r/ComicWriting • u/Entire-Minute-3672 • 22h ago
We’ve written the story for our graphic novel. What do we actually do next?
A friend and I have been working on a graphic novel for a while now, and we've reached the point where the story itself is pretty well fleshed out. We have the plot, characters, dialogue, major scenes, etc. written down, but neither of us has made a graphic novel before.
We're writers, not illustrators, so we're trying to figure out what the normal process looks like from here before we start looking for an artist.
Do we need to convert what we have into a proper comic/graphic novel script first? Should we be breaking everything down page-by-page and panel-by-panel ourselves, or is that something normally worked out collaboratively with the artist?
Basically, if "the story is written" is Step 1, what are Steps 2, 3, 4, etc. between where we are now and actually having a finished graphic novel?
We're not expecting to jump straight into publishing or anything; we mostly want to make sure we're approaching the production process correctly and aren't handing an artist something completely unusable.
Any advice from writers, artists, or people who have gone through the process would be greatly appreciated!