Please tell me if you think this would be useful for you.

I’m working on a story plotting app which focuses on value changes as the basis of the app. For each section of the story (beat, chapter, act) there are value changes (characters getting closer or further from some goal, threat, or other value). And I want to visualise these changes on a graph, so you can see how everybody’s fortunes rise and fall.

There will still be the standard components, something similar to index cards to plot out the actual action of each chapter and beat. But the unique addition that I’m bringing here is you can see everybody’s changes of fortune, like watching the stock market, or maybe like reading music.

It will be a desktop application (written in python and JavaScript).

So, does anybody think this would be useful to your writing? Are there other things you might want to see added to such a piece of software?

  • conciselyverbose
    2·
    2 days ago

    I wouldn’t necessarily target a single value like that. But, one of the things I find particularly impressive with my favorite author is how well she does at tracking every character’s beliefs/knowledge and mental state. It’s not “value”, exactly. But the way she manages to keep track of who knows what, who believes what, when they’ve taken emotional steps, etc, really brings the characters alive.

    A tool that enabled a timeline that makes it clear where scenes are and what the current states of any number of arbitrary variables (per character) with the ability for something enum-like and booleans seems like a tool that would make achieving that easier.

    (I’m not a writer, just a super heavy reader.)