Writing comics is wicked fast and easy… and illustrating comics takes forever!
As such, illustrators need to get that money… writers; just throw them some petty cash and they’ll be good.
It’s an argument that pops up frequently online, but has probably been around since the beginning of comics.
While I’m not going to try and tackle the artist/writer contribution discussion, I do want to touch on just how fast comic writing actually is…
or isn’t…
(Really I’m talking about writing in all mediums, not just comics.)
Most folks are under the impression that writing IS actually fast to do… and guess what, they’re right!
Last time I clocked myself (years ago), I could write about 1000 words an hour when I was in a long prose groove.
Sounds fast right?
I mean, look at the average sizes of some writing mediums:
- 7,000 words – 22 page single issue
- 18,000 words – 90 page screenplay
- 90,000 words – novel
At 1000 words an hour, that means if I just turned off my cell phone and the email and sat my ass in the chair, I could have a complete screenplay in just 2 days (two 9 hour shifts!)
Writing is fast and easy!…
umm, or is it?
If a writer could pump out a screenplay in 2 days? That’s a whopping 182 completed screenplays in 1 year.
A writer of that pace would have an astounding 1,820 completed screenplays in just 10 years of writing.
At 7000 words a comic script, that’s a one-shot per day, or more than 365 completed issues a year!
Let’s switch gears for a second and break it down as comic pages. At 22 pages per day, that’s 8030 comic pages a year, or 321,200 comic pages across 4 decades (we’ll get back to this number in a second.)
Novels would be a bit longer, requiring an entire 10 days to complete… 9 hours, 1000 words an hour, 9,000 words a day…
Giving the dedicated writer, 350 completed novels in a mere 10 years…
Reality is, nobody putting up numbers like that.
Nobody’s even putting up numbers in the same universe as any of that.
Let’s check in with IMDB;
- Aaron Sorkin is credited for writing 10 films over the last 30 years.
- Francis Ford Coppola 25 screenplays over the last 60 years or so…
- Shane Black 15 screenplays, across near 4 decades…
Then there’s people like
Michael Crichton who took 8 years to write Jurassic Park, the novel… not the screenplay…
or
J.R.R. Tolkien who took 2 years to finish the Hobbit manuscript, then another 5 years of edits until it was finally published… and an total of 17 years to complete the entire trilogy.
or how about,
J.K. Rowling’s 6 years to write Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
In the realm of comic books, Chuck Dixon, the most prolific comic writer of all time, writing for pretty much all the major publishers over his career, has put out a whopping 40,000 pages of comics over his 40 year’ish career.
While this is a truly mind-blowing number, remember back a moment where the total page count by the numbers came out to 320,000 pages across that same time frame. What gives, Chuck? 🙂
Obviously, some writers do write quicker than others… and some writers overall finish projects quicker than others, or produce a larger body of work over their career than others… and of course, there are abstract considerations like… life itself, success, failure, etc.
I’m pointing all this out not for prove any kind of writing speed formula, but instead to recognize the massively clear and obvious deviation between the fastest possible course, in theory and the real-world course, in practice. At least, in regards to quality fiction.
I always tell folks, actually writing the script is the fastest part of writing.
The time consuming parts, are everything else: Discovering the story, figuring out the best way to articulate the story (editing on the fly), actual editing, rewriting, etc.
In all the years I’ve been writing and editing for newer writers, I’ve learned that virtually nobody writes at their fastest speed, while working at their highest level of creativity and intelligence.
Speed is the trade off.
And when somehow, somewhere, you do manage to work with all three at maximum performance, you’re probably on really strong drugs, but beside that, burn out (physical, mental, and creative exhaustion) is inevitable.
The reality is, quality fiction in any medium takes time.
By the Numbers
So what are the real writer performance speeds?
In novels, the long-held tradition is 3 months to a first-draft. As I pointed out above, time frames often go completely out the window in long prose. With editing and tweaking notoriously dragging on for… ever.
Ironically, screenplays find themselves in the exact same traditionally timeframe or 12 weeks. In fact, I believe this is still fairly standard in union contracts. Another strange writing anomaly that the 18,000 word script gets the same time period as the 90,000 word novel manuscript.
Lastly, we come to comics.
The long held traditional assessment of comic writing speed is 1 page per hour. Remember that’s actual comic book page, not script document page. A single comic book page could be as little as a paragraph (for a simple full page art page), or many pages of actual script for a complex scene with many panels.
If you want to get particular about it, you can consider a benchmark speed of 10 writing minutes per panel.
A simpler 3 panel page could only take only 30 minutes to write, whereas a 9 panel page could certainly take an hour and half.
I often find myself taking more than an hour on a page. And even on smaller panel count pages, the time is often more than 10 minutes per panel. In fact, if I finish a short page particularly fast, it’s always a signal to me, to give it a harder look and see if anything from the story checklist can be applied or refined for a stronger narrative.
As you gain experience as a writer, of course, you do gain speed in your craft… but you also utilize more tools and tricks, and look through the art through a more complex lens. These two wolves constantly fight for dominance and who wins on any given page is anybody’s guess.
As I mentioned earlier, if you’re one of the folks who think writing is fast and easy… that a simple comic page should take ehh, maybe 10 minutes in its entirety to write… You simply don’t have a good grasp of narrative or the difference between poor and good fiction.
The Days of Throwaway One-Shots are Over
Again, what I’ve found over the years is that most less experienced writers (and definitely non-writers), approach writing from a purely instinctual place.
They write to plot, with minimal story discovery and minimal thought into story structure and mechanics.
I often point to my story checklist article, which highlights 17 elements of story, like Tone, Subplots, Dialogue, Symbolism and so on. I argue that it’s just impossible for a human to write on-the-fly keeping all 17 of those in play, to a deep and meaningful extent.
Genuine narrative is just too complex.
I think the mass consciousness consensus of writing comics is tied to Marvel days during its peak performance. At this time, Marvel was the machine, cranking out so many monthly titles. In fact, that’s why in comic creation we have the term of “Marvel Method writing,” which is really just delivering a rough outline of an issue to the artist. These vast majority of these scripts were simpler monthly serial stories, thrown together at a frantic pace, not-so-much with the goal of breaking any great narrative ground, but getting issues out and keeping customers on the hook.
Those days are over.
- The medium of comics and the audience have evolved.
- Technology has pushed aside the idea of the throw away comic issue.
I’m 100% definitely still an advocate of one-shot comics. They’re a great entry point for the new writer creator… but a new creator leveraging all their time, effort and money toward a one-shot is a completely different beast than Marvel’s charge to produce over 50 titles a month back in the day.
The truth is, creators rarely produce one-shots anymore.
Most writers coming to me for editing or story consulting help, usually have a larger graphic novel or maxi-series in play. The stories are deeper, with more moving parts then the old throw-away Marvel Method one-shots.
More sophisticated stories for a more sophisticated time.
And rightly so, such writing requires a lot of time and effort. Such writing, like all good writing, is rarely fast… or easy.
Masterwork Fiction
A decade ago, when I started this website and my books on writing, my goal was simply to put out the writing advice I wish I had when I first started.
Now, looking back at the years, the countless encounters and relationships with writers and their projects… I realize all my work has conveyed a real practical sense of achieving story and script excellence.
The focus has never been speed. It’s always been quality.
Raising the narrative bar by teaching folks what really makes story work and why.
Streamlining script execution for clarity, entertaining reads, and easier editing.
Allowing writers to find their footing, confidence and personal speed toward success, whether the story is twenty-two pages, or three hundred and twenty. ▪
About the Author —
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Newcomer or veteran writer, if you’re working on a project that needs commercial success, Nick urges to you read this intro article.
Nick Macari is a full-time freelance story consultant, developmental editor and writer, working primarily in the independent gaming and comic markets. His first published comic appeared on shelves via Diamond in the late 90’s. Today you can find his comic work on comixology, Amazon, and in select stores around the U.S.