Quantum Storytelling

My story, novella, treatment, or whatever you want to call it is done. But it’s not.

“Wait,” You might be saying, “What the hell is he talking about?”

I’m continuing to add and develop some extra scenes just for good measure. When it comes down to the chopping block, some scenes may have to go. All the more reason to create a few extra ones so in your chopping you have more to choose from, right?

I’m beginning to live in a persistent daydream of my story. All the scenes are there, I can run forward and back through them in my head, or in SuperNotecard. Things feel almost right. Almost…

There is a better reason to keep adding scenes, and it has to do with this whole scene wrangling process from start to finish. Each time I add a scene, two, or three I find that it brings greater clarity to the scenes around it, and to the story as a whole. As I add scenes the visual image of my story becomes clearer, and more focused.

And then there’s that word again, nagging at me. “Almost.”

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In graphics, rendering means putting the image on screen, or in processing terms it means taking all the elements of a scene and translating them into visual output which ends up on your screen.

With my full-fledged process for storytelling in mid-stride, I’ve begun to see prose writing as similar to rendering. What does that mean?

It means I work out all my story elements, decide what happens in a scene, and how that affects other scenes. I set the pieces up, and I write a short treatment for that scene, which in rendering terms would be something like a ‘preview’ — not the finished render, but a rough snapshot of what the final scene might look like.

Imagine for a moment, someone trying to film a scene in a movie and suddenly someone decides the location has changed, or instead of Sally slapping Bob, she kisses him. You might have to completely redo the scene. Each time an element of the story changes, the filmmakers have to go back and re-shoot the scene.

Any time you change fundamental elements of your story, you end up having to rewrite that part of your story. The idea here is, get it right the first time. Do a first pass treatment style, as a present-tense basic narration of events.

“Sally goes to the barn and milks the cow, and then she comes back to the cottage and churns butter.”

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I hit fifty two scenes this morning. What a rush. Sixty is in sight. I’m so close now. I don’t have cause to cheer just yet, as not all of those scenes are full prose. Some are prose, some are treatment style — abbreviated present-tense narration. It’s a total shotgun mixture.

Is that a problem? Not at all. The problem has always been wrangling the plot and structure of the story into something I could work with. By work with, I mean write something that I would actually feel good about from the standpoint of storytelling.

I’ve almost got all the scenes in place. The hard part is almost over. Writing is the fun and easy part. It’s been a long road to get to this point. I’ve spent years trying to figure out a process that works for me, and I’ve finally found one that does. Is it perfect? Of course not.

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