Planning: MaweJS, Story and Draft

[mkoskim]

Story Structure

My approach to stories is, that:

1. They are carefully crafted sequence of scenes, where
2. Scene is a text block that makes no sense, if it is divided to smaller pieces and separated from each other.

What MaweJS mostly has, are tools to craft this sequence. If you want to think like me, you should first forget all the other elements: chapters, parts, prologues, afterwords and all such things.

What I am mostly concentrating, are the tools to help to create this sequence. Text can be annotated with various elements, like comments, synopses, and marking them as incomplete or even missing. Text can be split to scenes, scenes can be merged or split (if they grew too large), they can be grouped together, and so on.

What I would like to concentrate are the words that reader reads. The structural elements are there only for one of the two reasons:

1. They help you crafting the words, or
2. They help reader to read the words.

Elements in a Draft

The exported draft is not meant to be read by regular readers. Instead, they are meant to share your story with your colleagues, or to be sent to writing competition or potential publisher.

You should not think the draft as a final book! It is not. If your story get published, the publisher will take your draft, and do all sorts of fancy things with fonts, page breaks, margins, layout and other stuff. If you are not self-publishing, don't pay too much attention to those things, as they will anyways be overridden by the publishers views. If you are self-publishing, consider working like the other publishers do: take a draft, and put it into an editor meant to create page layouts.

Publishers

Let's consider you have a novel, and you send it to a publisher. What would you want to include into your story? How would the draft look like?

There are two different cases: when looking for a publisher, and when working with publishing editor.

When Looking for A Publisher

Not all publishers will accept full stories. Instead, they may want to see some "marketing material" you need to produce to sell your story to them. For example, some want only 3 or 10 first pages first. Some want to see just synopsis, not the whole story. Some want manuscripts in specific formats.

Consult the publisher's web pages for guidelines. You might need to make tailored material for them.

Publishing editor

If the publisher gets interested, then they ask you the full story. Also, if your story is going to be published, then you work with publishing editor. In this phase, your final draft may include things like:

1. Title page: You want a title page: author, title and subtitle.

2. "Teaser" (backcover text): Most times, when you export drafts, you place "teaser" (your suggestion as backcover text) in the front of your draft, right after title page. This works for novellas, too, you can have author and title lines, then a short "teaser" before starting the story. Backcover text is the first thing the reader reads about your story.

3. Frontmatter: You may have acknowledges or forewords you feel important to share.

4. Mainmatter: This is your story. Many stories are just fine as simple list of chapters. But internally you may want to divide the text into acts. Acts you help you to structure your story, so that it does not have too big "head" or too short ending. Generally speaking, if you have prologue and/or epilogue, which is part of your story, it is located in mainmatter.

5. Backmatter: You may feel important to write some afterwords. These can tell your motivation to write this story. In some cases - scifi stories, political or technological thrillers - you may like to describe the speculations you based your story on.

Writing competitions

For writing competitions, you very seldomly send anything else but the story itself. No, teasers, no forewords, no afterwords. The format is usually pretty close to the publishers' guidelines: the draft should go straight to the point, and it should be easy to read. This generally means that you use 12pt font, 1.5 line spacing, left-aligned, ragged-right chapters and so on.

Many competitions are anonymous. You don't attach your real name to the draft, but use a pseudonym.

Your colleagues

To your colleagues you may send anthing you two feel necessary. Here you may like to send partial drafts, because you only want to discuss with some changed or otherwise specific parts.

Editor Elements

Editor elements follow the elements in the draft, but in the editor there are also elements that are not exported. These are meant to help you to get your story ready.

Mainmatter

I have developed MaweJS mainly for editing mainmatter, that is, the story itself. Mainmatter should contain the stuff you examine in "Story Arc" View. And because of this, I really need some way to write front and back matters. Otherwise I need to write them to mainmatter, which hurts the story analysis.

There are needs that I need to cover in future, like:

1. Separate section for forewords, afterwords and such #177 - Separate elements for front and back matter.
2. Unnumbered elements #229 - In some cases you will like to have unnumbered elements, for example, story prologue and/or epilogue.
3. Unexported chapters #235 - I probably make unexported chapter elements to make internal markers (e.g. pinch points) to the story.

Related

• Separate section for forewords, afterwords and such #177
• Unnumbered elements #229
• Unexported chapters #235
• Acts: Block? Marker? #240

[mkoskim]

If the smallest piece is scene, which are then collected together to form a chapter, what is the next level? It is probably an act (or part, partition). Stories can be divided to acts in various ways, and here are the most common:

1. Two part story: The story is split to two parts at the middle. These are stories, where the Midpoint is so dramatic, that it divides the story to two entirely different sections. Two-part story can be viewed as three act story, it is just split to two at Midpoint.
2. Three act story: This is the most common way to split the stories. First act is 25%, second act is 50% and third act is 25% of the story. The second act has Midpoint at the middle.
3. Four part story: This can be viewed as a two- or three-part story. When splitting a story to four parts, you split it like: (1) first act, (2) first half of second act, (3) second half of second act, and (4) third act. If you are familiar with e.g. K.M. Weiland's Character Arcs or Snyder's Beatsheet, you know that even that they are called "three act structure", they are both in fact four part structures.

But then, I must ask myself: Do I really need to split these acts to separate groups, or am I fine just with a separator? At the moment I think, that I am fine with separator:

#235

I could make an unexported chapter, which can have a name like "Act II", "Act III" or "Midpoint", and I can write all the needed guidelines for myself inside them. So, it is possible that MaweJS will be fine with just chapters and scenes.