A Challenge in Visual Storytelling

As an academic, and a fiction author, the majority of my energy goes toward literary (aka. written, textual) endeavors. It is a 2000+ year tradition of expression which is both empowering and imprisoning. We are no longer "bound" by the written word. We have so many other ways to explore the power of narrative.

The challenge we face when we strive to move from the written word to another medium is that we aren't trained to do this through our standard education. (I might argue that today we aren't even  educated to write well in the literary form, let alone in visual forms.) We do not know what expresses a feeling, a sensation of motion, hardness, softness, stillness or activity.  We have to take special courses to learn what techniques work to communicate visually. Visual codes are different than textual codes, but to write a narrative to be presented in a visual medium we must understand both the visual and the textual codes. We must have a common language. In most cases, to create a visual narrative requires a team, as very few of us have all the skills necessary to both create a story, illustrate a story, and promote a story.

As a rhetorician who primarily works in the written word, creating the script for a graphic novel has been a distinct challenge. When we began this adventure in 2004, Chris wanted me to script out every aspect of the comic page, frame by frame. We discovered over time that though I could do this, my decisions on visual narrative were not as powerful as when Chris was inspired to represent a scene "his way." It took us about eight years before we had a comfortable language through which I could communicate the "essential message" of a scene without dictating the specific visual elements to be included.

Chris was not comfortable, initially, in making the decisions for the visual representation of the story. He was used to authors who believed it was their jobs to micromanage every element of the comic's creation. I, on the other hand, wanted to work with a partner, not an "employee". Today, however, we have found a balance between scripting everything and leaving it all to Chris to create. I feel it is my job to provide Chris with the core story, including the subtle and hidden messages necessary for the long-term plot, and then I leave him to generate the visuals. This requires a lot of trust for both the artist and the author, because many times we don't imagine the same things... and as a "Type A" personality, the lack of direct control is difficult to manage... but the rewards are amazing!