TPG Week 230: What Happens When You Don't Study

[Steven Forbes]

Welcome back, one and all, to The Proving Grounds! This week, we have a new Brave One in Brian Sanford. We also have Liam Hayes losing his mind in blue, I'm the guy gibbering in the corner in red, and all get to see what I'm talking about as Brian takes us to

Midnight

Midnight, Issue 1 - Brian Sanford - Pg. 1 [Four Panels] (I don't mind the giving of too much information here. Title, issue number and name in the page header? Not the worst idea. Necessary? No. Unusual? Yes. Something to chide him about? Not at all. I save that for later.)

Panel 1:

CAP:

Saturday 6.43 P.M.

A man (Want to specify his appearance, age, race etc.?) frantically paces the living room of a small apartment. (Moving action. This cannot be shown in a static image. Have him checking his watch or something similar.) The room is messy and cluttered furnished by only a single lawn chair set up in the center of the room before a small analog television sitting on the floor, nothing but the flickering light (Again, that's a moving action. You can't show flickering light in one panel.) of rolling static churns across the screen. Dozens of crumpled energy drink cans are tossed about the living room, alongside towers of crudely stacked papers spilling onto the hard wood floor throughout the space comprised of past due bills, newspapers, miscellaneous junk mail, and fractured hand written trains of thought none of which make sense on their own. (We're not going to be able to see any text, so don't worry about what's on them.) (And later is now! The Flawless Victory is lost. I'm not overly dogmatic, but come on! The caption before the panel description? That isn't how it works. That's the cart before the horse. Hopefully, this is a simple mistake and I won't have to be subjected to this again during the script. I don't think that'll be the case, but hope springs eternal.)

Click here to read more.

[Morganza]

It's easy to overlook visual cues in your own head when you write descriptions, and when you do it comes off as trying to describe a dream, it's vague and often full of conflicting information. (like seeing two characters on either side of a closed door)

Page one is where I'd do the most work, stick to visual descriptions and not what the character is thinking, etc.

[DarkHalf05]

Originally Posted by Morganza

It's easy to overlook visual cues in your own head when you write descriptions, and when you do it comes off as trying to describe a dream, it's vague and often full of conflicting information. (like seeing two characters on either side of a closed door)

Page one is where I'd do the most work, stick to visual descriptions and not what the character is thinking, etc.

I personally find that this is where self-editing helps the most. I set it aside for a few days, more than a week preferred. If I reread it and it doesn't make sense then, I know I wasn't writing the descriptions properly.

I also do thumbnails and describe my thumbs. It helps.

[SamRoads]

Well done Liam and Steven. Thanks for taking the time to do this piece of editing.

There's been a lot of recent submissions where the brave one appears to have read up very little about comic script writing. Is it just happenstance?

The missing punctuation is the hardest thing to explain. Writing prose or film-script style I can somewhat excuse, because maybe the writer is in the habit of doing things in a certain way.

But given that bad punctuation is always bad, in every format of writing, it speaks to the writer being deluded as to their level of writing ability.