I’m not sure I would have done this if I hadn’t read about Stan Lee doing it, but it was easily one of the best tips I’d learned. It essentially looked like:ġ: Establish scene – somewhere in AustraliaĤ-5: Preparing to enter mine, Iko explains how she is hunting wolf soldiersĦ: Enters the mine show how she is aloneħ: Searching the mine, establish creepy settingġ0: Iko tries to get soldier to surrenderġ1: Iko shoots soldier and misses he discovers that she’s an android Though I didn’t save any of that original outline, it was a really simple breakdown of the story – nothing complicated. With my complete outline in hand, I set about writing a page-by-page outline, detailing exactly what needed to happen on each and every page that would move the story forward. However, once I had my scene-by-scene outline complete, I narrowed in on the story even more, employing a strategy that Stan Lee himself uses (because, hey, if it works for Stan Lee, who am I to argue?).

That synopsis then became the start of writing a scene-by-scene outline-again, this very much mimics my process for novel-writing. Once I felt like the story was forming into something coherent, I drafted a full synopsis and had it approved by my editor. With that premise in mind, I spent lots of time brainstorming ideas for scenes, plot twists, characters, settings, and ways to work in all of our favorite crew mates from the Rampion, while trying to build on the places where Winter had left off.

There would also be romance, a new villain rising to power, and some flashbacks that delved more into Iko’s backstory. Rogue Lunar wolf soldiers are wrecking havoc on Earth, and Iko has taken it upon herself to hunt them down and return them to Luna before they can destroy the tenuous new peace agreement that’s been established. I already had a basic premise for the story: I’m a planner / outliner, so I employed a lot of the same strategies here. This part of the process looked pretty much exactly like how I start all of my books. Once I felt like I had a solid grasp on what needed to go into the script and what the formatting would look like, it was time to start really figuring out the scope of the overall story.

The next step for me was very similar to my process with novel-writing, too. In Part I of this blog series, I talked about where the idea for Wires and Nerve came from, and some of the resources I used to research graphic novel scriptwriting.

Comic book outline template