Thread "Share Your Writing Experiences" in forum "Networking & Community Projects*"

Posted at 6:03PM, Mar. 24, 2016

Share your writing experiences and tell how you how you honed your craft as a comic book writer.

Posted at 6:03AM, Mar. 25, 2016

I didn't think of myself as a writer until fairly recently. I had done some creative writing classes in high school and college, but I hadn't churned out any books or essays. What I really enjoyed doing in my spare time was playing Role playing games. The table top kind, where all the pictures are in your head. And when I moved from Washington State to Virginia, I lost all my good roll playing friends (well, we're still friends, but getting together on the weekends is kind of out). I took up playing via forums on the internet, and that's when I realized I was a story teller. That's what I enjoyed. Creating characters, telling tales. I started writing fiction. I really wanted to write a hard boiled detective novel. But I kept writing down this dark path that really bummed me out. so when I stumbled on the idea of a comic strip, it seemed like the perfect way to tell a detective story, and keep it light hearted at the same time.

Posted at 6:03PM, Mar. 27, 2016

Bruno Harm wrote:
I didn't think of myself as a writer until fairly recently. I had done some creative writing classes in high school and college, but I hadn't churned out any books or essays. What I really enjoyed doing in my spare time was playing Role playing games. The table top kind, where all the pictures are in your head. And when I moved from Washington State to Virginia, I lost all my good roll playing friends (well, we're still friends, but getting together on the weekends is kind of out). I took up playing via forums on the internet, and that's when I realized I was a story teller. That's what I enjoyed. Creating characters, telling tales. I started writing fiction. I really wanted to write a hard boiled detective novel. But I kept writing down this dark path that really bummed me out. so when I stumbled on the idea of a comic strip, it seemed like the perfect way to tell a detective story, and keep it light hearted at the same time.
[/qoute]

I agree.

Posted at 11:03PM, Mar. 27, 2016

Hoo boy… Okay, let's try to piece together my writing history.

I guess I got started back in junior high. I really enjoyed the creative writing unit in my English classes, and started writing short stories and novellas just for myself and my friends to enjoy. I don't have any of those stories anymore, but I do recall being really interested in science fiction and fantasy. The stories weren't particularly good, but I had fun writing them and my friends enjoyed reading them. I got so into it, in fact, that I went on a young writers' retreat for a weekend and bought a couple of books about how to write.

In high school, I was lucky enough to take some animation classes. Learning how to draw storyboards got me started on telling stories with images rather than words alone. In fact, those early storyboards were created with purely silent animated films in mind; I didn't have any access to any sort of voice talent, so I learned to tell these simple stories with visuals alone.

I don't remember exactly when I first tried my hand at doing comics, but it was sometime between grade 11 and my first year of university. I was still an animation student, and wanted to make movies. However, film making is incredibly difficult no matter how you approach it. Even if I animated everything myself, I would still need voice actors. Finding voice actors who are willing to volunteer their time or be paid with beer and pizza is not as easy as some might lead you to believe, so I decided to try making a comic as a more cost-effective means of telling a visual story.

Needless to say, I found the medium incredibly satisfying. I started really paying more attention to comics as a medium rather than a stand-in for animation, and snapped up a few books about the history of comics and comic theory. Some of those books really got me thinking about how you could tell a story in ways that film or literature just can't hope to do. While my current style is very much inspired by cinema, I've got some ideas for playing with the nature of comics in the future.

At some point I'd love to do something like a single long panel, long enough to require a fair bit of scrolling, to imply that a single action is taking a long time to complete. Or maybe I'll put a huge crowd or a busy scene in that very long panel, and all that scrolling will create a sense of time passing between what's happening at the left side of the panel and what's happening on the right.