I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.
When you're writing a feature film, the moment you begin Page 1, you are in a sweat that you're running out of pages.
A 300pp novel can easily become a 200pp novel by printing with smaller type; a 100pp screenplay can potentially become a film of between 60-140 minutes in length; a 200pp stage play could be performed in anything from 30 minutes to four hours. For all these media, the script length is agnostic to the final work.
A novel is a book with a lot of pages.
Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph. Until you get to page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety - it's the job.
I finished a big book the other day. 421 pages. That's a lot of coloring when you think about it.
Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.
I don't write fight scenes in comics all that well. I think they're a waste of space unless they can move a story forward in some compelling fashion. You've only got twenty-two pages to work with. Why throw that away on a set of meaningless punches?
If I'm in the bookstore, and I see a 700-page novel, my first thought is, 'Ooh, how could you cut this down to size and make a movie out of it?'
The reason most novelists are not good screenwriters is that you don't have time for a lot of details. Novelists can really create a richer experience for the reader and have many subplots. You only have 90 pages because each page is a minute of screentime. You have to have certain things happen by certain pages, a certain story arc in the movie.
Inspiration is easy. The hard part is getting the inspiration onto 300 pages in an interesting, cohesive, easy-to-read but hard-to-forget story.
It always amazes me that Japanese comics have, like, 200 pages. How do they do that? They're fat books; it's a whole different kind of comic that's very close to their films. So I'm drawing from that history and bringing it here - bringing it to Katana.
I like books that are fat and full.
A lot of feature films do two pages a day.
I had no idea how long books were supposed to be.
'Nicholas Nickleby' is 800 pages long. At one time, the theater production was 15 hours long. So it's an interesting process, about what you leave out and what you select.
I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.
I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.
You have to remember when we were going once a month, we were putting out issues that were 480 pages, and people were complaining that these were too big, I can't get through a 480 page magazine every month.
I'm used to adapting my novels for feature film - it can be challenging to cut and compress three or four hundred pages into two hours of dramatic action.
Getting an idea for a book is not the problem, but you need 300 ideas - an idea a page.
My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.
One of my rigid goals is to keep each book under 300 pages because I think so much nonfiction is literally weighty that people don't get through these books ... If people don't finish your book, then they don't know what you're talking about.
