Last month I presented the way I create age layouts, and now it's time to show how I figure out the dialogue.
In this particular project, once I came up with the idea of the Mystery bird, I already knew how this story would end. So, the only thing left for me was to work my way trough the end and build up a logical narrative that would lead to it.
Everytime I came up with an idea about what's going to happen, the constant question was "How is this helping the story?" If I couldn't find the answer, then I'd let go that idea.
But this rarely happened. Most of the time, the question was posed and then I tried to answer it.
What will make the reader realise that the main character is detached from the others?
How can I make them see that she has trouble comunicating with the others?
What will make them feel her growing interest for that mystery?
I hope, I gave the right answers. That is for you to say.
After that, it's the easier part. Well, at least in some ways easier.
The dialogue I put also in service to the above strivings. Especially for "Bird" I tried to put as little dialogue as possible. Somewhere around the begining of the second chapter, I got a bit paranoid that this "less conversation" plan is going to make the story difficult to follow, so I may have let go of my original idea.
This is point that it gets a bit confusing. I really wasn't sure if I should follow more conventional way of telling the story, or should I dive into dream sequences and go and cut off all the dialogue. Certainly, both ways have their charm, but I couldn't decide between them, so I guess this is sort of a low point in "Bird". It's neither conventional, nor art. Something inbetween. In this line of thought, this might be a good thing, since the character herself is a misfit of a sort.
Or I'm, of course, overinterpreting.
Anyway, I spent some time dealing with the words themselfs. For previous comics, the first version of the dialogue was always in english, but in order to make it sound more real and much more rich, I decided to write in my native language. Then, I would transtale it to english and french ( tough one!) and try to make it sound as good as in it's original version.
Here is a little preview of what my dialogue sheets look like when I'm done with them.
You would think there'll be more crossed out stuff.
So, the last thing I do is distribute the lines to pages and then to panels. But I'm really not always sticking to the exact words. Sometimes, in the process of lettering a better sounding version pops in my head, or the speech bubbles are too small and I have to rethink it.
I don't know if this is good or bad practice. Those dialogues are obviously not of Shakespearian type.
But anyway, I try to give my best.
