by Strephon Kaplan-Williams
You know your material but how do you organize the main elements into a book that flows and develops for a reader? StoryLines is both a simple outliner and a set of linear cards that flow from left to right. Just like paper cards these can work in the same way. But when you sort paper cards you lay them out pretty quickly in trial order, arranging and rearranging the sequences of cards as seems best to your organizational sense. How do you do this in StoryLines. And have it be as fast?
Clicking and dragging cards visually in SL is not fast and your computer screen does not allow you to see a great many cards all at once and still read text. Zoom in SL does not mean changing the size of the cards and text as if zooming in our out. It only means filling the screen or not with a SL view. So you can only get more cards on screen by making their Preferences size smaller. This won't help much.
So in developing your storylines just make your cards a big enough size to see about ten words on the card itself. Your upper card screen will allow as much text as you want to type. You just won't see much of it on the visual card below.
1. Make as many columns and cards as you need to develop a storyline. You have to do this yourself by right-clicking on the menu that appears and do insert column or right click and pick New Card from the menu that appears. This is the horizontal flow of your story.
2. The vertical flow of your storylines are at the left as black areas that go down the left side. Each of these is a storyline, which means the name of the direction flow of a key element in the story. You can make your own names for each storyline. I use three lines for the three main characters. But I also create other storylines that will contain the horizontal flow of a storyline. These are: Character Name, Plot, Theme, Reader. Reader is for the reader reaction I intend at each story development.
3. Start with only the Main Character storyline and a second flow storyline called Plot. Do not include any other Character storylines yet, so you don't get confused, if you do. Some writers may want the two main characters' storylines showing to indicate interactions. Jane likes Joe. Joe rejects Jane. I call these storyline cards that go under the plot storyline, though they seem also character storyline cards. A plot storyline card is one that indicates an action. A character storyline card is one that indicates motivation or reaction for an action. Jane likes Joe because he has deep blue eyes is a character card. Jane talks to Joe. Joe ignores Jane. These are plot type storyline cards. Jane feels hurt and shuts up. This is a character card and goes on the Jane storyline.
4. If you stay with only one Main Character storyline visible, along with the plot storyline visible, then you are creating the story development to be the result of the main character's character. You are giving a complete story to the Main Character through the plot development line. If you are using two main character's storylines visible, and plot line, then you are making a story that is the interweaving of two main characters, so the focus is on the interactions of the characters and not on the internal nature of each Main Character in how they respond to an external event, such as both meeting each other at a party but not hitting it off right away. It's your choice of course. This only illustrates how to use StoryLines.
5. As we already know, don't we, StoryLines has a click function to turn on or off each storyline being visible as a series of cards or not. What is visible as a card is also visible on the very simple Outline in the upper left. This Outline view is the fastest way to arrange and rearrange your storyline cards. You have to use it since dragging cards visually, especially far away, is slower than if you were working with actual paper cards. This is the sacrifice we make to have a visual metaphor. And we do not have a Zoom function to reduce card size to very small so we can see a lot of cards at once and move them visually. So for the necessary speed, rearrange your cards by using the outline view. Not much fun but it gets the job done. Use the Outline to go quickly anywhere in a storyline by clicking on that card's text in the Outline view. Then once there you have the wonderful visual card screen at the bottom to see in detail how you want to arrange your cards. My card view contains eight full cards in a storyline and eight down also if I want eight storylines visible all at once, which I may want later on when I have developed several storylines for an intricate and exciting plot structure to the book. Card size is 145 wide and 80 high with a 14 point type size. I need this type size because of eye strain.
6. So you start your story structure by using both the card view and the outline view together. Use a limited number of words for each card to begin with. Also, start with the minimum number of storylines, two or three. One or two Main Character storylines, and one Plot storyline. Plot can mean also: Event, Key Dynamic, or Event event like a specific happening. A full story has a start in the ordinary world, chance meetings, reactions, choices, new actions, goals set, goals not achieved, crises, resolutions, new challenges, losses, injuries, new characters, interventions of character and fate, guidance, help, resistance, destroying, gain, allies, enemies, final resolution, and so on. Which ones are important to you and your story? You can make one or more plot storyline cards for any of your important dynamics like any of the above. This keeps an overall structure going which has development, variation, color, excitement, progression, suspense and finally resolution and achievement of a goal that is worthwhile, if that is the way you construct your story.
7. Once you have quite a bit of story development for the main Main Character, then you add a secondary character, or another main character, storyline and so you develop the perspective and development of the story. This allows you to build without getting confused by too much stuff on the screen at once, a problem I can have. It's great fun to write exciting individual scenes, but what is their purpose for the reader and the story development? So if you write a great scene you still have to place it within storylines as they develop. You may see that you need some developing scenes to get to your great scene. You also need to see what comes after. Thus you use storylines to keep rearranging plot and character developments as you actually write scenes. You thus keep modifying your story development according to what you are actually capable of writing that is dramatic as part of an exciting story. You use StoryLines to also analyze your story as you write it. Allow yourself the time to do so. You will not have writer's block if you are analyzing your story with keeping current your storylines according to what you actually write. Keep modifying your storylines by adding and taking away cards. You can keep interesting cards you don't use in the Pockets folder, where they can be reviewed and retrieved if you want to put any into a storyline again.
8. And don't forget you want to cause exciting and meaningful reader reactions. You may know how you feel as a writer, but keep thinking Reader. This is why I have readers who read my chapters as I develop them. But StoryLines allows me to build in reader reactions by having a separate storyline flow that indicates the most likely reader reactions to a storyline development. Oh, No, don't kill him! He has been throughout the whole book experiencing horrors he has overcome and now you make him die when he could have love and life? Yes, the novel, Cold Mountain, a colorfully written novel but with a serious plot flaw that will keep it from being great. You don't write a story in which the Main Character overcomes every obstacle and then dies almost by accident at the end when he is about to obtain his goal of happiness and relief from his suffering, or do you? At least as a writer know what you are choosing as a reader reaction as your story moves forward to its inevitable conclusion. Having a storyline for Reader reactions developing will help you in this.
This is all there is to using StoryLines effectively, as far as I know. Save frequently by hand so as you move cards around you do not have crashes caused by memory overload or hidden bugs. Do backup copies. Keep up-to-date with your actual writing in your word processor. StoryLines is more than an outline view, as with a regular word processor. Because it has vertical and horizontal columns it allows for you to create a complete two-demential story structure. This is its great advantage, which an outliner or word processor alone will never achieve. It's visual interface helps you also be more organized and inspired in your writing of full stories, like for a novel or play. Keep the vertical and horizontal clue-cards going together and you are sure to have a better finished product. Half a good story is how it is organized. The other half is how colorfully you write the details of your story to move the reader to experience what you write for themselves in their reading of it.
Strephon Kaplan-Williams is an American writer living in the Netherlands whose best-selling non-fiction publication is The Dream Cards in eight languages. He has also published a number of successful books in dreamwork psychology. He has now switched to writing memoir and fiction and finds StoryLines a necessary help tool.
© Strephon Kaplan-Williams, 2006
