[Editing] Uncle Josh Visualizes the Story

Uncle Josh Talks Too Much

I have been looking at ways to visualize, or even animate, my stories as part of the editing process. It helps that I just skimmed Chuck Wendig’s post on story shape, as it has given me an idea.

First, I want to consider the basic pacing of the story. This could be visualized by drawing a bar, say 500 pixels wide, and breaking it up into blocks for every scene. As I break up my scenes with a pound sign on its own line, that should be easy to write a script that tells me how many words are in each scene. Were I writing a book, I could break it up by chapters, first, and then by scene.

I then take those words counts in proportion and break up my bar with the proportional lengths.

Then each section can be broken down by paragraphs, proportionally. I think at this…

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