Storyboarding is an essential step in filmmaking – and also animation – often used to outline a script or shot list and assist the floor managers and directors in their set management. For those unfamiliar, they are, essentially, blank comic boards (usually 3×2 or 2×2) that are filled in with scenes for a book or movie, previously hand drawn but in more recent years are digital.
However, storyboarding also helps visualize a story from words on a page into an artistic frame-by-frame, thus making them extremely useful for novelists and short story writers as well!
The creative process will vary from person to person, so not every method and technique is for every writer’s arsenal, but for those who are stuck in writer’s block and searching for new ways to let creative stories flow from the pen, you may want to consider it.
There’s plenty of examples of storyboards you can find online. Film storyboards are all over the place. Can you storyboard for a novel as well?
Your editor won’t look at it, your agent won’t look at it, your publisher won’t look at it, and your readers won’t look at it, so you don’t NEED to do them, but they will undoubtedly help your writing improve – for multiple reasons.
- Storyboards can be used as skeleton outlines.
- Editors and copywriters always recommend doing plot outlines or at the very least a mental outline of your story structure, arcs, and concepts. If you’re going to do an outline, you may as well storyboard it where you have visual representations of different integral parts of a story.
- Storyboards refresh the mind.
- Several times I’ve been writing for several days with ideas pouring out of the mind, and then at some point I hit a block and need a break from constantly staring at my screen or my hand cramps from typing or writing on a pad, so I take a break, step away, and do other life things. Then when I come back, poof, I forgot all the mental images I was working on and they’re gone forever. If you have a rough sketch storyboard of your work, it can help you re-visualize just what it was you were trying to write.
- Storyboards enhance your descriptions.
- When a scene plays out in my head, it can sometimes be hard to describe if I don’t exactly have the right words, and sometimes once they are drawn out, visualized, and in front of me, the words start to come, or anything that may have been left out originally can now be re-added after noticing it in a storyboard.
- Storyboards are easier than graphic novels.
- If you are someone who is interested in graphic novels but lean heavier toward writing than drawing, graphic novels would be a fairly daunting task. So, the logical stepping stone to them would be storyboards, which are essentially comic strips that only contain major plot or dialogue points and skipping over the in-between frames. Basically, like a flipbook-style of storytelling, not necessarily better or worse than graphic novels, but simply a different preference. Flipbooks to animation are what slam poetry is to rap.
- Storyboards make for great sequencing.
- The most natural and intended use for storyboards – especially in filmmaking – was to provide an overview of a sequence of events, especially to help with ‘out-of-order’ films like Pulp Fiction or Memento, but overall to help plot out the order of a story in the manner it needs to be told. They help map out the thematic unity of a story’s different plot points, like with stories that tell multiple parallel stories, like Seinfeld or The Sopranos.
- Storyboards can be character-driven.
- While plot is the most significant use for storyboards, you could also create boards that focus solely on specific character, either for appearance & design or to outline their specific character arc, storyboards essentially allow you to section off your story in new ways to play around with to keep track of different arcs and scenes the further your story progresses.
- Storyboards can be used for key visuals.
- Some stories, usually fantasy, action/adventure, horror, or sci-fi genres have some key visuals that help with the marketing of the book. A key visual is a graphic that conveys the essence of a story, and they can be used for poster arc, or perhaps as an alternate book cover (or an inner-jacket cover), and any visual medium that conveys your story, and often the individual boards of a storyboard for a scene can be optimal for creating key visuals for your story.
- Storyboards can be used as mood boards.
- Mood boards are collages, or just conglomerations, of images and visuals that are meant to convey the mood, tone, emotion, or aesthetic of a story, often used in filmmaking as well, but just as useful as a technique for the creative process in general, and you can use storyboards as mood boards to better capture the feeling your story is aiming to make the reader feel.
There are dozens of places to make storyboards, from StoryboardThat to Creately, or graphic design apps like Canva or PicMonkey, comic creators like Comic Creator Studio, Comicgen, or Giga Manga, or high-powered software like Adobe InDesign or Krita. Of course, some rough sketches on a notepad or white printer paper can always suffice as well.
More and more writers and bloggers are also finding the unique quality of storyboards to enhance their storytelling.
While there are drawbacks of storyboards, such as having to convey motion using a motionless still-shot or being too time-consuming when most creators are in a time-crunch, there’s no doubt there are several technical uses for storyboards that can improve your writing.
Donovan Levine | Agent, Writer, Copyeditor 
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