graphic novel class 1 - blue sky

coming up with an idea

Some housekeeping: I’ll be sharing pieces from this series every Thursday, and sharing random drawings and posts every Monday.

I will be matching all money earned from paid subscriptions and donating it to various trans charities. To begin, I’ll be giving to The Trans Lifeline’s Microgrant program, which provides funds for gender affirming surgery and legal work, with a focus on BIPOC and incarcerated trans folk.

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I’m going to take you through the process of a graphic novel in a series of posts. This is from my perspective, as a writer and artist who makes fantasy books for middle grade and young adult readers - but hopefully it will be helpful even if you’re interested in making a different kind of book!

Coming up with an idea

Storytelling is as natural as breathing. We tell stories as kids, with our friends, on social media, in therapy. We tell stories to ourselves to make sense of the world, and then tell to them to other people so they can see the world the way we do. It’s a deep, old, very human thing.

It is ALSO hard! Because it’s not only having the idea, but organizing your thoughts in a way that OTHER people will understand it. And not just understand, but get pulled in and feel the emotions you want them to feel. It’s my favorite thing in the world, figuring out how to use words and pictures to perform an act of telepathy, and it drives me crazy.

For this post I’m going to talk about the big-brain, blue-sky phase of a project, when everything is possible because you haven’t actually started yet. What are things to consider, and what are ways to push your imagination?

I have a theory that all storytellers have a ‘first story’ - the one they’ve been mulling over for years, maybe a lifetime. When they sit down to make their first book, this story comes spilling out, full of life and ideas. Maybe this is true for you, maybe not. Maybe you’ve already told your first story! Regardless, stories start with a spark of an idea. Something that is compelling you to explore, to pull a thread.

A few examples of story sparks:

• an image that won’t leave your mind

• a desire to see a certain kind of story in media

• a real-life experience that you want or need to process through fiction

• anything you have a lot of feelings and opinions about

Building out your idea:

Once you have this spark, you can start asking it questions. To stick with the fire metaphor, you’re giving the spark oxygen (exploration, questions) and fuel (research, story planning, gathering inspiration) to grow into a healthy blaze, one that won’t be blown out by a gust of wind (the inevitable gut feeling that happens with every project where you realize it’s doomed and so are you and you’ll never make anything good in your brief lifespan) (this always happens, but it passes if you stick with it. I promise.)

Here are some questions I always find helpful to ask myself:

• What do you want to see in a story? What haven’t you seen before? What have you seen before, but it was done badly and you think you can do it better? (this last one is especially inspirational to me lol)

• What is the heart of the idea?

• What are you trying to say with the story? What’s the point? Why this story, why you, why now? Fyi - you don’t have to have a grand, smart-sounding answer for this! “I think a sitcom style comic about my pet guinea pigs’ drama would be fun“ is a valid reason.

• What do you (or your artist) want to draw? Make lists!

• What do you want to write? Make more lists!

• What do your characters want, and what is in their way?

• If you’re an artist, start sketching the characters. They’ll change a lot, but you’ll discover new things about them as you draw. This is an old, OLD drawing of Aster from the Witch Boy. The .psd is just entitled ‘kid’. The character would go on to change a lot, but I was already figuring things out about body language and presentation.

  

• Are there any specific scenes, character types, or narrative arcs you want to do? Images or places you want to go to? Dig into these. For the Witch Boy, I had a specific image in my head before I wrote any of the story. It became a tentpole - I knew I wanted to draw this scene, so that led to questions about what led up to it, and what happened afterwards.

  

Let yourself answer these questions fully and without judgement. If storytelling is a labyrinth (mixing metaphors, sorry) then putting words and sketches down will help you step forward, help you turn the next corner. Even if a promising-looking path turns into a dead end - now you have more information. You know that path isn’t right, and that puts you closer to finding the right one.

These are big questions, and it’s okay not to have all the answers. Sometimes I think the answer is one thing and only realize it is something else once the book is done. But they should get you thinking!

At this stage, it’s also very important to bring in inspiration in many different forms.

• Research! Even if your story is full fantasy, read about our world to bring in details. Find things you wouldn’t have known otherwise that make your story unique. This is an ongoing process, and even when you’re not working on a story, get in the habit of hoarding cool facts! This doubles as making you fun at parties.

• More research! If you’re writing about characters who don’t share your exact experience (race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, tbh probably all your characters unless it’s autobio!), you have a responsibility to do your research (even if your story is taking place in a fantasy world). Look for first hand accounts of these experiences from real people AND research how characters like that have appeared in media before. Educate yourself on tropes and stereotypes. (I’ll talk about sensitivity readers in a later post)

• Sometimes research will kill certain ideas as you learn they’re not realistic, or as you realize there’s some kind of trope or stereotype around them you don’t want to perpetuate. This is ALWAYS a good thing - it’s pushing your story to be stronger, more unique, and more considered. Doing this at the front of a project means you won’t get too attached to a harmful, regressive, or overplayed idea.

• Inspiration! What movies, shows, books, games, etc do you like? What are your favorite parts, and why? This is a vital part of being a storyteller - interrogating your own interests and understanding why other media succeeds or fails.

• More inspiration! This is a comic, so gather visuals. They can be paintings, other comics, a Pinterest moodboard, photos you take yourself. Even if you’re writing for someone else to draw, a comic is a visual medium first and should be approached in that way. Below are some early images I pulled for the Witch Boy that I returned to again and again when I needed background inspiration:

  

  they double as #kitchengoals

• If you are writing comics, and all you read are contemporary comics, expand your viewpoint. Look to other mediums, to nonfiction, to other cultures’ forms of storytelling, and into the history of comics. (this advice applies to every medium by the way - if you want to write for animation you have to watch more than just animation!) This is another way to make sure you’re telling a unique story, and not just a recycled version of something you’ve already read.

This is the blue sky process. It should be playful and transformative and creative. Be open to discovering new things about your story. Be open to realizing the heart of it is actually somewhere else. Be open to realizing the things you liked most about it at the start might be the things you have to throw out in service of a better story. People say ‘kill your darlings’, but in my opinion it’s more like - ‘thank your darlings for their service, and put them to rest.’

In the next post, I’ll talk about pulling these ideas together into an outline. Do you have any ways to come up with story ideas? Favorite places to go for visual research? Let me know!