Tony DiTerlizzi - Drawing Between the Lines: Bringing a Story to Life

A tiny peek at Part Two of Tony's talk: The Writing. Tony uses art and illustration terms to help illustrators in the room find ways to approach writing their own stories, like:

"The summary of a story is like a thumbnail sketch in illustration."

For Wondla, Tony started with an outline. He explains there are no details in an outline, "it's just chess moves... I'm looking for the beats of my story."

"An outline is like a rough sketch"

Books Tony turned to on the craft of writing. Some of his favorites: 20 Master Plots, The Writer's Journey, Story.

Tony mentions screenwriting books were particularly attractive to him since they seemed to pertain more to the style of book he wanted to make, books that would have visual, cinematic elements because they'd be heavily illustrated chapter books.

Tony cautions; "These books can be very helpful, they can also be very dangerous... they're formulas. I usually don't look at these types of books while I'm working on my outline."

Tony passes around the first draft of Wondla!!! It is covered in notes from Holly Black! We'd better not see this accidentally leave the room and end up on Ebay, guys.

"Revisions to the text are just like revisions to the final image."

Now Tony circles back to the beginning and talks about what it's like to illustrate your own novel. It's hard to imagine a more perfect speaker for this topic! What a lucky bunch of conference attendees.