One of the great things about writing comic books is also one of the bad things: It demands constant and consistent output over a long period of time. To make anything resembling a living, you have to write three or four complete stories a month, often juggling them simultaneously, finishing one and then leaping, sans hiatus, to the next. The playwright, George S. Kaufman, once said to Irving Thalberg, when Thalberg was demanding a certain script be handed in, "Do you want it good or do you want it Thursday?" Writing comics is one of those fields where the answer is, "We want it as good as you can make it by Thursday." The assembly-line hand-offs require us to keep churning it out. And churning it out and churning it out.
There have been some very prolific writers in comic history — Robert Kanigher, Joe Gill, Gardner Fox, Paul S. Newman, Vic Lockman — and while he might fall short of matching those gents in page count, no one has maintained a consistent standard over more tales than Denny O'Neil. Folks who recall his fine work on Batman and on Green Lantern/Green Arrow sometimes forget that all of that represents a fraction of the work he's done…and not a very large fraction. How does he do it? He tells some (not all) in a new book out any day now…The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics. I'm among several "guest lecturers" who inhabit its pages but never mind that. Anyone who aspires to be a writer — and not just a comic book writer but a writer of anything — can profit from reading what Denny has to say about story construction, pacing, crafting expressive dialogue, etc. End of plug.