Unfamiliar Comics

If you want to start writing a story you need to have a place to start, so where should that be? If you’re at this point, chances are you have the overall idea of what your story is going to be, hopefully the goal and characters of the story. But, you need to get that focused!

First thing, what is the main point?

Each story has one of three main focuses:

• Character
• World
• Mystery

Now, a good story has a bit of each of these but a good story has one focus.

A character story means the main objective is for the character develop in some major way and once that has happened the story is over.

A world story is means that the main objective is for the character to leave their home and explore, the story ends when that character decides whether to go back home or stay in the new world.

A mystery story means that there is some unknown that needs to be solved, and once the character solves it the story is over.

Figuring out which one of these three your story is will really help you start focusing everything about it. For example, The Renegade Mermaid is a World story. Lovisa, the main character, has left her home world and is out on a Greek-style coming-of-age story where she must find her place in the universe. Now with The Renegade Mermaid being a comic situated story there is no overall ending, so the option for her to go back home will most-likely become a regular occurrence as it will divide parts of the continuing arc.

EVERY story should have character development though, do you know what happens when there is no character development? You get a 90’s sitcom where the characters stay stagnant and never grow. But be careful with character development, because if you’re not ending the story with a character growth you don’t want the reader to start hating the new changes that character has made.

Which goes to another starting point, who are you writing this for?

There is no right answer to this, but you should be aware of your personal reasons. Either you are writing this for yourself and the opinions of others are just an after thought, or you are writing this for the world to enjoy and you should take into consideration the probable opinions people will form. Don’t go all wishy-washy though, starting out and writing the story for yourself and making a very intricate plot then halfway through deciding you want it to be for everyone and shifting the plot to be simplified is a terrible idea. That would ruin your story!

The next thing that will help you start is understanding your characters. I’m not going to go too far into this today, I’ll dive deeper another day. One of the easiest ways to help understand your characters is to just Google character archetypes. Archetypes are common character personalities like the dark loner or the helpful adventurer or the retired cop. Obviously you don’t want to completely copy and archetype but this gives you another nice starting point for character design!

So think about these things and how to focus your story, write out lots of notes on how your own world is going to be and what direction the story is going to go. And be sure to check back lately, I’ll be going over setting up a character’s personality and chronologically when your written story should start in your universe!