Part Three: Create Chapters and Weave in a Theme

This is the final post my series about writing flexible stories. To back track, here's part one and part two.

So after organizing my events, I now have a story outline, more or less. The problem is that the events are separate things. They don't blend together. The best thing I can compare this to is a sitcom where each episode has something different going on, but there is not a cohesive story. There's nothing wrong with that, and that kind of outline will probably work well for a four panel/gag manga. However, I enjoy stories that flow from one happening to the next.

This is how I transform my list of events into an ongoing story.

I've already organized my events (for more info on what events are, see post two) into acts, so I now have a chronological story. From here I group the events into chapters.

When I group events into chapters, I don't move them around. I simply divide them up while leaving them in the order that they are in. For example, let's say I'm looking at Act One and it has 10 events. The first five events look like they have enough content to make an interesting short story--like a chapter of a book. So without moving them around, I label those five events as a chapter (sometimes I also call chapters episodes). After taking care of those 5, I have five more events in Act 1. I may decide that the next three would make a good chapter, so I label them as chapter 2. Then I could assign the last two events to be chapter 3.

So basically I look at my events, see how many in a row can make a harmonious chapter, and group them together. Some of my chapters only have one event.


Weaving in a Theme

This is the most creatively challenging part, but it's the key to making an ongoing story.

I go back and look at my chapters. Although they are in the chronological order that I want, they still are very separate from each other.

This is when I step back and look at the big picture of the story.

What do I want to happen to character A? I want her to be more social and learn to make friends.

What do I want for character B? I want her to appreciate who she is and not worry about being as talented as her sister.

Then I go through each episode and add something that will help the characters to get a tiny bit closer to their goals. And it doesn't take much. For the shy younger sister, it could be that in chapter one she sees the next door neighbor from a distance, in chapter two she manages to say hello (thanks to the prodding of her more social older sister), and in chapter three she tries to have a conversation, and so on.

These advancements aren't the point of the chapter. It isn't like a wrote an entire chapter about the younger sister trying to say "hi" to her neighbor, although I could have. It's simply a moment that's woven into a chapter and that progressively changes from chapter to chapter.

It does take a little bit of imagination stretching to do this well, but that's what writers do!

Quite a few recent TV shows have writing like this. There is an ongoing story that is mixed into episodes that may or may not be related to it.


Start Writing!


I write the script for a chapter, draw it, and then when I'm almost done drawing it, I start writing the next one. If I waited to write the entire script for a long story before drawing it, I know I would lose interest. And with a story that will take years to create, the transitions between drawing and writing are what keep it exciting.

This method is very flexible because since the episodes aren't tightly tied together, it's easy to remove the ones that don't work, and add ones that will work better. Still, they are all related to a central theme and goal, so the story doesn't lose being harmonious.

I can alter my story if I need to based on my personal feelings and even audience feedback almost on the fly. I changed the episodes of Mascara many times. Some I used, some I threw out, but readers typically can't tell that anything has been left out or added.

So this is my process of putting together the story for a long, ongoing comic. I'm actually working on a long comic right now, so my posts have been a little sparodic, but I also like taking the time to share what it's like to create a story that can go on for a very long time. ^_^

Brainstorm and Get Organized!


This a continuation of my previous post, Creating Flexible Serialized Stories: Part One. That post covered developing characters that compliment and contrast with each other in order to create an ongoing dynamic.

As I develop the characters, I like to think about their personalities and their situation. Then I write down everything that they could possibly do and all the trouble that they could cause together. It doesn't matter if it makes sense or not. The ideas don't need to be directly related or connect. I write it all. When outlining, each situation gets its own bullet point. I call each bullet point an "event."

It's best to do this using a digital program like Word or even Workflowy, because after brainstorming, everything will need to be rearranged. 

Getting Everything Organized


After writing down all the possible situations that the characters could get themselves into, I arrange the events into a chronological order that makes sense to me. I've found it helpful to group events into sections called Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3. Creating acts was a suggestion from my husband, and I like how it works.

Act 1 is everything that helps the audience learn more about who the characters are, what they are like, and what problems they are dealing with. This is where I put every event that sounds like it could be at the beginning of the story.

Act 2 is where the characters grapple with their problems and fight their way to the solution. This is also a good time to introduce new characters and friends that either help the main characters to reach their goals, or hold them back from reaching their potential. I put the most interesting events in this category. Here is also where I sometimes put events that don't seem to fit anywhere, but are still interesting and exciting.

Act 3 is the wind down. This is where problems are solved, and when the characters realize that they are not quite the same as they were at the beginning. If the characters don't realize that they've changed, at least make it obvious to the audience.

Going back to the example I started with in Part One, by the end of the series the younger sister could be a little bit more social and the older sister could learn how to appreciate her own unique gifts.

It's okay not to use all of the events. Some I set aside. If I feel like using them, I'll pull them out of the reserve, and if I don't, than that's alright. But I try to use the majority of them.

At this point I do have an outline, but as far as story goes, it's a bit disjointed. The next part is how I bring it all together. 

The first direction is a complete, contained story. For Couture and Wings, I wrote the script from start to finish, like how someone would write a novel. It's all one contained piece. 

For long, continuous comics though, I've found that it's better to be flexible. 

This blog post series covers the steps I take when creating a long comic. All of it is related to the post I wrote about writing scripts, but this is more about the planning that is done before writing a script.

These steps are especially important when creating a long webcomic, because with a webcomic it's difficult to go back and edit the story once it's posted. It's more like making a TV show than a novel. 

For a long story, I like to come up with two main characters with traits that will lead to them getting into many different situations together. 

Example: There are two sisters who live together. The oldest one is social, outgoing and good at making friends. She wishes to have creative talents like her younger sister, but she does not. She tries to do creative stuff sometimes, but it usually ends up being a disaster, and her younger sister has to help her. On the other hand, the younger sister is not social, but she is imaginative. She wishes to be more social sometimes, so her older sister helps her out with that.  

The two characters are different, but they work together. Mascara is written the same way. Two characters with complementary or opposing traits that work together.

The situations that arise from their combined chemistry takes me to part two, which I'll be sharing in my next post. 

When I write a rough draft of anything, it is a complete mess. Usually, I can barely stand to read my rough drafts because they are so amateur. Going from my brain to the paper, my writing is full of unnecessary and forgotten words, awkwardness, ugly descriptions, and things that simply make no sense.

I have a boss who is dyslexic, and he's always asking me to help him with spelling stuff. Well, because my spelling is bad too, I'm no help at all. It's probably worse than his, and I don't have a learning disability. He so would not believe me if I told him I was a writer. How can someone as horrible as me be a writer?

It's scary, but while writing pages and pages in this awful way, I rarely look back to fix stuff. In the back of my mind, I know what I'm writing is for the garbage, but that's okay. I only need to get the story out of my head. If I'm really into the story, it's okay if  my writing is way less than perfect. It's okay.

So yes, I am a horrible writer. What I am is a good editor. Now that I think about it, it may not even be fair to say specifically that I'm a good editor because I like showing my work to different people to get feedback. It's probably more accurate to say that I'm good at the editing process. I know what to keep, and I'm not afraid of throwing stuff out.

Even before I started sharing what I write publicly, anything I wrote that I considered done was edited about five times. First I revise, making the story says what I want. I make sure the events are in the right order, the story has the right tone, and that the plot is tight. I do that twice.  Afterwards, I hit the grammar, and it's two rounds of that.  Then at the end, I do one more overall edit. I have edited more times, but that's the typical process.

Although I do get frustrated with how rough my rough drafts are, I'm kind of proud of owning up to being a bad writer.  I rarely get writer's block because I'm not paralyzed by attempting to write perfectly. I know getting things perfect the first time around is impossible for me. When I write, I write directly without stopping.

There is no reason to stop if I'm writing my thoughts, and I'm not too concerned with how things are turning out.

It's interesting how when I have less to work with, I have more ideas. That could be because I'm forced to use what I have and think of alternatives.

Recently, I've come to the sad realization that I may not be able to create any more full manga series. It's all about time. When I created my first few mangas, I had less responsibilities. Now I can barely do one page a week, when I was making on average four pages a week in the past.

Being so limited is frustrating. Still it makes me think of other ways to deal with it. Lovely Riot is a story I want to tell.

So I've decided to try a storytelling experiment. I'm writing Lovely Riot like a novel, but then I'm also adding some manga style graphics to it. The tricky part is that the artwork isn't like typical illustrations, which are pictures of what's already going on. The artwork is actually going to be part of the story. Without the art, it will feel like something is missing.

I'm testing this technique out on one chapter, just to see what methods and layouts I will have to use to get it to feel right. It is a bit crazy and a risk, but it could end up being something very interesting, and I'm excited about the possibilities. 

My own future or someone else's.

I recently received this touching open letter. I laugh when I see that I've inspired someone else to write a blog, when my husband originally inspired me to start one.

Before we started dating, he emailed to me a link to his gaming blog. I thought it was amazing how he wrote about what he was playing and working on. At the time I was working on my first manga Mascara, and I realized that I also had a lot to share. So I started this blog.

Over the years I've had times when I posted regularly, and other times when I barely posted at all. There are blogs with way more readers and traffic than mine. Sometimes I ask myself why do I keep posting?

I think it's a need for self-expression. When I write I'm able to express myself better.

I've also kept writing blog posts because it's great practice. After working on manga for such a long time, I found writing to be somewhat difficult when I got back to it. Keeping up with my blog made the idea of writing a novella less intimidating.

The best thing about blogging and just writing in general, is that I never know when something I write will have the power to alter my future. In her open letter Ari mentions a novel I wrote called Omnigirl. I wrote it when I was around 15, and I've shared it with some of my friends. I never thought much of it, but I realize now that If I never wrote it, my life would've been very different.

I shared Omnigirl with my husband when we were friends, and after reading it, he realized that he wanted to ask me out. My whole current situation of being happily married is because of a novel I wrote when I was fifteen.

Now every time I start typing I wonder if the words I take so lightly at the moment will somehow drastically affect what happens in my life or the lives of others. It's fun to think about!

Creating the Ultimate Most Organized Creative Notebook Ever Part 1

Creating the Ultimate Most Organized Creative Notebook Ever Part 2
Creating the Ultimate Most Organized Creative Notebook Ever Part 3

 


While working on this project, I decided to take a look at the very popular Project Life scrap booking system. Before I had only heard of it and had a hazy idea of what it was. When I did more research on it, I quickly saw that it didn't fit my needs. A Project Life album would be too much for me to carry around in my bag, and it was more for scrap-booking, not note-taking. Besides that, I prefer paper pages over fully plastic ones.


Still there was one thing I absolutely loved about it. I thought it was awesome how photos and other visual items could be added to a Project Life album without worrying about layout. So I cooked up my own way of doing something similar.


I've always enjoyed creating artist trading cards. They're a simple way to make art, and they come in a standard size: 2.5" x 3.5" These cards fit perfectly into plastic sleeves that are used for trading cards. Also there are all kinds of papers designed to fit into the sleeves, from watercolor paper to scrap booking style paper.Variety was what I was searching for.


Using double sided tape I attached the plastic sleeves to the notebook pages, creating a simple layout. I've found that it's best to have the sleeves near the edges of the pages instead of near the inside. The closer they are to the spine, the harder it is to close the notebook. The mixed-media notebook I chose is designed to handle an expanding book, so that was helpful.


Another bonus to using the 2.5" x 3.5" sleeves is that it makes it easy to add photos from my Instax Mini 8 camera.





I'm fortunate to be married to a guy who enjoys designing games for fun. He had a MS word template I could use to print out even more cards to slip into the sleeves. Using that and Canva as a design tool, I realized that these tiny pockets are perfect. It's a daily scrapbook/planner that's easy to carry around, and very simple to customize. Besides I don't have the time to create larger pieces of art that covers a whole page. A 2.5" x 3.5" card is plenty.


I was pretty happy with the results, and the pages look nice. However I noticed that after four months I would run out of pages and need a new notebook. I was a little disappointed. Having a notebook that could last all year would be ideal. Also I realized that I would like to have a calendar in my notebook too.


Turns out I needed more than a notebook. I needed a high powered planner. The next post in this series is about how I used what I learned from creating this Ultimate Notebook to design my Ultimate Creative DIY planner.

Another method is marking the edges of the pages. Here's the Lifehacker post about that. I like this because all I have to do is look at the side of my notebook to see where certain entries are. Using different colors on the edges of the pages instead of just black has worked out better for me.

How I'm went about organizing this notebook is another thing. I'll explain that in more detail in a part two post, but as a sneak peak check out this site about creating a  Bullet Journal. It really influenced how I decided to put this notebook together.

I think that's part of the reason why I like dabbling into making cute, little, random print zines once and awhile.

Right now I'm working on the second and most likely the last issue of a zine I was doing for my Etsy Shop called Blanket Princess.



I say it's the last issue because I'm shifting my main focus to my manga right now. I will probably make more zines with different themes and titles in the future. Blanket Princess is a zine made up of random stories, artwork, DIY projects, and parts of manga I've already published. The second issue simply finishes off those stories and introduces some more DIY and art. 

Sure, making an ezine is probably a little easier, but print seems more private. Print is tactile and intimate, and I enjoy creating things on paper. Overall I feel like reading print books involves more senses than ebooks do.

Reading an ebook only involves my eyes, and if it's an interactive book--maybe my ears too. But with a print book, I'm using my eyes, my nose (you know, that awesome new book smell) and my touch because of the texture of the pages and the physical motion of turning them.

It's funny how when I was younger, the activity of reading physical books was not noteworthy to me. Now it is.


Now you can follow me on Bloglovin!

Then I could clearly see why I was having such a difficult time getting into my creative projects, and finding time to do them. Three years ago, I was unmarried and living at home. Now I have a husband and a house to deal with and chores and whatever comes with all of that. 

Still, I was trying to stick to the creative routine that I had three years ago--like nothing had changed. 

But EVERYTHING had changed. And that's why the old way of doing things that was so great before, was no longer working. 

I started this blog 5 years ago, and back then I was focused on graphic novels and manga. I'm still focused on graphic novels and manga (I'm working on a new graphic novel at this moment), but I've realized that just focusing on that topic has limited me on how much I share about the little creative projects and processes that I take on everyday. 

And honestly I find writing about that more interesting than the basics of graphic novel making. Not that I won't write about that anymore, but I want cover a broader range of subjects about creating things.

Now I'm excited about writing and making stuff all over again!

So next time when I'm stuck in a rut, I think I'll take a moment to step away from everything. I'll look at my past and ask myself "Is it different from now?" Then I'll think about the future, and see if I'm where I want to be now to get there. Sometimes a little reflection is all it takes to get things back on track.

To make things neater, I've reorganized my blog posts into categories on the top bar. I find it makes finding relevant articles way easier.

Also if you're only here for the posts I write about creating manga and don't wish to be bothered with the other stuff, that's fine. Simply subscribe to the filtered RSS feed that's on the right. It only shows posts that are tagged Manga.

Thank you so much for reading, and hopefully I will be updating this blog for many years to come. ^_^