Many love stories follow the dramatic template: A falls in love with B, B falls ill, A battles on B’s behalf. Similarly, many thrillers follow: A trusts B, B uses A to attain goal, A learns the truth about B. Such templates are infinitely combinable and exist at micro as well as macro levels. The less you worry about creating unique dramatic situations, the more time and energy you will have to work on their exposition in your story. The magic of writing is in the exposition, not dramatic originality. The challenge is to understand that “exposition” means the character-driven incidental details of plot as well as rhetoric, and is a function of your voice, of who you are. The best example of a “plagiarizing” writer in this sense is Shakespeare.
Begin a story from threads
Create new threads by creating an event, using the event’s text as the thread name. When you’re reasonably happy with the opportunities offered by the threads, edit the events and add new ones to develop the story.
Focus your writing on a central issue
Create threads that relate to one another. This will help you arouse the reader’s curiosity with a central question. Will the hero survive? How could it happen? Who did it? Make your events maintain such questions in the reader’s mind. Where your threads intersect, there your story will develop.
Example:
Gutman and co. stop at nothing to get falcon
Wonderly uses protectors to obtain falcon
The intersection of these two threads, the necessary interest in Wonderly’s protectors Gutman must feel, is the engine of much of The Maltese Falcon.
Begin with open-ended threads
Try to create threads that state what happens in the light of its characters’ nature.
Example:
Wonderly uses protectors to obtain falcon
The example above provides a general picture of Wonderly which can generate events on a number of levels. How does Wonderly use protectors? How does she find them? Where are her past protectors? What would she do to get the falcon? Asking such questions of an open-ended thread will help you create dramatically relevant events.
Create characters by spotlighting existing
Threads can constrain your imagination when thinking about the story’s characters. You would be unlikely to think of Joe Cairo in The Maltese Falcon if you were trying to create associates for Gutman, though you would probably have no trouble creating Wilmer. To create characters whose individuality extends beyond the requirements of their thread, spotlight an existing character and create a new, related one in contrast. You will soon know whether the new character has a role to play in the events of your story.
Spotlight minor characters
Minor characters exist in stories as they do in life: as part of the logistics of our existence. In stories, however, minor characters can have a thematic or dramatic role beyond their logical function. Spotlight them to explore how they can illuminate, contrast, hinder, etc. your main characters. A good example in The Maltese Falcon is Effie, who is plain and a-sexual, and one of the effects is that Wonderly is even more of a knockout.
Read books on writing if you’re a novice
StoryProject is a tool, not a tutor. To use it, you should be familiar with the various theories of rhetoric and structure of fiction. There seems to be no bookshop without a shelf dedicated to the subject. The books may not be as good as their covers claim, but they will help you shape your own thoughts.
Inspiration and Auto-writer
Customizing Inspiration
The Inspiration menu items can be edited. Shift-click and hold on the Inspiration button to bring up the Inspiration menu, with every sub-menu ending with the “Edit Menu…” command. Select it and a dialog will appear, letting you rename, add and delete items of the sub-menu. If you add items, the item entry dialog will appear every time you enter a new item, so you can enter more than one. Press “Cancel” when you have no more entries to add.
The renaming operation is case insensitive. This means that although you can enter capitalized menu items, you cannot change “Name” into “name” directly. The workaround is to change “Name” to something else, like “xfds”, then change “xfds” to “name”. Because the Inspiration menu can insert its items anywhere in the entry field, it is best that its items are lower case.
Auto-writer is programmed to check the basic grammar for the original menu items, but will not check any new ones you enter. Add items only if you think of a worthwhile concept that is not included. If the menu already contains “wealthy”, there is no point entering “rich”, though there is a subtle difference between the two. The purpose of the Inspiration menu and Auto-writer is to inspire your plotting, not to aid your rhetorical power. The latter is a task beyond the scope of StoryProject.
Customizing Auto-writer
Auto-writer is designed to produce broadly ranging events of a type conducive to dramatic development. Not all of the events will be logical, but they will provide the random input that creative effort requires. This randomness of input is best suited for times when you’re unable to even start a story. If you have a story partly formed already, it may be useful to narrow down the range of events being produced.
There are two ways in which you can control Auto-writer’s output:
1. Set a persistent element
If you want to set a random element of Auto-written output to a particular word, type the word in the Event entry field and Command-click it. A dialog will ask you to select one of the Inspiration categories for the word to occupy. With the element set, every Auto-written event containing the Inspiration category you picked will feature your word in its place. The rest of the elements will remain random.
You can make an element not appear in Auto-written events if you Command-click some empty space in the entry field, but this is not very useful.
To reset the element to its default random setting, type “reset” into the entry field and Command-click the word.
2. Set a custom Auto-writer template
Setting an Auto-writer template gives you control over all of its elements. Type “% ” (percent and space) in the empty Event entry field. Then Option-click and hold on the Inspiration button, until a menu containing only Inspiration categories appears (or press Command-I and Option-click the Select button of the Inspiration dialog). The category that you select will be inserted into the entry field. Type a space and repeat the process, selecting all the categories you need. Type in any non-random text required. Now Option-click the OK button.
Well then, if your custom template is “% Pastime makes me sweat, but Pastime makes me Character.”, then Auto-writer would come up with events like “Yoga makes me sweat but TV watching makes me strong.”, “Swinging makes me sweat but nudism makes me nervous.”, and so on. More usefully, you may try templates like “% The Character inhabitants of planet Xeptra look like a cross between a Occupation and a Pet.” for science fiction, “% Driven by Motive, Occupation and Relation mutilate Occupation with Prop.” for horror, “% Relation hides Character target from assassin in Venue.” for adventure, “% Occupation kidnaps Occupation in Venue.” for crime, etc. In fact, short templates without non-random elements are the most inspiring: “% Action Occupation Pastime.”, “% Occupation Motive Character Relation.”, “% Character Goal Goal.”, etc. The custom template will also use any persistent element you have set.
To reset Auto-writer to default templates, type “reset” in the empty entry field, and Option-click the OK button. Alternatively, Command-click the Inspiration button or press Command-P. You will be asked to either put the custom template into the entry field again for editing, or reset both the template and any set element to default random settings.
One custom template is saved at a time in the Inspiration button, across program restarts. When it contains a custom template, the button is hilited. This saving feature is there to help you finetune your template, but you should not expect such templates to have a long lifespan. If you wish to, though, you can save any number of these templates: enter a template in the entry field, and save it as an event in your story.
Note that a custom template cannot reproduce its punctuation except for a period at the end, and it does not undergo any grammar or gender checking. Template elements must appear as in the Inspiration menu: possessive cases and plurals will be treated as non-random text.
