Have You Thought of Turning Your Story into a Graphic Novel?
It can solve the problem of working in a backstory
If the backstory is important, but complicated or even convoluted, how do you work it in?
It’s easily done by presenting your backstory as a prologue, but some readers find these off-putting in a novel. I think a prologue looks more appealing in a graphic novel.
As with all the examples, the page spread above is from a graphic novel I wrote in 2010, Counter-Espionage Disinformation for Beginners.
Settings and descriptions are straightforward
A picture is said to be worth a thousand words. If you have a spectacular or frightening or just plain awful background which must be understood in order to follow the story, a picture can be worth even more. And it doesn’t hold up the action while everyone stands by, waiting for the reader to catch up.
Setting may be vital, but if you take two pages to describe it your reader will lose a lot of enthusiasm — unless the two pages are in a graphic novel.
You would need a lot of words to tell a reader about the Interpol Most Wanted poster on the spread below, but showing it is easy.
Internal conversations and hidden agendas are easy to show
Knowing what characters are thinking as well as what they’re saying can usually be worked into an ordinary story using a convention such as single quotes and italic print, but it’s much easier in a graphic novel with speech and thought balloons.
It is also more easily understood by readers. And they can always refer back to panels such as these when some nuance of a hidden agenda gets blurred later on as the action unfolds.
So are shifting perspectives or points of view
In an ordinary novel, when it’s important to know different people’s thoughts you can write from the ‘third person omniscient’ point of view, wherein the narrator knows the thoughts, actions, and feelings of every character.
But I must admit, whenever I read something profound in the third person omniscient, I am reminded of a bewildering scene in the movie Quo Vadis which I saw at the age of nine. After watching a king, apparently a bad one, stride across a palatial room, some older girls behind me agreed in worried whispers, “He knows!” Not only did I have no idea what he knew or how he knew it, but I couldn’t imagine how the girls knew that he knew it.
Graphic novels let you avoid such problematic subtleties which might inflict feelings of inferiority on your readers.
A different physical point of view can also be used to introduce a plot twist. Action unbeknownst to some or all of the characters can be easily shown in a graphic novel. And you can do it without having to use the awkward word “unbeknownst.”
You might have new problems, unique to graphic novels
What if your story doesn’t fit into panels like regular comic books? This isn’t a problem at all. Formatting is entirely up to you.
Use panels and conversation balloons when that’s easier, full page illustrations (as in the spread below) or solid text where that’s the logical route. Or action can flow from panels to straight text and back (in the Chapter 4 spread, above).
What if you can’t draw people? Have their voices come from inside a building (in the prologue, above) or a bus (right page in the Chapter 4 spread) or make the people so tiny it doesn’t matter what they look like.
Or outsource the figures. I had mine done by one of my grandsons.
What if you can’t draw at all? Scan objects into your computer files (like the jewelry in the spread below) or use photographs (left page of the Chapter 4 spread).
Outsource it all. Lots of starving artists can draw just fine.
