How to Use StoryWeaver Story Development Software

A writer recently asked:

Hello, I am new to the idea of writing software and have only watched a few youtube videos to aquatint myself. Storyweaver seems to be the right fit for me because I don’t have a hard time writing I just have a hard time driving the action forward in a consistent way to meet an end. I have been trying to write a novel for a while and find that the sheer magnitude of the story makes me feel confused about what to do next!

 

Storyweaver is a program that helps you develop an over all blue print which you then use as your guide when you actually sit down to compose your story, is that correct?

 

I have the demo version and I was a little unsure about how much to write in response to each question. My inclination is to just launch into the story full board. I wonder if there are any example stories that could be referenced for first time users of the program?

 

Does a short story work in the same way as a novel with this software?

Thank you for your time

My reply:

Howdy!

Yes, StoryWeaver is designed to help you create your story’s world, who’s in it, what happens to them and what it all means.

It does this by taking you through a step-by-step path of creative discovery through four stages: Inspiration, Development, Exposition, and Storytelling.

Each stage follows the creative process and focuses on what is needed to come up with ideas, rather than forcing the author to focus on what the story requires. In the end, the story gets all it needs, because the author creates an entire world.

We don’t supply any finished examples as that tends to move the author away from his or her own ideas. But, there are small examples from different stories in many of the 200+ “Story Cards” – each of which has you focus your creativity on a particlar step in the process.

While you can use StoryWeaver for short stories, you’ll want to skip some questions and answer others with less depth because that degree of detail simply won’t be called upon in a short story.

As for how much to write in response to each Story Card or in the regular “synopsis” breaks, there is no minimum nor upward limit. It just depends on how far your Muse takes you. Just remember, the process is idea generation – the actual writing will be done after that process by referring to what you have written about your story’s world.

Melanie

The 28 Magic Scenes – Part Four

http://dramaticapedia.com/2012/08/30/the-28-magic-scenes-part-four/

The Dynamic Model (2) – Transmutation of Particles and Waves

In this second article in the Dynamic Model series, I’m going to explore really intriguing problem – how particles can be transmuted into waves and vice versa.

Why this important to writers and even more important to psychologists and social scientists may not be immediately apparent, so first I’ll outline its potential usefulness and also how it is essential to the expansion of the Dramatica theory into a whole new realm.

Stories might end in success or failure of the effort to achieve the goal. But how big a success, or how great a failure. Now you are talking a matter of degree. What’s more, is it a permanent success/failure or a temporary one? And if temporary, does it always remain at the same level or does it vary, getting bigger, smaller, or oscillating in a symmetrical cyclic or complex manner?

Now, apply this to a character’s motivation. It may be motivated by one particular kind of thing, but is that motivation increasing or decreasing? It is accelerating or decelerating? Is it cyclic or complex, is it transmuting from one nature of motivation to another? And for that matter, how does a character actually change from one nature to another in a leap of faith? Up the magnification and ask, “can I see the exact moment a character’s mind changes from one way of looking at the world to another?”
When is that magic moment at which Scrooge changes? How long does it last? Can we find the spot at which he is one way now and another way a moment later? Is the change a process or an immediate timeless shift from one state to another? What exactly is the mechanism – not the mechanism that leads him to the point of change, but the exact time at which that change occurs?

When can we say that a light switch is off versus being on? Is it how many electrons are crossing the gap, is it the position of the switch at a visual resolution? Is it the light getting brighter? How bright? How fast? How about a mercury light that fades on and off at 60 Hz? When it is on the nadir of the down cycle is it off? And therefore, does the exact moment of a character’s change depend upon momentum? Inertia? Zeno’s paradox?

If writers could follow the rise and fall, the ebb and flow of dramatic potentials, resistances, currents, and powers discreetly for every element, every particle in a story’s structure, one could predict the cognitive and affective impact on the readers or audience as a constantly changing bundle of waveforms, each one thread or throughline in the undulating unbroken progression of experience.
Now project this into psychology, societal concerns, stock market analysis, weather prediction – such a dynamic model would enable incredibly accurate projections as well as far more detailed and complete snap analyses.

BUT

In order for these applications to be realized, we need not only a dynamic model, but also the means of connecting it to the structural model. In other words, we need to develop a particle/wave continuum in which particles can become waves can become particles in an endless flow of cascading shifts and transmutations.

So how does this interface work? What stands between particle and wave that alters one to another?
In the next installment of the Dynamic Model series, I’ll offer some conjectures.

Melanie

Novel Writing Tips: Novels Aren’t Stories

A novel can be extremely free form. Some are simply narratives about a fictional experience. Others are a collection of several stories that may or may not be intertwined.

Jerzy N. Kosinski (the author of “Being There,” wrote another novel called “Steps.” It contains a series of story fragments. Sometimes you get the middle of a short story, but no middle or end. Sometimes, just the end, and sometimes just the middle.

Each fragment is wholly involving, and leaves you wanting to know the rest of the tale, but they are not to be found. In fact, there is not (that I could find) any connection among the stories, nor any reason they are in that particular order. And yet, they are so passionately told that it was one of the best reads I ever enjoyed.

The point is, don’t feel confined to tell a single story, straight through, beginning to end.
Rather than think of writing a novel, think about writing a book. Consider that a book can be exclusively poetry. Or, as Anne Rice often does, you can use poetry to introduce chapters or sections, or enhance a moment in a story.

You can take time to pontificate on your favorite subject, if you like. Unlike screenplays which must continue to move, you can stop the story and diverge into any are you like, as long as you can hold your reader’s interest.

For example, in the Stephen King novel, “The Tommy Knockers,” he meanders around a party, and allows a character to go on and on… and on… about the perils of nuclear power. Nuclear power has nothing to do with the story, and the conversation does not affect nor advance anything. King just wanted to say that, and did so in an interesting diatribe.

So feel free to break any form you have ever heard must be followed. The most free of all written media is the novel, and you can literally – do whatever you want.

Novel Writing Tips: Get Into Your Characters’ Heads

One of the most powerful opportunities of the novel format is the ability to describe what a character is thinking. In movies or stage plays (with exceptions) you must show what the character is thinking through action and/or dialog. But in a novel, you can just come out and say it.

For example, in a movie, you might say:

John walks slowly to the window and looks out at the park bench where he last saw Sally. His eyes fill with tears. He bows his head and slowly closes the blinds.

But in a novel you might write:

John walked slowly to the window, letting his gaze drift toward the park bench where he last saw Sally. Why did I let her go, he thought. I wanted so much to ask her to stay. Saddened, he reflected on happier times with her – days of more contentment than he ever imagined he could feel.

The previous paragraph uses two forms of expressing a character’s thoughts. One, is the direct quote of the thought, as if it were dialog spoken internally to oneself. The other is a summary and paraphrase of what was going on in the character’s head.

Most novels are greatly enhanced by stepping away from a purely objective narrative perspective, and drawing the reader into the minds of the character’s themselves.

The Dynamic Model

This is the first in a series of articles I’ll be writing about a whole different way of looking at the Dramatica theory – in terms of dynamics, rather than structure. In fact, the dynamic model is a counterpart, not an alternative, to the existing structural model with which you may be familiar.

As an illustration of the difference between the two, if you think of the structural model as being made of particles, the dynamic model is made of waves. If the structural model is seen as digital, the dynamic model is analog. If the structural model describes a neural network, the dynamic model describes the biochemistry, If the structural defines the elements of a story (or psychology) and how they relate, the dynamic model defines how the elements transmute or decay into other elements and how relationships among elements are changing.

In usage, the structural model can tell you, for example, that a main character is driven by logic; the dynamic model can tell you how strongly they are driven and how the intensity of that drive changes over time. The structural model can predict if a story will end in success or failure; the dynamic model can tell you the degree of success or failure.

In a nutshell, the structural model documents the fixed logic of a story’s structure, the dynamic model charts the ebb and flow of its passions. Cognitive and Affective, Yin and Yang, Space and Time. Head and heart.

If you are familiar with deep Dramatica theory, you know that all the output of the Story Engine is not made available in the Dramatica software. In fact, the Story Engine generate quite a bit more information about a story’s structure than it makes available to a user. What information, and why suppress it? I’ll answer the second question first.

We suppressed information that was so detailed and dramatically “tiny” that it was beyond the scope or magnification in which authors work. And, even if someone wanted to work with structure to that microscopic micromanaged level, that information had such little impact that it would almost certainly be lost in the background noise of the storytelling. In other words, the granularity of that suppressed information was smaller than the resolution of an audience’s understanding. In short – it would be lost in the translation from structure to finished story. So, to keep from overcomplicating the story structuring process and having the author do work that would never have a practical impact, we decided this kind of material should not be provided by the Story Engine.

Still, just because authors can’t really apply this suppressed information in a useful manner doesn’t mean the information isn’t accurate, especially when using the Story Engine for psychological analysis rather than just for fictional constructs. So, here’s a brief description of this information, shared here for the purpose of illustrating the limits of the current structural model at its farthest edges, and then being able to further describe what the developing dynamic model can bring to the table.

What is suppressed: PRCO and 1234. What the hell does that mean? PRCO stands for Potential, Resistance, Current and Outcome (or Power). 1234 is the sequential order in which the four items in a quad will come into play. You see this last part in the sequence of the Signposts and Journeys for each of the four throughlines in Dramatica, but the engine only shows you the output for the “type” level or plot level of a story’s structure – the equivalent of the topics each act will cover in each of the four throughlines. It is suppressed for all the other levels and all the other quads. (Though some additional sequential information is also available in the Plot Sequence Report in Dramatica.)
In truth, EVERY quad in the structure appears in every story structure, but some, like the Signposts, are the focus of the story. And yet, if you watch a story unfold, you’ll see that EVERY SINGLE QUAD in a completely structured story will unfold in a predictable sequential manner. As a side note, the manner in which we discovered this is an intriguing story I may write about someday, but for the purposes of this article, suffice it to say that every quad in a structure at every level will have a 1234 sequence attached to it, and those sequences will differ from one storyform to another.

But what about the PRCO? Well, consider ever quad as a little dramatic circuit – not a static thing except in the sense that an electronic circuit is static – a battery, a resistor, a light bulb and some wire – but the electrons flow through it and the bulb generates light. Similarly, in a dramatic circuit – a quad – the four items will act as Potential, Resistance, Current and Outcome (Power) and form a flow that moves one moment into the next and generates energy that sparks the next scene or sequence or act.

Now I could go into great detail about how all this works (it is built into the Story Engine after all) – BUT, that’s not the point All you need to know for this article is that in the process of “winding up” the dramatic potential of the story at large, the model is (conceptually) twisted and turned like a Rubik’s cube so that quads are misaligned in a way that creates the tension that drives the story forward. Or, in terms of psychology, it describes the conflicting forces that are at work in the mind.

And so, every item in every quad will be assigned a 1234 and also a PRCO. This means that sometimes a scene will begin with a Potential and other scenes will open with a Resistance or Current or Power. In other words, 1234 and PRCO are independently assigned because they are not tied together psychologically, nor in terms of fiction.

Back to the dynamic model. The structural model can only tell you if something is a potential or resistance and the order in which it will come into play. But, only a dynamic model could tell you how MUCH potential or resistance was present and how long its span of time in the sequence will last: its duration. Plus, the dynamic model could tell you how the intensity of that potential might be changing and how fast it is changing and whether that speed of change is accelerating.

Stepping back then, it is pretty easy to see the usefulness of this both in charting the collective dramatic intensity of an unfolding story upon an audience’s head and heart, and also the manner in which motivations and decisions, effort and activities reach a flash point or recede in real world individual and group psychology.

Enough for this introductory article. More soon….

Melanie

Novel Writing Tips: Keep A Log

Keep a daily log of creative notions and tid bits.

One of the biggest differences between a pedestrian novel and a riveting one are the clever little quips, concepts, snippets of dialog, and fresh metaphors.

But coming up with this material on the fly is a difficult chore, and sometimes next to impossible. Fortunately, you can overcome this problem simply by keeping a daily log of interesting tidbits. Each and every day, many intriguing moments cross our paths. Some are notions we come up with on our own; others we simply observe. Since a novel takes a considerable amount of time to write, you are bound to encounter a whole grab bag of tidbits by the time you finish your first draft.

Then, for the second draft, you refer to all that material and drop it in wherever you can to liven up the narrative. You may find that it makes some characters more charismatic, or gives others, who have remained largely silent, something to say. You may discover an opportunity for a sub-plot, a thematic discourse, or the opportunity to get on your soapbox.

What I do is to keep the log at the very bottom of the document for my current novel, itself. That way, since the novel is almost always open on my computer, anything that comes along get appended to the end before it fades from memory.

Also, this allows me to work some of the material into the first draft of the novel while I’m writing it.

 For example, here are a few tidbits at the bottom of the novel I’m developing right now:

A line of dialog:

“Are you confused yet? No? Let me continue….”

A silly comment:

“None of the victims was seriously hurt.” Yeah – they were all hurt in a very funny way.

A character name:

Farrah Swiel

A new phrase:

Tongue pooch

A notion:

Theorem ~ Absolute Corruption Empowers Absolutely

Corollary ~ There are no good people in positions of power

I haven’t worked these into the story yet, but I will. And it will be richer for it.