Veronica Berglyd Olsen
111 lines
4.1 KiB
ReStructuredText
111 lines
4.1 KiB
ReStructuredText
.. _docs_features_story:
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**************
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Story Comments
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**************
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A special set of comment styles allow for annotating your text with structure information. There
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are two styles of comments available. They are an extension to regular comments as described in
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:ref:`docs_usage_comments`.
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.. versionadded:: 2.7
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Story Structure Comments
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========================
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You can annotate story structure by using the ``%Story`` style of comment. To use the feature,
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make the first word of a comment ``Story``, followed by a period, a structure term, a colon, a
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space and the text for that term.
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Usage
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-----
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The story term can be anything that you want to track in the manuscript. This construct is intended
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to make it easier to extract metadata from a work to perform a structural analysis of the story.
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There are probably as many ways to examine story structure as there are authors and editors
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combined. For this reason the story tag is flexible. You can use any terms you want and track any
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aspect of the story that serves your purposes.
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An example method has been advanced by Shawn Coyne in *The Story Grid*. This method asserts that a
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story is composed of "beats", and that each beat has an inciting incident, a complication, a
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crisis, and a resolution. One might capture these elements of a beat where a character overcomes
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their fear of giving a speech as:
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:bdg-info:`Example`
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.. code-block:: md
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### Scene
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%Synopsis: Carol overcomes her fear of giving a speech.
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%Story.incite: Carol is pleased to be invited to a conference to see her boss deliver a keynote.
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%Story.complication: Carol's boss calls in sick and asks her to deliver a big speech.
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%Story.crisis: Carol has a fear of appearing on stage.
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%Story.resolution: Carol engages the help of a coach who helps her overcome her fears and delivers a great speech.
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Other analytical models propose tracking a scene's pace, how it affects the mood of the story, or
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which element(s) of the story's genre are being satisfied. An author can use this mechanism to
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track any element of a scene. Some examples include time of day, how much time passes in the scene,
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or even the physical form of a shape-shifting character. If a story involves magic, one could track
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which wand a main character has in hand. It's up to tha author.
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When the story and other scene metadata is extracted into a tabular form, it is possible to get a
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comprehensive overview of the story and to identify possible issues. For example, so many
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fast-paced scenes without a break that readers might become fatigued or over-stimulated.
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Output
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------
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The story structure comments can be included in the manuscript, and are formatted similarly to
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the synopsis comments:
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.. figure:: images/fig_story_structure_manuscript.png
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A set of story structure comments as shown in the Manuscript tool.
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When you export your project data from the Outline View, all story structure terms are added as
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columns to the exported file, which can then be opened in the spread sheet software of your choice.
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Story Notes
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===========
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Story notes are similar to story structure comments, but have no predefined meaning. Essentially
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they are a generalisation of the story structure comment, and the only point of having this
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additional format is to allow you do filter them in and out of your manuscript independently.
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You can annotate story notes by using the ``%Note`` style of comment. To use the feature,
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make the first word of a comment ``Note``, followed by a period, a term, a colon, a space and the
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text for the note.
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Usage
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-----
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These notes are free form, but one intended use case is to add consistency annotations to your text
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to remind yourself where you have described something that must be checked against other parts of
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your text later on.
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:bdg-info:`Example`
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.. code-block:: md
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### Scene
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%Synopsis: Carol overcomes her fear of giving a speech.
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%Note.consistency: This is the first time in the story Carol gives a speech.
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Output
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------
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Story notes are included in the manuscript in exactly the same way story structure comments are,
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but has a separate inclusion setting in the build settings. They are also included in CSV exports
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from the **Outline View**.
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