How do I write a comic if I can't draw
How do I write a comic, manga or graphic novel for the first time?
I grabbed a pen, paper and started writing in Google Docs. That's the honest and brutal answer.
Write, write, write then write some more. For 8 weeks I woke up, write 3 pages for a new story then threw it away and started again.
At this point being a creator is like being a Pilot, at some point it all comes down to flight hours. After 2 months, I learned through brute force what a story was, wasnt and the ways I prefer telling a story.
I strongly recommend you do the same. There is no shortcut for talent. Don't mistake a person being born with perfect memory for "talent", rest assured almost all of thsoe invididuals give up at the first sign of pain.
The 8 Week Routine for how to write a manga
This is the routine I ran every day for 8 weeks. If you want it from a standing start, here is the brute-force version that actually got me there.
Morning
- Wake up and write 10 new Slug Lines for a NEW story.
Lunch
- While working for 10 hours at the salary job, rewrite the 10 ideas.
Afternoon
- Pick 3 of the Slug lines that I like and write a 500 word story about each one. It must answer who, where, when, what, how and why.
- Pick 1 and rewrite the 500 words with an original character name and refine it.
Night
- Delete all your work. Go to sleep then do the same again the next day.
Our Baby Is Strange was the final story in that 2 month journey.
I realised that my ideas for what they are worth are at the very least unique in a world full of slopulus AI. Instead of focusing on on your lack of ability to draw why not focus on the abilities you do have.
This is the tough decision you will have to make as a creator.
In the case of Our Baby Is Strange, I used MangaPlay Studio for Google Docs to get the point across of what I wanted to say in the manga then made the commitment to hire an artist to take these "ambitious" MSPaint drawings and turn them into a chapter.
You may be wondering how this lead to the creation of Enemy Of the State?
You switched from Game Development to Graphic Novels/Manga?
Yup. At some point you have to take a leap of faith and get dug in. At the time I was creating a game where you were are the only clerk at the sole airport on an Island of apes. You're name is Red, the Red Head and your job is to fine these apes and drum up charges so they never leave but you still make the company a fortune!
Those 8 weeks of battle training allowed me to see the strenghts and weaknesses of ideas with profnoun eyes, in this idea I saw an opportunity to bring "Pan Airways" to life. I spent every free minute I had for 3 months to re-invent Pan Airways into a fully fledged out story.
What if "Red" came into work one day, and over the course of a day the whole Island went to shit?
Thus was the birth of Enemy Of The State, a 210 Page Screenplay wrote entirely in Mangaplay Studio. I was blessed to have the same artist of P For Pistol (MGOSketches) draw the illustrations for it.
Superhumans are stuck on an Island where they have been for over 700 years. Our little "RED" comes into work one day as the guardian of the Airport, the only place people are allowed to legally leave. Before she can begin, enemies left and right begin making moves to invade the Island with little warning.
I switched from Game Development to writing Comics because I could. I still fully intend to create P For Pistol but the reality of life is that I need money! I have no intention of purposefully dying a broke artist.
How do I write a comic when Final Draft costs more than my rent?
When I first looked into how to write a graphic novel properly, every blog post told me the same thing. Buy Final Draft. Final Draft is the industry standard for screenplay writing software in Hollywood, sure, but I am one broke indie creator trying to figure out how to write a comic without a budget.
Final Draft costs around $250 last I checked. For someone who has not written a single page yet, that is an absurd ask. I am not paying $250 to discover I have no ideas. I tried the free trial, hated the interface, and went back to Google Docs for another week of brute-force writing.
Here is the thing about Final Draft. It is built for film, not for how to write a manga or how to write a graphic novel. The panel descriptions in a comic script do not map cleanly to scene headings in a screenplay. You end up fighting the software instead of writing the story. I wasted maybe 4 hours of my 8 week training arc on tool comparisons before I gave up and went with plain text.
That is why I cared so much when Superscript.app showed up. It was the first screenplay writing software that did not pretend a comic was a movie. Then the creator killed it. So I rebuilt it as MangaPlay Studio because I refuse to learn how to write a comic inside a tool that hates the format.
How do I write a comic page-by-page once the script is done?
The script is half the job. The other half of how to write a graphic novel is breaking the screenplay into actual pages an artist can draw. Enemy Of The State is 210 pages. Each page got a panel breakdown, dialogue placement note, and a one-line visual brief.
I do this directly in MangaPlay Studio. The tag syntax lets me label a beat as a splash page, a 4-panel grid, or a silent panel without leaving the doc. Final Draft would have me writing "INT. AIRPORT - DAY" over and over for something that is fundamentally a visual medium, not a film.
If you are starting out and asking how to write a comic for the first time, do not buy Final Draft. Use Google Docs with the MangaPlay extension, write 8 weeks of throwaway scripts the way I did, and only pay for screenplay writing software once you have a finished draft worth formatting.
What screenplay writing software do I use for writing a comic script?
As such, the tools I created while making these mangas I have decided to put online for free.
To start your next story, I recommend the Superscript/Mangaplay format.
I truly loved using Superscript.app but the creator killed it off. If you are a beginner writer trying to make a manga, comic or graphic novel then imo that was your best bet. The format was straightforward, natural and had some image support but the software is no longer around.
To fill this gap, I put Mangaplay Studio online for free on a website and a Google Docs extension! Superscript lives on. The format name has changed to Mangaplay because I needed to add some functionality to the syntax.
This version of the Superscript successor comes with specific tags to label what type of panel it should be, with the bonus of being 1 click away to turn it into a screenplay.
