My physical notebooks (and all our other worldly goods) are still floating somewhere in the Pacific, but I do have a partial write-up from my lecture notes on disc. Yell if you want a copy.

In the meantime, anyone care to offer opinions on fiction-structuring packages like, "Writer's Dreamkit?" (I know, only sign the backs of checks, but I reckon that if I'm thinking of writing a check for VP, I'm not a pro yet.)

So, with that caveat, I don't think that you'll get more out of $269.95 worth of Dramatica than you will out of $2.69 worth of file cards. (I read some of the movie reviews that they give as examples, and discovered them to be wrongheaded to the point of uselessness -- to the extent of missing who the main character was, or what the dramtic turning point of the story was.) Recall too that in terms of structure that movies are short stories, not novels.

If, however, buying Dramatica is what it takes to get your butt into the chair and your fingers onto the keyboard, then it's worth it.

Definitely did not want a movie/play scriptwriter: my main vaster than empires and more slow writing project uses a Ben Jonson play for its plot armature, so I'm trying to move away from that kind of structuring and into a more novelistic arrangement. I've also recently figured out that the play only really gets me to an initial crisis/revelation point in the novel, so I take you point about short stories.

That is, I could make the play into the species (if not quality) of short story that Terry Carr used to buy for Ace Specials, the kind that can be extended to novel length if you punch a few holes in the wall and install an electrical subpanel in the attic.

Thanks for the advice, hope to see as an instructor in Fall of 2003.

I'd love to do it someday, but I think it might be weird for me, and for you...also I'm not a "young writer" - or a young anything - any more.

I'm also perversely fascinated. I'll try to keep my reply short. Watch this space.

The unitalicized values were assigned to this work of fiction by whomever put this demo together (most likely Melanie Anne Phillips), and are derived from Dramatica's associated body of literary theories.

Here's the test:

A. What work of fiction is being used for this demo? (No fair peeking.)

B. If you were in the middle of writing a work of fiction, would the information filled in by the Dramatic Story Engine be useful to you?

THE LISTS:

1. Character Dynamics:

Resolve: Change
Direction: Stop
Approach: Be-er
Mental Sex: Male

2. Plot Dynamics:

Work: Action
Limit: Optionlock
Outcome: Failure
Judgment: =Bad=

3. Thematic Choices:

Domain: =Mind=
Concern: =Memory=
Range: =Truth=
Problem: =Thought=

4. Main Character Appreciations:

MC Domain: Psychology
MC Concern: =Conceptualizing=
MC Range: =State-of-Being=
MC Problem: Thought
MC Solution: =Knowledge=
MC Focus: =Change=
MC Unique Ability: Situation
MC Critical Flaw: =Interpretation=

Teresa: I've emailed you my notes. Yell if for some reason they don't arrive.

I'm going to go look at the demo now, and see if it even makes sense.

Meanwhile, Hamlet for $20 is ... [sfx] ... the Daily Double!

Mike, if I'd guessed that, it would have been because the character's problem was defined as "thought". What tipped you off?

That's "To be or not to be," and so on.

You will, of course, have Googled on Melanie Anne Phillips in order to find out what award-winning screenplays, best selling novels, and critically acclaimed short stories she's penned?

Then I realized that while I thought I knew what the jargon meant, the view of HAMLET it seemed to represent was childish and unduly influenced by fairly dumb C.20 exposition on the meaning of the play, focussed on that one famous soliloquy.

Not so good: either the software doesn't do what I want because it tries and fails, or it requires more critical knowledge of a work in progress than an author is likely to be able to correctly supply.

And, Jim, put it this way: how much would you pay for "Joe Eszterhas's Basically Instinctual Scripting Engine"?

As a writer I've been hung at the starting block for years by the feeling "oh, this idea I thought was original is just an imitation of story X." I think I've read too many books. Back in high school I had no such inhibitions and wrote all sorts of gloriously derivative garbage, and some of it really wasn't that bad. It seems less derivative when you've gone ahead and hung some flesh on the bones.

VP: To anyone who is wavering about VP -- go. It's an injection of pure writing inspiration, together with practical directions and a customized map. (Your part is to walk the road.)

Teresa: I thought your VP party trick was falling down whenever someone -- usually Jim -- surprised you with a joke.

My understanding now is that it has morphed into a Dramatica type monster with the same approach, modelled on the "21-point storyline" and other such Hollywood simplifications.

Best,

JF

Oh, my.

Oh, my goodness.

As it happens, I have a fully-functional version of "Jim Macdonald's Highly Developed and Entirely Rational Plot Washer And Dryer with Extra Spin Cycle" right here. Did I ever tell you about how I use Celtic knotwork as an outline?

Other useful plot generators include grandmaster-level chess games. Really.

I keep thinking about repackaging dear old Eliza as a plot machine . . .

"Why do you say there would have been a time for such a word?"
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? You seem quite positive."
"Have you thought about alternatives to the way to dusty death?"
"Tell me more about the idiot."

- . . but it would be, well, what we used to call "wrong."

Write it in Visual Basic with a glitzy interface. Put it in a four-color-printed box. Charge three hundred bucks a copy for it. Advertise in Writer's Digest. There you go.

I've never seen Plotto myself, just read descriptions. I wish someone would put out a facsimile edition. It does have the virtue of having been written by someone who could crank out plots by the armload.

Scott, thanks for pointing me at the demo. I did check it out.

Bob, Kevin, it doesn't surprise me that the Dramatica story engine has options that are perfect for Hamlet, nor that it appears to use 20th C. critical interpretations of the play.

You know how if you ask people for a number between 1 and 10 they'll usually pick 3, and if you ask for a particularly random number between 1 and 100 they'll give you 37 or 17? By the same sort of defaults, color = red, painting = Mona Lisa, and great work of English literature = Hamlet. You build in answers for the one test question you know is going to come up.

Beth, that's my general-purpose party trick. I feel myself a very drab instructor next to Jim.

Thank you for the vote of confidence -- and you too, Fran

Jim, of course I googled her up. Short bios of the two creators of Dramatica: http://www.dramatica.com/theory/addl_materials/aboutauthors.html. Neither is a writer. Mr. Huntley has nontrivial software credentials.

Melanie Anne Phillips' list of all her creative work: http://storymind.com/melanie/. I notice that she's working on a story for "an upcoming book of shorts and unfinished pieces called 'Fragments'," no publisher mentioned. The bit of story attached to this announcement is very short, neither good nor bad.

Melanie Anne Phillips' fiction: http://storymind.com/melanie/writings.htm. There are two more short stories, one of which is for children, the other of which is unreadable. There are also two screenplays. One's actually a treatment. It's Jaws, only the sharks have taken to cruising through snow and are preying on young skiers. I'd give it a place in the Happy Slush Log.

The journal of Dave Phillips when he was in the process of becoming Melanie Anne Phillips: http://www.heartcorps.com/melanie/diary/diary.htm. This is relevant only because it explains why Dramatica insists on referring to a character's "mental sex", a category it defines as "differentiates between male and female problem-solving techniques," instead of specifying their gender.

{glyph of suppressed rant in re stupid theories about problem-solving techniques and gender}

And then there's the poetry. And the annotations thereto. And the various web instantiations of her theories.

Perhaps I should stop now.

No, add this: a fairly sensible article from 1995 about story-development software: http://www.wga.org/WrittenBy/1995/0195/sftware.htm. Sums up the issues very nicely.

Six or seven comments came in while I was writing that long one yesterday, if anyone was wondering. I have to say that Scott's take on Dramatica seems like the sanest reaction imaginable. And Mike, I love the idea of adapting Eliza as story-analysis software. Should we combine her with the Evil Overlord plot generator? This is becoming a fabulous machine, like D. West's mimeograph.

There should be a switch, failing that, there's certainly a programmatic solution, but I'd have to download MT and stare at the code. (There are people who could glance and fix it, but I'm a net/sysadmin, not a developer.)

Can't get published? Still imagine you aren't being read past the third expository graf? Have you updated "Nightfall," "Nine Billion Names of God," "Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" AND "Big Two-Hearted River," and they're still coming back singed?

Troubling you is that what is, young Jedi?

Well, now there's

HACKWELL'S DEMON

(No, not "Damon." Who are you kidding?)

Know Stuff Without Learning It!
More Fun than the Video Professor, and unlike him, knows the difference between "comprise" and "compose" (with moderately priced plugins)!
Less Codependent than Everquest!
And They'll Love The Part Where Everyone Is Run Over by a Helix of Ravening Energy!

Only $449.50, or Six Easy Payments of $129.95!
(You Don't Have MathCAD, Right?)

Besides the mechanics of writing, do you ever go into that harder-to-define aspect of writing at VP? Here's an example, which I just happened upon (to my delight) taking the Green Line into work today, something that probably should have been written by Stephen King, or Barbara Kingsolver--but never was:

"Several writers have noted the feeling of discomfort experienced by the writer who carried within himself a work not yet written and which, even before it has been undertaken, 'wants to come out.' If it is ever to be born, it will not be before its term of nine months or nine years--nonum prematur in annum--after which the writer will once more find himself alone, in the solitude where he was before conceiving it. The very feeling of these solitudes sufficiently confirms the living presence so vividly experienced in between. It will be hard to convince the artist that during the years which were sometimes required for it to become viable, that the work in him was nothing...."

Courtesy of Etienne Gilson. I bring it up because it seems hard sometimes, even learning the craft, to know when the time is actually right (write!) to put pen to paper. The difficulties of plot-construction may be a major reason. But oftener it seems more a matter of how well you know your characters...

Best,

John F

Oh, one more vote for Mike going ahead with that fancy Visual Basic interface for Eliza-as-writing-machine.

But what comes up in conversation late at night -- that's another matter. I've sat out on the porches at the Island Inn, or on the beach a mile down the road where you can see stars overhead and luminous ctenophores in the water, and talked writing and related arcana until way past my bedtime.

I've only started to think of it as a party trick during the last year or so. Recall that I've spent a lot of time as a copyeditor. When I started teaching at VP I was more used to authors who go ballistic if they see a lot of red pencil on their pages, so I went easy on the students.

On the other hand, I also have a long and embarrassing history of absentmindedly copyediting whatever's in front of me, if it needs it and I have a pencil in my hand. One afternoon at VP during a one-on-one that involved a lot of text analysis, I wandered from absentminded copyediting into absentminded full-scale line editing, murmuring the reason for each change as I made it. When it occurred to me what I was doing I stopped, horrified, and tried to apologize -- only to find that my student was delighted. He thought it was great. He said he'd never realized how thoroughly you can edit down prose, or how quickly.

I don't always do my Veg-o-matic number, either. Going over "Wolves Till the World Goes Down" with Greg van Eekhout did not involve a lot of simple deletions. Working over Scott Jansson's story was half a textual thrash, and half a philosophical discussion of what dogs do and don't understand. It depends on the story.

I could be wrong, but I think the episode Scott photographed (http://www.scottj.net/images/VP/DSC00058.JPG) was the first time I ever used that term for thrashing someone's text. It was the last day of the workshop, and Yog came up to me and asked whether I'd be willing to sit down with one of the students with whom I hadn't had a one-on-one. I forget how Yog said it, but it was a little confusing, so we discussed it for a minute. "Oh," I finally said. "You want me to do my party trick."

"Exactly."

And thus it was named, and thus it happened. I sat down on the floor with the author sitting in the chair behind me so he could see what I was doing, and set to work. It wasn't until much later, when I saw Scott's photos, that I realized we'd collected an audience.

All that said, it now occurs to me that I do know a few rules of thumb for shortening text. The first is that the real beginning of the story can often be found one or two or six paragraphs past the beginning of the text. Of course, if you've already cut the easy 3K words, you've probably already chopped that bit.

The second is that explanations often reflect what the author knows about that bit of the story, not what's needed there. If my copy of the Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes hadn't been swiped by someone at Chelsea House, I'd be able to tell you who this illustrative anecdote is about, but it was, so I can't; and furthermore I'm probably going to get a few details wrong. Doesn't matter.

Two men are collaborating on a play. One of them has written a scene that needs shortening. In it, a guy has declared his love for a woman, and been told that she thinks of him as a friend. He responds to her with a long speech, protesting this and declaring that and vowing something else, but mostly protesting. Whatever. It's a long speech, and it needs cutting.

The other writer, the one who didn't write the scene, struck out the entire speech, and instead had the man say, "And you expect me to banquet on this cracker?"

Perfect. Went straight to the point: 'What you offer me is not bad, but it is also not enough.' That's the best kind of scene-shortening I know.

Finally, if you absolutely cannot shorten the piece any further, try sending it in at its current length. There aren't that many situations where wordcounts are all that stringent. One's if you're on the Hugo committee and are determining a story's exact wordcount to see whether it meets the eligibility requirements for an award category. Another's if you're doing small corrections in a second edition and are forbidden to make changes that will cause cascading repagination throughout the book. A third is if your publisher printed your cover flats long before your manuscript was delivered, much less typeset, and yet failed to budget for the possibility that the actual spine size might differ from the arbitrary spine size used for the cover flats, necessitating a new set of separations and an extra print run. And the fourth is if you have an editor who really, really cares about exact wordcount.

And even if you're in one of those tightly-counted categories, bear in mind that (1.) there are a lot of different ways to count words (all but one of them wrong, IMO), which yield variable results; and (2.) editors don't sit around all day wishing they had some wordlengths to calculate. It's not one of their more meticulously maintained skills.

Anyway, 17,000 words is "about 15,000 words", right? :)

Christopher -- the method I've seen most commonly used is to count the number of words in an average-looking page and multiply by the number of pages, either by actually counting every word on the page or by counting the words in a paragraph to estimate the number of words per line, and multiplying by the number of lines. For this story it actually came out pretty close to Word's count, but you might want to experiment.

How to count words: Pick one line on a page -- the tenth, let us say. Count the characters on that line. Spaces count as one. So does punctuation. Write down the total.

Go through the ms. and randomly find several more pages. Count the tenth line on those pages, too. If it's unusual -- three words long, or it contains an equation, or something like that -- count a line from a different page. Add up the totals. Divide by the number of pages/lines counted. The result is Characters Per Line, CPL.

If you're using proportionally-spaced type, count two or three times as many lines to compensate for the greater variability.

Count the number of lines per page. Compare this with some other pages to see whether they have the same number of lines. This is Lines Per Page, LPP.

Simple version: Number of pages x LPP x CPL = total characters. Divide by six to get your wordcount.

More elaborate version: Chapter sinks count as half a page. Partial pages at the end of chapters count as half a page. Text breaks are an extra line. Line-for-line text (signs, poems, etc.) counts as full lines. If you have a lot of excerpts, indented, in a smaller typeface, do a separate CPL count and tot the extracts up separately. Same goes for footnotes. Take your final number of characters, however you figure it, and divide by six.

Shortest version: Spaces count 1, punctuation counts 1, and six characters count as one word.

Do editors do this with every submission? Not on your life. Editorial macho takes different forms, like Beth Meacham's mutant ability to heft a manuscript and call off its typeset page length within a signature or less.

Every Tor Editorial employee I know of who's been able to do a full-scale formal character count learned how to do it while editing literary criticism at Chelsea House.

I'm sure lots of us will want to refer to your word count method in the future. Would you be willing to put a link to it on your home page? Or how about on the Viable Paradise page?

If you click on the timestamp right under the headline, you get the permanent link for that post. That link will persist into the archive. Bookmark that, and the comments will come with it.