How to Write a Manga Script: From Story to Storyboard, Step by Step

First, an uncomfortable truth

Plenty of successful manga artists don't write a formal script at all.

When Akira Toriyama was drawing Dragon Ball, he said flat-out in a 2007 interview: "I basically only think about that week's chapter — even I don't know what's going to happen next week." The fact that Goku is an alien wasn't decided until the opening of Z. When Trunks first appeared, not even Toriyama was sure who the character was.

So if you're wondering, "Can I get away with not writing a script?" — the answer is: yes, but there's a price.

Toriyama relied on genius-level instinct and weekly discussions with his editor to keep his bearings. But he's also admitted that in the later years of serialization, his editor kept pushing him to keep drawing a story he wanted to end — a lot of the plot direction was essentially forced out of him. Eiichiro Oda, on the other hand, writes One Piece as an extreme planner: he plants foreshadowing that pays off three or four years later, with a crystal-clear master plan for the whole story.

There is no "correct" method — only the method that fits you. A script isn't a cage that limits you; it's scaffolding that holds you up until your instincts grow in.

Whether you use one, and how detailed you make it, is your call. This article is about how to write a script if you decide to — not about whether you have to.

What is a manga script, and how is it different from a novel?

A manga script (also called a comic script) is a document that describes every page and every panel in words.

It isn't a novel — it doesn't need beautiful prose. It's closer to a director's shot list: it tells the artwork what to show.

A manga script usually contains these elements:

The key point: there's no standard format for a manga script. As long as you (and your collaborators) can read it, it works. But a structured script is a thousand times more useful than a vague verbal "the panel looks roughly like this."

Six steps: from story to script

The steps below are a reference workflow, not an order you must follow. You might reach step four and realize the scenes you broke out in step two are wrong, so you go back and fix them — that's completely normal. Creative work is inherently back-and-forth; the only linear thing is the finished product.

Step 1: Sum up your story in one sentence

Before you write any script, make sure you can state the core of the story in a single sentence:

"A girl who has lost her memory searches for her past at the academy, only to find that the truth is crueler than forgetting."

This sentence isn't for the reader — it's for you. It's your compass: whenever you're unsure what a given page should show, come back to it.

Step 2: List out your scenes

Break your story into individual scenes. Each scene is a combination of a time and a place:

Scene 1: In front of the school gate (morning) — the protagonist arrives at the academy for the first time
Scene 2: Classroom (daytime) — self-introduction; she spots a familiar face
Scene 3: Hallway (after school) — a mysterious student stops her
Scene 4: Rooftop (dusk) — the first fragment of memory surfaces

Don't think about the artwork or the panel breakdown yet. Just list "what happens."

Step 3: Allocate your page counts

This step is unique to manga: your story has to fit into a finite number of pages.

A typical short manga runs 16–32 pages. A serialized chapter is usually 20–40 pages. You need to decide how many pages each scene gets:

Scene 1: In front of the school gate → 3 pages (establishes the world; needs wide shots)
Scene 2: Classroom self-introduction → 5 pages (core event; dialogue-heavy)
Scene 3: Hallway interception → 3 pages (pace picks up; turning point)
Scene 4: Rooftop memory → 5 pages (climax; needs negative space and emotional buildup)

A common mistake: giving every scene the same number of pages. Wrong — give important scenes more pages and transitional beats fewer. In manga, pacing is controlled through page count.

Step 4: Break each page into panels

Now we're at the heart of the script. For each page, you decide how many panels it has and what each one shows.

A rule of thumb for how many panels to use per page:

Take Scene 1 (3 pages) as an example:

[Page 1] (3 panels)
  Panel 1 (wide shot)
  Art: A full view of the academy, wrapped in morning mist, the crest above the main gate
  Narration: "Everyone says this is an ordinary academy."

  Panel 2 (medium shot)
  Art: Students walking in through the gate in little clusters
  SFX: chatter, chatter

  Panel 3 (close-up)
  Art: The protagonist's feet come to a stop at the gate
  Narration: "But I don't even remember what 'ordinary' is supposed to feel like."

[Page 2] (2 panels)
  Panel 1 (medium shot)
  Art: The protagonist head-on, bag over one shoulder, a little dazed but smiling
  Protagonist: "Okay. Deep breath."

  Panel 2 (full shot)
  Art: The protagonist strides through the gate, her back blending into the crowd
  Narration: "Day one has begun."

Step 5: Write the dialogue and the panel descriptions

You actually started this back in step four, but a few points are worth calling out on their own:

Panel descriptions should describe "what you can see in the frame," not emotions.

• Weak: "The protagonist feels very sad." (How exactly do you draw "feels sad"?)
• Strong: "The protagonist bows her head, rain dripping from her bangs, the photo in her hand crushed in her grip."

Keep dialogue short. Speech bubbles have limited room; if a single line runs past two rows, it's too long. If you find more than three bubbles crammed into one panel, consider splitting it into two.

Make the most of "silent" panels. The power of manga is in the image. One wordless close-up on a face can hit harder than ten lines of dialogue.

Step 6: Go back and check the pacing

Once everything's written, do a quick pass from start to finish. Check:

• Does the last panel before a page turn build anticipation? The last panel on a right-hand page should make the reader want to flip to the next one.
• Are there several pages in a row that are all "talking"? Add action or a scene change to break the monotony.
• Does the climax have enough pages? Is your most important scene getting squeezed?
• Do the characters jump around? Within one scene, characters should stay on consistent left/right sides (the 180-degree rule).

A complete script example

Here's an excerpt from a one-shot manga script you can use as a format reference:

Chapter 1: Enrollment

================
[Page 1]
================

Panel 1 (wide shot)
Art: A full morning view of the academy, with the "Qinglan Academy" crest above the main gate
Narration: Everyone says this is an ordinary academy.

Panel 2 (medium shot)
Art: Uniformed students filing in through the gate
SFX: chatter, chatter
Notes: The background students don't need much detail; the point is to establish an everyday feel

Panel 3 (close-up)
Art: A pair of feet comes to a stop in front of the gate
Narration: But I don't even remember what "ordinary" is supposed to feel like.

================
[Page 2]
================

Panel 1 (medium shot)
Art: Xue, the protagonist, seen head-on in front of the gate, bag over her right shoulder,
     short hair, bangs covering her right eye, calm but faintly dazed
Xue: "...Okay."
Notes: First look at her face — make it a face the reader will remember

Panel 2 (medium-long shot)
Art: Xue strides through the gate; the students around her are all chatting and laughing,
     and she's the only one alone
Narration: Day one.
Effect lines: none
Notes: Contrast the cheer of the surrounding students with Xue's isolation

Managing your script: don't let the panels swallow you

Twenty pages a chapter, 3–5 panels a page — that's 60–100 panels per chapter. Ten chapters of a serial is over a thousand panels.

As the script piles up, you run into problems like these:

• A piece of foreshadowing a character dropped in chapter 3 needs to pay off in chapter 8, but you've forgotten exactly which page and which panel it was on
• A character wore a red coat in chapter 5 but a blue one in chapter 7, and you never noticed
• You want to look up "which scenes this character has appeared in across the whole work," but the information is scattered across dozens of files

Some creators manage this in Excel, some in Notion, some in a physical notebook. What matters isn't which tool you use — it's whether you have a system that lets you, while writing the script for chapter 50, still pull up a detail from chapter 3 in seconds.

If you're looking for a tool built specifically for manga scripts, give LitMemo a try — its storyboard editor is designed around exactly the format above (page → panel → panel description, dialogue, SFX, effect lines). You can assign a character to each panel's dialogue, and @mention characters and world-setting entries right in the panel descriptions, which makes them easy to trace back. And once the script is done, you can export it straight to a text script or a PDF panel sheet — no extra layout work required.

One last piece of advice

Write first, revise later — don't try to be perfect as you go.

Your first draft will be rough, guaranteed. The page allocation will be off, there'll be too much dialogue, and you won't even be sure what some panels should show. That's normal.

And honestly — you've probably tried writing a script before. Maybe you downloaded some template, dutifully filled in three pages, and then realized the format was draining you faster than you were running out of ideas — so you quit.

That wasn't your fault — that method just didn't fit you. There's no such thing as "the one correct script format." This article gives you a starting point, not a right answer. Once you've used it, change whatever feels off and reshape it into a version that works for your hand. Your process only has to work for you — it doesn't have to work for anyone else.

A script is the skeleton of your story. Get the skeleton right, and the flesh looks good however it grows. Get it crooked, and no amount of detailed drawing can save it.

So write it. It's fine if it's bad — a bad script beats a blank page.