The shape of story - data and drama
Monday, March 29, 2010 at 12:00PMA relatively recent viewing the new John Hilcoat film The Road got me thinking about the visual shape of story. Upon seeing the film - and feeling utterly depressed as we walked out of the cinema effected as we were by its intense bleakness - a friend expressed visually his experience of the film by drawing in the air with his finger. What he drew looked something like this…
This image is about as an accurate a representation of the narrative experience as any written critical review could undertake. I found myself reflecting on other ‘graphs’ and visual representations of drama and narrative.
My particular fascination for Infographics revealed some surprisingly irreverent but not the less poignant examples. 
And even at a micro-level the ability for visual data to manifest distinct drama can be astute. The images below visualise individual character moments and quotes.
Amusing through they may be they point toward the power for visual representations to be powerful writing tools.
Stewart McKie In an article entitled Screenplay Visualisation: Concepts and Practice undertakes a kind of environmental scan of some of the methods employed by various creative writing software tools to visualise rather than just write. Though its few years old now and at least one of the applications referred to has gone the way of the dodo, the essay none the less provides a good broad look at some methods for script and drama visualisation.
Among those mentioned is of course my favourite creative production and screenwriting weapon Celtx. It has numerous visual tools including Storyboarding and clip-art based Sketch system perfect for mapping blocking staging and dramatic spaces.
There is however one further tool in Celtx that is enormously useful for seeing the shape of a drama over time and expressed through colour. The index-card view in Celtx allows for each card to be assigned a colour group. As a creator you might colour code by character, or act or location or any other grouping paradigm. In any such case the real power of colour grouping is the ability to zoom out to see all the cards of your project in one go and from this macro-perspective the colour-shape of your story becomes clearly apparent. You will see immediately where their are clumps and where there is sparseness of certain colours and by this identify the peaks and valleys in the drama you are crafting.
The other tool that I find particularly useful in this mode is the superb and free mind-mapping app X-Mind. Xmind creates bubbles and links those bubbles together in trees, flow charts and relationship links. Xmind can also convert from and between tables of data to flow-charts and mind maps. It’s here that an interesting workflow opens up. Information on characters and scenes can be entered into a standard grid table in X-mind - perhaps a column for character and then scene descriptions in another. And then, with single click, the table of linear data can be displayed as a non-linear mind-map or flow-chart where new relationships between scenes, characters, ideas and events can be seen at a macro-level that may not be apparent in a linear script of text.
There is of course nothing new about this idea. Yet I think there remains huge opporunity to move away from assuming writers all have brains wired the same and all work in the same way with words on blank paper. Creative thinking is a many-headed beast, words on paper may be the end goal but the road to that goal should be dictated only by what best suits the creator and the project.
Whilst we all use software to enact and enable creative process that shouldn’t mean software tool should dictate the creative process. Good creative software doesnt overtly govern the method or impose the order by which an end creative result is obtained. This has long been my criticism of most post-production and editing systems where by they, all too often, enforce a predefined process to exclusion of other possibilities. The extremely popular Final Cut Studio for example uses discreet applications for each process (edit, sound, colour grade, etc) this is not uncommon but the integration between these Apple apps is almost totally one-way. Soundtrack Pro and Apple Color are designed and intended to work with a locked off edit completed in FCP. The fundamental idea that the software thus entrenches and imposes upon the project and creators is that Sound and Colour are interpretative rather than generative, that sound and colour do not inform the edit only add to it, that sound and colour must follow the edit; a hierarchy of process dictated by the software. FCStudio is a software suite that distinctly tells you How to work and dictates its own internal notion of a ‘correct’ process to the large exclusion of other possibilities. Software paradigms such as that inherent (but not exclusive) to FCStudio fail to be open-workbenches and instead serve as pre-defined pipelines. (I have written about this in more detail in an essay entitled The Philosophy of the Tools.)
This is an conceptual trap that tools such as Celtx (which I have had some involvement and input to over the years) strive very hard to avoid by providing as much as possible a workbench rather than a pipeline; a collection of tools that the creator exploits in any manner and order they wish to best suit their needs. This idea brings us full circle to perhaps appreciate and explore the exploitation of non-literary mechanics to produce literary works - visual methods to better articulate written expression.
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