Story Comments#
A special set of comment styles allow for annotating your text with structure information. There are two styles of comments available. They are an extension to regular comments as described in Comments and Notes.
New in version 2.7.
Story Structure Comments#
You can annotate story structure by using the %Story style of comment. To use the feature,
make the first word of a comment Story, followed by a period, a structure term, a colon, a
space and the text for that term.
Usage#
The story term can be anything that you want to track in the manuscript. This construct is intended to make it easier to extract metadata from a work to perform a structural analysis of the story.
There are probably as many ways to examine story structure as there are authors and editors combined. For this reason the story tag is flexible. You can use any terms you want and track any aspect of the story that serves your purposes.
An example method has been advanced by Shawn Coyne in The Story Grid. This method asserts that a story is composed of “beats”, and that each beat has an inciting incident, a complication, a crisis, and a resolution. One might capture these elements of a beat where a character overcomes their fear of giving a speech as:
Example
### Scene
%Synopsis: Carol overcomes her fear of giving a speech.
%Story.incite: Carol is pleased to be invited to a conference to see her boss deliver a keynote.
%Story.complication: Carol's boss calls in sick and asks her to deliver a big speech.
%Story.crisis: Carol has a fear of appearing on stage.
%Story.resolution: Carol engages the help of a coach who helps her overcome her fears and delivers a great speech.
Other analytical models propose tracking a scene’s pace, how it affects the mood of the story, or which element(s) of the story’s genre are being satisfied. An author can use this mechanism to track any element of a scene. Some examples include time of day, how much time passes in the scene, or even the physical form of a shape-shifting character. If a story involves magic, one could track which wand a main character has in hand. It’s up to tha author.
When the story and other scene metadata is extracted into a tabular form, it is possible to get a comprehensive overview of the story and to identify possible issues. For example, so many fast-paced scenes without a break that readers might become fatigued or over-stimulated.
Output#
The story structure comments can be included in the manuscript, and are formatted similarly to the synopsis comments:
A set of story structure comments as shown in the Manuscript tool.#
When you export your project data from the Outline View, all story structure terms are added as columns to the exported file, which can then be opened in the spread sheet software of your choice.
Story Notes#
Story notes are similar to story structure comments, but have no predefined meaning. Essentially they are a generalisation of the story structure comment, and the only point of having this additional format is to allow you do filter them in and out of your manuscript independently.
You can annotate story notes by using the %Note style of comment. To use the feature,
make the first word of a comment Note, followed by a period, a term, a colon, a space and the
text for the note.
Usage#
These notes are free form, but one intended use case is to add consistency annotations to your text to remind yourself where you have described something that must be checked against other parts of your text later on.
Example
### Scene
%Synopsis: Carol overcomes her fear of giving a speech.
%Note.consistency: This is the first time in the story Carol gives a speech.
Output#
Story notes are included in the manuscript in exactly the same way story structure comments are, but has a separate inclusion setting in the build settings. They are also included in CSV exports from the Outline View.