Write a Graphic Novel in 5 Simple Steps

Creative Writing in 5 Simple Steps

by Jeffrey Edward Peters

Comic books, also called "sequential art" or "graphic storytelling," are currently a billion-dollar industry. Books of sequential art, popularly known as graphic novels, fill bookstores and libraries all over the world. In WRITE A GRAPHIC NOVEL IN 5 SIMPLE STEPS, author Jeffrey Edward Peters shows young, aspiring writers how to create new universes of their own through the unique combination of words and pictures that make a graphic novel.

48 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2012

Reviews

[Julia Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This guide offers tips on creating a comic in clear language. Each step is in a seperate section, allowing for reading the book in order or out, or even just offering up selections for inspiration to students. Discussion of comic craft is blent with talk about its application in the real world. For instance, in the section on scripting versus the Marvel Method (giving an artist a loose description of the story, letting them draw what they like, then adding the dialogue and story afterwards), there was an explanation of how a popular character was only fleshed out because the writer liked the way the artist depicted him.

I could definitely see using this in my classroom as part of a graphic novel creation unit. I would love to have my students create a one to six panel comic to convey information instead of doing a standard book report at some point, just to see how it went. It seems like a fun way to have children respond to literature!