Xanthippe

Pandora's Tale: Chapter 1, first draft

Added 2019-10-14 16:44:06 +0000 UTC

For anyone curious about how I write the scripts for Pandora's Tale, I've attached a PDF of the first draft of chapter 1. There are a few differences between this and the final version - notably, the title was still just 'Pandora', and the pages where Pandora is inside the pod were completely rewritten so that they better fit the themes that were emerging as I worked on the chapter. There are a few other places where I re-worded something so that it made more sense, or just so that I could fit the dialogue on the page. This last one happens more than you might think with comics.

By the way, "first draft", in this case, means the first script-formatted version of the chapter. There are normally two stages before this one: First, I'll write down all of the points that need to be covered by the story and work out an order that makes sense. I start with the stuff that absolutely needs to be there for the story to work, and then add the less vital stuff. A chapter is 20 or 21 pages, and based on this method I can usually estimate if the story will be able to fit this length. Then, I write dialogue based on this outline. Usually there aren't any descriptions here, and if I'm really lazy I might not even include who's speaking, since I'm most likely gonna remember it anyway. Once that's done, I can go through the script and divide it into pages, potentially making more cuts if a page gets too crowded. After that, I turn the script into an official first draft like the one here.

I hope you find this interesting! Let me know if you'd like to hear more about how I write my scripts!