It's a little known fact that usually in comics, your scripts and storyboards are well beyond that of the art.  After all, they have to be.  In Western comics, you have a satellite system where a different artist in the mix (penciller, inker, colorist, letterer) are all working on different pages, possibly different chapters, at the same time.  It isn't much easier for the Eastern disciplines (manga, manhua and manhwa), where the artist is likely pumping out at least 16 pages a week, pushing them and their assistants to the brink of breakdown.  So the script needs to be ready and perfect to go, with no mistakes and little need for revisions, from the get go.

More importantly – that's MORE IMPORTANTLY – the script has to be good.  We all love the artistry and creativity of the lines, the tones, the creation of the figures, correct?  No argument there.  But in the end, what do you do with a comic or manga?  That's right: you read it.  Therefore, it has to be good.  The best story or writing in the world can save horrid art (see: XKCD), while not even the best art can polish a turd of a script (see: more manga and anime than I care to mention).  Florid and purple prose – especially the truly Bulwer-Lytton level – can torpedo the best art in the world.  I've seen it, you've probably seen them for yourself.

So, it's arguable that the writing, not the art, is the truly important part of any comic or manga.  I'll sit here for a second while that sinks in.

So, back with us?  Good.  Now that I've brought that little revelation into stark reality for you, I'm here to tell you that all is not lost.  Really.  All you have to do, really, is just to follow four important steps.

1. Be Brief.  As the title says, you are not writing the Great American Novel.  You might be doing a comic based on, say, Atlas Shrugged, but no one's going to read it if each of your script paragraphs are the size of the whole novel itself.  As Shakespeare wrote, "Brevity is the soul of wit."  But let's not take his word for expertise; no, let's go with an actual expert in the field, comic legend Will Eisner, who wrote, "Remember, you are dealing with sound."  In short, you just have the bare minimum in that speech bubble to convey the idea.  Here's an example: your script

Johnny said to Mary, "My love, should we abscond far away and to the lands beyond, where you and I can live as man and wife, where we can live in wedded bliss, to love and hold each other forever?"

should read more like the following in those speech bubbles:

"Love, should we go far away where we can love and hold each other forever?"

Note that a lot of the fat was trimmed, leaving the core there for the audience to understand.  You should never cut the sizzle away from the steak, but a writer armed with a well-honed sense of brevity can say in ten words what would originally have been twenty-five.

2. Be Smart.  There are dozens of scriptwriting books and guides on how to create a well crafted script.  There are even group sessions – the annual contest Script Frenzy is just one example – where others will help you tone that tome.  Two brilliant books to read on the subject are Eisner's Comics & Visual Art, and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.  Here at Megami, we have well-worn copies of both Eisner's and McCloud's books, as well as the DC Guide to Writing Comics, from which we adapted our own scripting template (more on that later, if folks are interested).

3.  Be Brave.  Don't be afraid to take your work and distill it down to lesser amounts.  You will cut words, there's no way around it.  There's no need for four speech bubbles in your frame when only one will suffice.  Do what you have to do to cut out the extra.  For example, I write everything in prose; the first story arc of Claude & Monet is essentially a nearly 40,000-word novella.  From there, I will break it up into approximately sixteen chapters, which will have less than half of that number of total words, and probably only a fraction of that will be actual dialog.  So figure that from 40K words, only roughly a tenth of that will be what your characters actually say, as well as captions and other verbal narrative.

4.  Be Coordinated.  As I said at the beginning, the writer is the lynchpin of the whole work.  Without your writing skills, then there is nothing.  But even still, you are not alone.  As the writer, you are the one who works with the artist to ensure that you do not overwhelm him or her, flooding her with tons of verbage when sparsity and brevity is called for.  This goes double if you're handling both scribble and doodle duties.  But on the bright side, even though you're probably going to have a problem being a brief writer, don't worry – the artist is probably having the same problem, only from his end.

And that's what we'll talk about tomorrow on Day 25: Artwork Does Not Make You the Louvre.