Quantum Storytelling

This is how I’m working these days, and boy is it ever working. The process goes like this:

1. Early Creative Soup
• Create story beats as index cards within SuperNotecard.
• Break beats down into separate individual scenes.
• Keep adding scenes and filling in the story til you reach 60+, the rough number of scenes in a feature length film.
• Shuffle things around as necessary.
2. Treatment
• Write out scenes in present-tense, abbreviated treatment form. You can do some of this during the Early Creative Soup stage if you feel the scene ideas are developed enough.
• Clean things up, arrange, rearrange until happy with scene order and full story.
• Fit it all into a tight three act structure if you can.
3. Execute the Medium
• Draft each scene as novel prose.
• Draft each scene in screenplay format.
4. Editing & Revisions
• Revise and edit drafts to clean up prose, fix errors, etc.
• Ship it!

That’s all!

I pushed myself towards seventy scenes. I only need about sixty. I did it because I knew if I tried a little harder I would find a little bit extra material I didn’t think was there. More than that though… is how I feel this morning.

I’m at sixty seven scenes. And I don’t think I can make seventy. I could, but this morning it feels pointless. Any scene I create I will simply throw away. My story feels complete.

While on the surface I was aiming for the logical reason of generating a little extra material, I think in my gut I knew that forcing myself towards seventy scenes would make me hit a point where I knew deep down it was overkill. I wanted to reach that point.

Why?

Because there’s always that uneasy feeling when you’re trying to do something new, and evaluate whether that new process or method was effective. I wasn’t sure if I had milked it for all it was worth.

Last night I tried to insert one of my ‘extra’ scenes and it didn’t work. It was something, ideally, to be placed at the beginning of the story. The problem is the beginning of my story is really tight in how it introduces the hero and the villain, and there just isn’t any room there to disrupt the flow and go off on tangents. Other extra scenes have inserted just fine. But now my story is pregnant. I’ve got more scenes than I really need and things feel really full. Why keep feeding my story?

It feels right, and I feel like I’m wasting my time to add more. I was waiting for that gut reaction more than anything, and I’ve got it.

You know what that means. It means my scenes are ready to be written in prose!

Let the fun begin.

Matthew Cheney doesn’t believe that lit snobs exist. What do you think?

While I agree that claims by sci-fi fans of the genre being snubbed are probably overwrought, and certainly exaggerated, so too is Matthew’s rebuttal. I have met people who were condescending towards genres like sci-fi, or hardboiled pulp.

As to what I think about that, well I don’t think I could go wrong by agreeing with Heinlein when he said, “Obscurity is the refuge of the incompetent.” Of course, this might incite the wrath of many yet-to-be-successful creators, but let’s not misinterpret things.

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