I've written many scripts for comic books(nothing published) and I love doing it but I'd think I'd be happier doing Mangas and such. I just don't know how to go about doing this. HELP!
Japan - 4 Answers
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1 :
Get a four year degree.Learning how to speak, read & write Japanese will help.Then realize work from an unknown gaijin will never be accepted. There's thousands of other wannabe writers already living in Japan. Sorry to be so harsh, but it's the truth...
2 :
Honestly, the best way would be to get a job doing something else (such as teach English), and do the scripts on the side. Unless you've established your writing skills (in Japanese, of course), then you will not make a living writing comic book scripts in Japan. And it'll be really difficult to get a job regardless, there are literally tens of thousands of aspiring comic book writers in Japan, and many of them are self-published.
3 :
There are some international manga contests in Japan. http://e-morning.jp/mimc/ Apply for them and win. It would change something.
4 :
If you haven't gotten the scrutiny of a public audience and gone through the pressures of a regular deadline, you may not have trained yourself to have the mettle to be a pro writer yet. The way you get first published in Japan is no different regardless of whether you live in Japan. You solicit your (completed) script to a publisher. If they like it, they will publish it. But keep in mind that manga artists in Japan are expected to write their own story. As a script writer, your story has to be exceptionally good so that the editor thinks it's better than having a manga artist write their own story. Now, there is a slight issue with language. Simply put, manga doesn't get published in Japan if it's not in Japanese. There are several ways to get around that. Some publishers are interested in finding non-Japanese manga talent, so they are willing to translate non-Japanese works (they might dock the translation cost from your pay, though). You have no control over the translation, so anything that's lost in translation is lost, and your editor may never get it either if they don't read English. You could have someone translate your script and submit that. However, you'll be competing at the the same level as the thousands of over aspiring manga writers, and it's likely you are no match against them when they've grown up reading manga all their life. Or you could write your script in Japanese from scratch. Your Japanese probably isn't at a publishable level, so this is inadvisable. The Japanese manga publisher with a fairly consistent history of publishing non-Japanese manga writers is Kodansha, so it's best to first solicit to them. If you've never solicited manuscript to a publisher and never gotten rejection, you will learn what it means to persevere against repeated discouragement. Now, suppose an editor at Kodansha likes your work, and you get published. Almost all non-Japanese manga writers who have gotten published in Japan still live in their home countries. Manga artists and writers are not employees of an publisher, so there is no work visa coming from them to let you live in Japan. If you become self-sufficient as a published manga writer, you could get an artist visa and live in Japan. That's a choice you could make, but it's not something you can get by default.
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