, are heroine characters in their books. Graphic memoirs can be autofiction, too. What a diverse genre!
It bears repeating: it doesn’t take a degree or special talent in art per say to create a narrative that meshes with artistic imagery to develop story. If you can doodle some forms in a margin, you can create a comic sketch. If you can pen a vignette or a short story-length tale with some conflict and characterizations and setting, you can develop the working start for a great graphic novel.
Whether you chose to buddy up with a trained artist or collage the scene yourself or incorporate photos or draw outlines and squiggles of your own or explore computerized software to craft drawings, you already have the basic building blocks to begin in this fascinating genre.
Photo courtesy of Unsplash, by: Mahdiar Mahmoodi