Story-writing talk (Patreon)

Asia asked this question and my answer ended up getting really long so I’ve decided to make a post for it! Hopefully its interesting to hear me blab about story stuff 😂?

Oh yay I love this question!!

Honestly I think the way I made the story for Sparks is fairly unconventional- when I started drawing it, I didn’t really have a story, LOL… when it started all I knew was the bare bones of that first scene (Philo and Atlas accidentally portal far away and are stuck together overnight). My vague idea was Satyr are magic and go to an academy to learn magic. While I was drawing that first scene, I spent a lot of time thinking about the world and the characters, and the main story ended up emerging!

I’m probably similar to you- now the beginning and the ending are very clear for me, but there’s still a lot of middle stuff I haven’t fully worked out yet. I have the major events in my head, and a few fully fleshed out scenes that are scattered through the story, but there’s a lot to connect them that I’ll be writing on the fly as I’m drawing it! I don’t have a script or written story for Sparks anywhere, so thumbnailing for me is my writing process really… it means thumbnailing takes longer for me than it might for most people, but I like it this way because I have a lot of freedom to add things or change things at the last moment!

The climax was probably the part I struggled with the most too, that only recently worked itself out really! I just trusted that eventually I would figure it out hahaha… the nice thing about making a comic is it takes so long that I always think to myself, well, I probably have at least a year before I reach (whatever difficult part) and surely by then I’ll have thought of something. Most of my plot-hole solving ideas come up when I’m on the bus to work or in the shower just spacing out and thinking about the characters!

So I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t think it’s so important to have everything decided or worked out clearly before you start- focus on the parts you do know and have fun with it and as you flesh those parts out more odds are the rest will fall into place :) that’s what’s worked for me anyway! I’m sure at some point I’ll work out some future detail and wish I’d known about it earlier so I could’ve woven it through the story earlier- but I’d rather have a completed imperfect comic than no comic at all, which would be the case if I agonized over it too much hahaha. And if you’re writing rather than making a comic page by page you won’t even have that problem cause you can go back and edit! 

I hope that helped! I like talking about this stuff so feel free to ask me these sort of questions any time 🥰