| Posted: 02 November 2026 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | 6
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It is a general rule that writers mostly don’t think in pictures. A classic example came a while back when, as a favor to an editor, I took on an assignment being written by someone else. The writer insisted on working full script, which meant I had no input on the number of panels on a page, or what was in them. Almost immediately I ran into a problem with a group of five or six characters sitting around a table talking. The dialogue in the first panel established the position of each character at the table—which the writer immediately ignored with the second panel—and the third—and the fourth. Without the characters actually moving, the sequence of their speaking kept changing. Ultimately I had to resort to some pretty odd camera angles to get the characters in the right order to fit the dialogue. (Unrelated to that, one of my “favorite” examples of writers not thinking in pictures involved another full script where the writer asked for a winged figure—BIG wings—to fly thru a door and between the legs of a man standing in the room—without knocking him over! In that case I had to simply ignore what the panel description asked for.)
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