Comics scribe Tom King recently pushed out a series of tweets giving real time insight into one aspect of his writing process. In honor of a grocery store from my youth, I dub it his Mad Butcher mode.

I’ve collected them together here for convenience. If you’re curious about the process of writing and/or want to write comics yourself, I highly recommend taking a look. I imagine his decision making can be applied to any kind of writing, but with the tight “twenty something” pages of a comic book issue it’s especially relevant.

With no further ado, and all credit to Mr. King:

Reading through my latest draft. Already hating it and only on page 3. This is going to be a long day.

— Tom King (@TomKingTK) June 4, 2018

All right, I’m going to make an effort to save this script. It’s not good, but I don’t think it should be scrapped yet. If this doesn’t work though…

— Tom King (@TomKingTK) June 5, 2018

First, the big problem is the pay off isn’t paying off. The pages of pay off are fine, but it’s missing something in the middle, the tension that needs to be released. So we need to fortify the middle, especially the late middle.

— Tom King (@TomKingTK) June 5, 2018

So we cut page 1 which is just a gag opening. I love the gag; probably my favorite thing in this flawed thing, but it doesn’t add to the pay off and we need everything pointing in that direction.

— Tom King (@TomKingTK) June 5, 2018

I’ve got a nice 6-7 double splash, so pretty: but with the cut of 1 that moves this splash to 5 (can’t have double splashes on odd numbers). The double (typical of me) is very sparse on information/words. And we need to bolster the middle with more. So that becomes a 1pg splash.

— Tom King (@TomKingTK) June 5, 2018

So now I got two pages to use to reinforce our sagging middle. But I’ve robbed my artist of (half) a splash. Page 15 (was 17) is a splash with plot info; I’ll do a reflective page turn splash in 16 also with plot information. One sec, while I write.

— Tom King (@TomKingTK) June 5, 2018

All right new page written. It ain’t perfect, but it’s thematically more important than the splash and parts of it come from the heart. Still got one page left that I took from the gag. Going to add that three pages from the climax, right at the heart of the problem. One sec.

— Tom King (@TomKingTK) June 5, 2018

He never got back to us from that “one sec” as far as I can tell, so either the draft butchered him or he came out on top like that guy  beating his chest and yelling at Charlie Sheen in the helicopter at the end of Platoon. 

As an extra special crunchy bonus: ultimate words of wisdom sure to guide all hopefuls into epic comic book stardom…

The art of writing is capturing theme, movement, and poetry through the perfect positioning of truly sacred words:

PANEL 3: CRAZY QUILT a bit confused.

QUILT: W-what?

— Tom King (@TomKingTK) June 6, 2018