Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá's blog

Dialogues.

How can we transform that good idea for a story into a dialogue that could seem natural and would tell everything it has to? Some times, I begin thinking about the stories from a scene, for the images come first to me. Alongside these images comes the meaning, the idea I want to tell, in need of shaping into some sort of text form, be it a narrative or a dialogue.

The first one is the easy solution, a little distant, it comes in lots of different forms and it has a initial advantage: in life, no one narrates their own actions. That said, one can expect a more literary text in the narrative. Even the "thinking" captions are some sort of narrative, once we don't think out loud and there is no continuos and rational line of thought in our heads.

The dialogues are a whole other story. How, then, can we transform an image and a stampede of little peaces of thoughts in a dialogue that would glue everything together and complete the picture? You must have the whole story clear in your head and what point you are at. Afterwards, you need to know what is happening on your page to decide what that single panel will tell, which part of your speech in in that panel's hands. Finally, you need a dialogue that flows trough the panels, bonding and making the continuity of the page.

You can't think the panels independently, neither the pages and so on. You can't tell everything in the first panel and have nothing left to the rest of the page, the same way you can't have a great page followed by a terrible failure of storytelling. You need to work the text with the images, the dialogues with the captions, the panel among them, the pages, the chapters, the beginning, the middle, the end. And I'm sorry, but a good story needs all these elements before you start drawing it.

Knowing it already makes the whole difference.

I had an idea for a new story, but I'm still looking for the right dialogues to tell it.