Quantum Storytelling

I’ll be cheering from the sidelines this year, as last year I learned that word count (somewhat counter-intuitively) doesn’t necessarily equate with story progress. That and I’m knee deep in trying to finish previous years NaNo endeavors.

Good luck to those of you taking the plunge with National Novel Writing Month tomorrow. Perhaps in a year or two’s time, we’ll all need a National Novel Finishing Month.

I’ve rendered out nine scenes so far in full prose. Easier than ever. Easier than NaNo. Everything is going smoothly. The only thing that slows me down is that I occasionally have to look up a detail for accuracy — a little last minute research. I should be done with Act One and into Act Two by the middle of the month.

Writing is supposed to be hard. I’m supposed to stare at the blank page for hours, and summon the will to write. I’m supposed to start at the beginning, and finish at the end of a long glorious stream of consciousness. I’m supposed to suffer, and rewrite. Something must be wrong because none of that is happening!

I wonder if it’s because the writing journey is easy with a road map?

Maybe. Just maybe.

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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