I’ll bet you didn’t know that October is National Graphic Novel Writing Month. 😎
Glenn Hauman of ComicMix describes NaGraNoWriMo thusly:
The goal is simple: By October 31st, you write a script for at least a 48 page long graphic novel.
Despite my employment by the comics industry, I’ve never really wanted to write for the medium. Okay, okay, twenty years ago I’d have thought writing for comics would have been awesome, but I was also sixteen years-old and my juvenile impulses shouldn’t be held up as any sort of present-day standard.
Would I want to participate in NaGraNoWriMo? Do I want to write a script for a forty-eight page comic book in the month of October?
I thought about this on Friday, and recognizing that this would most likely produce an interesting (but ultimately unusable) spec script, I thought that perhaps this was the opportunity to write the Doctor Who/Uncle Scrooge crossover I’ve long dreamt of. For several reasons, none of which I’m willing to share at the moment, I decided this was an untenable choice.
On the subway ride home Friday, I brainstormed other ideas.
After dismissing Batman/Thor as an unrealistic waste of time (seriously, even though it’s a spec script, there’s no point in writing something utterly pointless) and a zombie baseball story (because it’s a joke of an idea, one that would be better suited for an 8-page Tales from the Crypt tale, not a 48-page graphic novel), I settled on two ideas that had promise.
One would be a modern day, lit-esque graphic novel. The other would be an historical piece.
After more musing, I decided the second would be best. It’s something different and unique and, to be honest, putting the work in on developing the graphic novel script would give me the foundation for a short story or a novel.
In truth, I had some of the background work on this done. In the spring I’d started a file of notes for an historical story, but I didn’t actually have a story. A setting, a concept, some characters, and how they related.
Now I’m hanging this sketchy work on something. I spent the afternoon hammering out a two-page outline.
I have some issues of TwoMorrows’ Write Now (the magazine about writing comics) to look at for ideas on formatting a comic book script. Screenplay I can do. Not well, but I can do it. Comics? That’s terra incognita. :h2g2:
So, we’ll see. 🙂