Graphical Outlining

A student image-text from Glenn Russell's "Reconceptualising pedagogy: Students' hypertext stories with pictures and words"

Wally Wood's "22 Panels That Always Work"

Motivation

Traditional outlining is oftentimes a necessary evil. It is required to focus thought and determine structure, but it often constrains thinking, limits expression, and creates inflexible limits to the composition process. Comics as sequential art, on the other hand, still provide a structured narrative (since they are in sequence) but are arbitrarily extensible. Writers who are visual thinkers (which is not by any means an oxymoron) can perform a sort of remediation from their internal composition process (which might be highly idiosyncratic and multimodal) to a document that is shareable and interpretable by others. The graphical outline provides structure but not limits.

Many writers, especially young writers, are already steeped in the visual culture and semiotic landscape of comics as a mode. This fluency can be harnessed in the service of writing as a creative process. Doodling, even when combined with activities such as taking notes, is a "low stakes" task whereas traditional outlining can be "high stakes." Graphical outlining is an attempt to accomplish the same tasks as traditional outlining in the invention process, but from within the comfort zone of the writer.

Task

1. Using storyboard sheets, index cards, post it notes, or some other medium where sketching is afforded but where the order of sketches is mutable, begin drawing brief visual vignettes that relate to the writing prompt. Each storyboard or index card is a "panel."
2. After creating many short vignettes, a few long vignettes, or some quantity in between, begin placing them in an order.
3. Begin an inquiry into structure. What vignettes tie into other vignettes? Are there panels that in retrospect "belong" elsewhere?
4. Begin filling in the structure by creating transition panels to tie together the vignettes.
5. Repeat the previous steps, refining both the overall structure and the actual artwork of the panels involved. The refinement of artwork should be associated with the refinement of the structure of the narrative. Sketchier initial ideas are literally sketchy on paper.

Potential Pitfalls

A coherent, compelling visual narrative is not necessarily the same as a coherent, compelling written narrative. In fact often the two modes are opposed in how they depict a sequence. One could provide many examples of a fiction piece where the "twist" was something visual about a character (say, the character's appearance) or equally a piece where hiding a verbal fact (say, the character's name) is vital to the narrative. Since the modes have different sets of affordances, what works in one mode may not work in the other.

Similarly, just as the written outline might be stultifying or confining for some writers, the graphical outline might be even more confining (for instance for an artist who takes particular pride in one of the panels and so can't bear to scrap it from the visual narrative, even if it no longer meshes well with the remaining panels).

Potential Rewards

For visual thinkers the traditional process of outlining might be a chore. The goal with graphical outlining is not just to recontextualize the process, but to make the process fundamentally multimodal. If new modes have new affordances, they must also promote different styles of thought. A key step in the composition process is this winnowing and structuring of thought. The more frameworks which are available to assist, the more avenues for success that exist.

The process of sketching is inherently gestural; this ability to gesture (and thus not "commit" to a particular shape or composition) is key for maintaining flexibility in a structural sense. It also provides evidence of progress, even for unsuccessful approaches. One common problem with written outlining (most of which occurs on the computer) is that the process of revision is usually a process of deletion. It is possible to work for hours and have nothing to show for it but a blank Word document. Leaving a graphical trail of panels (many of which may be finished artifacts in and of themselves) provides a sense of progress and momentum not reflected in more traditional workflows.