Free PDF: Tips to Write Comic Book Dialogue with Examples

Download this free guide with basic tips and tricks to write a compelling comic book script that brings your story to life

Managing page layout and length is one of the single most important skills of a comic storyteller. By carefully planning your dialogue and how it appears on the page, you can create pace, action, and suspense to captivate readers and keeps them turning pages.

Fred Van Lente (@fred_vanlente) is a best-selling writer who specializes in comic books and graphic novels. He has worked for Marvel on titles including The Amazing Spider-Man, Iron Man Legacy, and Wolverine: First Class. He’s also created his own comic book series, and written a how-to book called Make Comics Like the Pros.

If you want to learn how to write your own comic dialogue, here Fred shares a free downloadable cheat sheet with his top advice for getting started.

The role of dialogue in comic books

“Visual storytelling is about shifting the importance of objects in space. Once you can grasp this basic concept, and apply it in all its variations, you’re free to tell any tale you want,” says Fred.

He believes that his job as a writer is to guide his artistic collaborators to the story he wants to tell through a combination of visual storytelling and professional script writing.

In his script writing for comics course, Fred teaches you how to write professional scripts for comic books and graphic novels from scratch. He guides you through the process of creating scene descriptions, characters, dialogue, and other elements to build compelling scripts that are ready to share with editors and artists.

Free PDF guide: Basic Tips and Tricks to Write Comic Dialogue

Shared from Fred's course, this free downloadable cheat features his 10 essential tips for the dialogue-writing process to make your script sound more professional—no matter your experience level. The advice includes:

1. The dos and don’ts to consider when writing, from avoiding clichés to writing phonetically.

2. Why you should read your dialogue aloud to ensure it sounds natural. Sometimes hearing your speech instead of reading it helps to highlight areas for improvement.

3. Using ellipses to link captions and establish suspense—a key feature of any strong comic book script.

Ready to discover more advice on writing narrative captions that bring your characters to life? After clicking the button below, you’ll find a PDF titled, Basic Tips and Tricks to Write Comic Dialogue, by Fred Van Lente, in the Downloads folder on your computer.

This resource is ideal for beginners looking to understand the basics of comic book dialogue as well as established writers with an interest in exploring a new genre. If you want to access this material after that date, you can sign up for Fred’s course, Script Writing for Comics: Explore Visual Storytelling.

Learn more about comic book creation

- Want to take your knowledge of comic book design further? Learn everything from superhero illustration to graphic humor with these 12 online comic book art courses.

- Get inspiration for your drawing and storytelling with 18 amazing comic strip examples to inspire your ideas.