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How to Write Manga: Your Complete Guide to the Secrets of Japanese Comic Book Storytelling
What if you could wake up tomorrow and make manga- what would you create?
With How to Write Manga, you can find out!
Let writing teacher R.A. Paterson share his over twenty years of experience helping writers like you become great storytellers. How to Write Manga will give you the simple and essential tools you need to write your manga your way.
Inside you’ll learn how to…
Write both Shonen and Shoujo manga. Master the Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu story structure that makes manga unique. Create epic battle manga like Naruto, My Hero Academia and One Piece. Design manga characters that your audience can’t get enough of. Grab your audience and keep them reading until the end. Make your stories come alive with emotion. Craft romance and slice-of-life manga that your readers will love. Produce four-koma gag manga. And so much more!The difference between you and a manga pro is smaller than you think!
Do you want to make manga? Do you want to share your story worlds with everyone?
Get your copy now, and start tomorrow ready to make your dreams come true!
320 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 2, 2019
67 people are currently reading
38 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Currently reading
April 28, 2021Manga have such a unique way of storytelling but you rarely find any books that really go into how they are build up. I do not know if more ma terials are available in Japanese and these just never make it to English or if the industry likes to keep these secrets. So I was really happy to spot this books as it promised to already have done the research that interested me: to see how manga storylines are structured and what makes them work, what makes the characters work.
I will come back and tweak this review as I read, but here are my thoughts so far.
The pre-amble talks about how the author’s original approach to researching manga was with the focus in shounen works. This almost turned me off since I am not interested in telling a shounen story, but the author promises to have points and chapters that work for all manga and parts that are focused on different genres.
The first few chapters talk about the characters, the main characters, supporting cast and the anti heroes and what makes them work. These have a few helpful points on what makes an interesting character, and how each character that has things they are good at should also have weaknesses.
But I don’t agree with one of the main points that at least the main characters should be exaggerated to be able to stand out. While this is often the formula for shounen manga (eg. the strongest character) this doesn’t always work for other genres, like in a slice of life manga. Part of these advices are presented as universal and to me it feels like these were still very much written with shounen manga in mind so I would take them with a grain of salt.
There was one thing that really bothered me in this section though and that was the talk of female characters. The author went on to say a few lines that are simply generic ideas on what they think female readers would like but this is not true and it doesn’t sound very good when they say only attractive female characters would sell well.
“Female audience members all imagine themselves as physically attractive (or want to be attractive), and the lead character”
“the female lead will almost inevitably end up with a love interest, who is usually also going to be attractive”
“and if she wasn’t attractive the audience wouldn’t be able to accept them getting together.”
These seem like a really wild ideas to just put out there, presented as fact. This type of personal taste and presenting it as a fact comes up when the author talks about the audience enjoying cruel villians as well. It is stated the audience enjoys seeing the villains do the awful things they do because it is what people also want to do but only rules and consequences are keeping them from doing so. I really don’t think this is how people work? At least, not all..?
These chapters did have good points and ideas though so I will continue reading and I can’t wait for the chapters about plots and storylines.
I will come back and tweak this review as I read, but here are my thoughts so far.
The pre-amble talks about how the author’s original approach to researching manga was with the focus in shounen works. This almost turned me off since I am not interested in telling a shounen story, but the author promises to have points and chapters that work for all manga and parts that are focused on different genres.
The first few chapters talk about the characters, the main characters, supporting cast and the anti heroes and what makes them work. These have a few helpful points on what makes an interesting character, and how each character that has things they are good at should also have weaknesses.
But I don’t agree with one of the main points that at least the main characters should be exaggerated to be able to stand out. While this is often the formula for shounen manga (eg. the strongest character) this doesn’t always work for other genres, like in a slice of life manga. Part of these advices are presented as universal and to me it feels like these were still very much written with shounen manga in mind so I would take them with a grain of salt.
There was one thing that really bothered me in this section though and that was the talk of female characters. The author went on to say a few lines that are simply generic ideas on what they think female readers would like but this is not true and it doesn’t sound very good when they say only attractive female characters would sell well.
“Female audience members all imagine themselves as physically attractive (or want to be attractive), and the lead character”
“the female lead will almost inevitably end up with a love interest, who is usually also going to be attractive”
“and if she wasn’t attractive the audience wouldn’t be able to accept them getting together.”
These seem like a really wild ideas to just put out there, presented as fact. This type of personal taste and presenting it as a fact comes up when the author talks about the audience enjoying cruel villians as well. It is stated the audience enjoys seeing the villains do the awful things they do because it is what people also want to do but only rules and consequences are keeping them from doing so. I really don’t think this is how people work? At least, not all..?
These chapters did have good points and ideas though so I will continue reading and I can’t wait for the chapters about plots and storylines.
August 29, 2024
Secreta of how to write great manga stories especially shonen manga fight scenes.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews