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Alan Langford
2025-04-12 08:44:29 -04:00
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Story Structure
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Version x.y of novelWriter supports story structure using the %story style of comment.
To use the feature, make the first word of a comment `story`, followed by a period,
a structure term, a colon, a space and the text for that term.
.. code-block:: md
%story.term: text
The term can be anything that you want to track in the manuscript.
This construct is intended to make it easier to extract metadata from a work to perform a structural analysis of the story.
There are probably as many ways to examine story structure as there are authors and editors combined.
For this reason the story tag is flexible.
You can use any terms you want and track any aspect of the story that serves your purposes.
An example method has been advanced by Shawn Coyne in _The Story Grid_.
This method asserts that a story is composed of "beats", and that each beat has an inciting incident, a complication, a crisis, and a resolution.
One might capture these elements of a beat where a character overcomes their fear of giving a speech as:
.. code-block:: md
%Synopsis: Carol overcomes her fear of giving a speech.
%Story.incite: Carol is pleased to be invited to a confernece to see her boss deliver a keynote.
%Story.complication: Carol's boss calls in sick and asks her to deliver a big speech.
%Story.crisis: Carol has a fear of appearing on stage.
%Story.resolution: Carol engages the help of a coach who helps her overcome her fears and delivers a great speech.
Other analyical models propose tracking a scene's pace, how it affects the mood of the story,
or which element(s) of the story's genre are being satisfied.
An author can use this mechanism to track any element of a scene.
Some examples include time of day, how much time passes in the scene, ot even the physical form of a shape-shifting character.
If a story involves magic, one could track which wand a main characteh has in hand. It's up to tha author.
When the story and other scene metadata is extracted into a tabluar form,
it is possible to get a comprehensive overview of the story and to identify possible issues
(for example, so many fast-paced scenes without a break that readers might become fatigued or over-stimulated).