APE IN A CAPE: A Hopefully Helpful Thread

APE IN A CAPE: A Hopefully Helpful Thread:

nerdshipkelvin:

gailsimone:

I had a Hollywood friend ask me this morning about how to format a comic book script. That's a big question. I'm going to answer it, and I thought it might be helpful to some of you who are aspiring to write comics yourself (the short answer is, everyone does it differently. The long answer is,…

What is your editing process when writing? 

Interesting question. Okay, my first rule…NO ONE SEES MY FIRST DRAFT.

No one. Never.

A first draft is for ME. It's for me to look at, to tinker with, and to improve. It's the wrong time to bring people in, they will only muddy the waters.

So I always go through and do a second pass before an editor or artist sees it. The second pass doesn't mean re-writing from scratch, it means fixing dialogue, dropping or editing scenes, that sort of thing.

WHILE I am writing my drafts, I am constantly editing. What I am doing is listening for the alarm bell in  my head. If a line sounds generic, if it sounds like anyone could have written it, or any character could have said it, the alarm goes off and I try to reconfigure it. I don't want generic characters, I don't want to repeat other stories I've enjoyed.

So I guess my advice would be to develop that alarm bell. If you write, "I'm getting too old for this shit!" your bell should go off. I might change it to, "Jesus, I thought I was going to die skydiving." Anything, something different, something fresh. If your script is a sandwich, you don't want any old meat in it, right?  Do something different. Every time you hear that bell.