How to Plan the Panels for Your Graphic Novel
- In This Quick Guide:
- Breaking the Page Window Is a Pane
- Use the Rhythm Method
- Panel Planning
One of the most important aspects of writing a graphic novel is planning out your panels—it’s the storyboard of your work. Unless you’re writing Marvel style, you’ll need to break the contents of each page into panels. A panel is a tricky thing, full of possibilities and limitations. In this guide, we’ll show you how to plan your novel for the best pacing and storytelling.
Breaking the Page Window Is a Pane
The dialogue in a panel may cover 20 seconds, but the picture itself is a snapshot, a second in time. In one panel, Loretta cannot pick up a penguin, turn, and throw it at Dmitri. That may sound like one activity, but it’s three separate actions taking place in three separate moments.
You could show that in three panels, one with the penguin being picked up, one with Loretta turning, and one with the penguin being flung. That would work, but if you could do that same thing in fewer panels, your plot would move forward more quickly. Readers are smart enough that they don’t need to see every moment, and can assume what happens in between. If in one panel the penguin is picked up and the next has Loretta with her arm outstretched and the penguin hurtling toward Dmitri, the reader knows that she turned. In fact, you could rely on implication even more, with Loretta picking up the penguin in one panel, a look at Dmitri talking in the next, and then Dmitri is suddenly hit in the face with the penguin in the third.
Another limitation is that you can have only one important visual concept in each panel. If you can’t tell the reader what’s going on in one single short phrase, the panel won’t work. “Dmitri watches Loretta pick up a penguin” works. “Dmitri doesn’t see Loretta pick up a penguin” also works. But you cannot count on the reader getting “Because Dmitri is winding his watch, he doesn’t see Loretta pick up a penguin.” You really get to show only one action. Everything else in the panel—other characters, furniture, penguins—is merely context.
So you need to break what happens on the page into a series of individual visual moments. You can have as little as a single panel on a page, or you can actually have dozens of panels on a page, particularly if it’s a series of single-character shots with little dialogue.
Use the Rhythm Method
It’s useful to start by picturing every page as being made up of the same number of panels. The number of panels vary from project to project, depending on the art style and the size of the pages—just think of how many typical panels of two people walking will fit on a single page. With that in mind, you can then consider how to vary the number of panels on each page. If your default panel count is 6, then a page with just headshots of penguins talking might have 10 panels. On the other hand, a big action shot of penguins parachuting off of an aircraft might take up two thirds of a page, leaving space for two normal panels.
You might never have a page with the actual default number of panels on it. Still, by using that number as a base, you keep a certain rhythm through the entire story. Pages with fewer panels mean pages that read quickly, even though the large panels may each take a bit longer to read. This emphasizes the action as big, explosive moments. The smaller panels that make up a higher panel-count page capture a lot of small moments adding up to a tense flow of activity, while the page as a whole takes longer to read. Keeping the rhythm helps the reader pay attention to the storytelling, rather than being distracted by randomly sized panels.
A good idea is to lean toward using a default of five or seven panels per page; the odd number keeps you from assuming that the default page is three rows of two panels apiece.
Panel Planning
You could make a graphic novel with varying size pages, so one page is very small and the next is very large. It would, however, be expensive to print and difficult to read.
Barring that, you have to keep an eye on how much you’re putting on a page. If you have a panel that needs to be larger than normal, either to emphasize the image or to fit in all the dialogue, then you have one of two choices: either make other panels smaller than normal, or put fewer panels on the page.
The good news is that as the writer, you don’t have to come up with the final panel placement. The penciler has to make those decisions. But even if you don’t make up the panel layout, you should have a panel layout in mind. Otherwise, you might ask for the impossible, and most artists don’t like to do the impossible.
For example, let’s say you write a four-panel page. Panel one is a normal-size picture of Loretta talking. Panel two is an extra-tall panel of penguins climbing a rope up the side of a building. Panel three is a standard-size shot of Loretta gasping as she looks out the window. Panel four is a wide shot through the window of the sun setting over the city, with a penguin dangling from a rope in front of it.
Possible layouts.
That page sounds fine until the artist has to place the panels. Look at the diagram of possible layouts to see the problem. Once you put down the short panel one and the tall panel two, where do you put panel three? If you put it below the first panel, some readers will read the panels in the wrong order, as the vertical gutters (the spaces between the panels) lead their eyes straight from panel one to panel three. Some graphic novelists would try using arrows to lead the reader from panel to panel. In things read to order what them telling instructions need shouldn’t readers! (Read that sentence backward.)
Putting three panels in a row gives you wasted space and an odd-looking design. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wasted space and an odd-looking design, but they should be there for some reason besides a writer being too lazy to plan.
With these tools and tips you can start planning out the panels of your graphic novel. Good luck, and happy writing!
From The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel, Second Edition, by Nat Gertler and Steve Lieber
