Episode 12 - Is It Warm In Here?

Story

Pick and Crunchy meet Professor Razorclaw.

Behind the Scenes

I have yet to mention my writing process. Except that by mentioning not mentioning it, the writing process has been mentioned!

My process for writing has grown and changed even more than my art process. However, for the last handful of episodes or so I have started to land on a fairly stable process for writing.

Writing AGZ Part 1: Overall Story Outline

I maintain a slowly evolving outline for the story. The outline gets moved and re-written in parts in different tools. Sometimes it's because the tool is just at-hand such as VoodooPad or my pocket notepad I scribble in throughout the day. Other times I choose a specific tool to visualize and play with the outline such as FreeMind.

Writing AGZ Part 2: Episode Outline or Notes of Intent

From the outline, I take the given episode node and create a brief episode concept that I cut and paste into the editor I use to grow the concepts into real dialog.

Writing AGZ Part 3: Writing the Episode

The final narrative is almost always composed in Scrivener. Scrivener has some fun behavior built in where you can type out dialog directly in a screenplay format. It seems to help things flow well for me when coming up with "some character says" then replying back to that character as yet another character.

Why Share These Notes?

It's helpful for me to document my evolution as a storyteller and visual artist. I hope others may find it interesting and/or useful. I also do this to see what kind of thoughts and feedback end up being shared by the readers.

Also, I think I've finally seen enough "behind the scenes" documentaries and read enough creator how-to blogs and things where it just seems to make sense to craft a little space to share such thoughts along with the given art being produced.

Thanks for reading, feel free to join the Forums and take the discussion further!