No. That's Fox McCloud. Scott McCloud's comic was on the six steps of creation. At least, artistic creation. These steps are as follows: Idea/purpose, Form, Idiom, Structure, Craft, and Surface. They don't seem as clear as to what they mean from just looking at them, but McCloud goes in depth about them as the comic goes on.
He does a very good job at explaining the six steps in a way that is easy to comprehend. Out of all the six steps, I think the one I need the most work on is structure. Specifically pacing.
The standard for something being a novel is fifty-thousand words. Currently, the novel I'm writing, Black Roses (I know the title is edgy but it relates to the plot so shhh), is forty-one-thousand words long... And I'm only about a quarter of the way through.
I know there are plenty of super long novels, such as basically every book is the "A Song of Ice and Fire" series. But those novels are filled to the brim with plot and story. So many things happen to so many different characters. It's like taking three books and putting them into one. Black Roses is not like that.
The story isn't super complicated. It's not simple either, though. Overall, not a whole lot of things happen in a long period of time. For example, at around thirty-thousand words, the main character gets together with his girlfriend/sister (it's complicated). Then, at forty-thousand, he's questioning whether or not she's out to murder him and his friends. That's a bit quick, right?
BUT IT TAKES TWENTY THOUSAND WORDS FOR THE MAIN PLOT TO EVEN START.
This isn't something that can be fixed with just a bit of editing, which I'm planning to do once I finish the book, hopefully by the end of the school year. I'm planning to rewrite many parts of the story, but considering the fact that this is my ninth draft of the thing, I kind of just want to have one set official story. But yeah. I suck at pacing. A lot.
