Alan Langford
40 lines
2.2 KiB
ReStructuredText
40 lines
2.2 KiB
ReStructuredText
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Story Structure
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Version x.y of novelWriter supports story structure using the %story style of comment.
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To use the feature, make the first word of a comment `story`, followed by a period,
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a structure term, a colon, a space and the text for that term.
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.. code-block:: md
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%story.term: text
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The term can be anything that you want to track in the manuscript.
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This construct is intended 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 combined.
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For this reason the story tag is flexible.
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You can use any terms you want and track any 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_.
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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.
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One might capture these elements of a beat where a character overcomes their fear of giving a speech as:
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.. code-block:: md
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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 confernece 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 analyical models propose tracking a scene's pace, how it affects the mood of the story,
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or which element(s) of the story's genre are being satisfied.
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An author can use this mechanism to track any element of a scene.
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Some examples include time of day, how much time passes in the scene, ot even the physical form of a shape-shifting character.
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If a story involves magic, one could track which wand a main characteh has in hand. It's up to tha author.
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When the story and other scene metadata is extracted into a tabluar form,
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it is possible to get a comprehensive overview of the story and to identify possible issues
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(for example, so many fast-paced scenes without a break that readers might become fatigued or over-stimulated).
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