Story Assembly II - another embroidery thread (post-apocalypse!)

writing
#1

I’ve been reading through the Story Assembly – Putting it all to work thread and finding a lot of really helpful info. Would anyone care to do something like this again? I’m sure there are a lot of people on the board that weren’t around for the last one, and maybe some others that would like to do it a second time?

If so, there might be a couple of changes that could be made to better accommodate doing this type of exercise online. We could start out all working on just one throughline rather than the whole storyform, although that might keep the exercise from being as helpful. Or, depending on how many people are interested-if anyone-we could divvy up throughlines and, rather than taking turns going one at a time through 70 something story points, we could all post a whole throughline at once for others to look at and critique, and then see how everybody’s individual throughlines come together to form a story at the end. Might be easier to complete the exercise that way too.

Thoughts? Anyone? @jassnip, you started the last one, care to go another round?

Storyforming from a Premise
#2

I’m happy to give it another go. I thought the last one was really fun and I was disappointed that we never got to finish it. So yeah, lets discuss how to best put one together.

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#3

Cool idea, I’d be happy to try it.

One thing I’ve noticed watching the Story Embroidery videos (have you watched any of those?), is that people riff off each others ideas for various story points, even across throughlines. So if people did go away and do a whole throughline on their own, there would probably need to be a “weaving” exercise at the end. But it could work.

P.S. we should get a chat-bot to join the thread who replies to every post with some version of “Yes, but how is that a problem? Where is the conflict?” :grin:

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#4

Is this about creating one from scratch?

#5

That’s how I envisioned it. Pretty much the same as the last thread where this was done. Would you like to join in?

@jassnip, @mlucas, and I were discussing the method to use in a PM to keep this thread clean so hopefully we can post that soon and get started.

#6

It sounds like fun. What do I do?

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#7

@jassnip will be posting a storyform with gists and letting us all know the genre.

From there, we’ll do this round robin style. The only thing is that a couple of us may try to stick to one throughline until it’s all done before moving to the second. Not everyone has to do that. We also discussed trying to get through a throughline a week and then a week to look at how it all fits together, so this won’t stretch out for half the year.

We’ll go in this order…
@Gregolas
@jassnip
@mlucas
@Prish

If anyone else wants to join, let me know and we’ll put you on the list.

@jassnip has also been kind enough to set up a document for us to help keep track of it all.

Thanks.

#8

Okay, here we go. I hope a few others of you will decide to jump in once you see what the random genre and character choices popped out. This is gonna be fun.

Without further ado – Genre: Post-Apocalyptic
with a cast of 7 female and 1 male characters

The link below will take you to the google doc version of the Story Form with gists. Anyone following the link can comment on the document. I alone have editing privileges, just to keep things tidy and up to date.

Story Form

#9

Clay the contagonist is a mid-thirties corpse.
(Is he an actual dead body? Did he play one on tv before the apocalypse? Is there some other explanation? I’ll let the story determine that when the time comes)

If no discussion, @jassnip, you’re up! And thanks for the awesome story form! It looks great, I think it’s gonna be really fun to work through.

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#10

Okay, I took.

STORY GOAL: Being in the Now - The last known fertile women, after a devastating biological apocalypse, need to get pregnant now by any means necessary.

@Gregolas. I hope Clay isn’t “really” dead or this is going to be a really short story. :stuck_out_tongue:

@mlucas you’re up.

2 Likes
#11

Somebody better beat me to it, or Clay’s a dead man! LOL. This story took a quick dark turn, even for the apocalypse. :smiley:

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#12

@Gregolas, what dark corner did you get that from, to make the only male character a corpse, in a story where the goal is to get pregnant!? Anyway, I’ll try to beat you to it here…

Overall Story SYMPTOM: Putting Someone into Action
The biological disaster has also left few men alive, all of them are infertile and impotent; there is no ‘action’ to be had there (which the characters see as a problem – whether they want to prolong the human race, or just want sex).

Many feel it was acting too precipitously when Luwanda, Hawk and others* revived a potentially virile man, who was cryogenically frozen at a life extension facility in the early 21st century, when in his mid-thirties.

Clay** was protected from the biological agent in his cryogenic chamber. But he resents being used so aggressively, and proves difficult to put into (baby-making) action.

* don’t want to step on any toes … totally cool to just make this “some of the characters” since we haven’t defined Luwanda or Hawk much yet. Also the act of reviving itself could be a conflict (scene or Signpost) so I was trying to leave it vague … did they break into the facility to do it? Does one of the characters work there and order the revival? Are perhaps all the women semi-prisoners of this facility? Or something totally different? (To coin @Gregolas, LSD – let story determine.)

** we need a reason for Clay to have been in cryonics in the first place, e.g. a terminal brain tumor or some immediate life-threatening illness (holy cow, that would be a Present consideration!!)

@Prish, you’re up!

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#13

Nice save! I think I’m crushing on you now…just a little bit. Added this to the doc.

#14

I’m not sure what to do, here, but here goes (corrections and redirections accepted)

Benchmark: his corpse is disintegrating in stages and it may be too late to get his consciousness into an android’s body if they don’t overcome the latest obstacle standing in the way between corpse hero and the android body.

#15

Which one was that? We could still finish it.

#16

Hey, I’m not the one who made it about women needing to get pregnant, but as a contagonist, you can’t make the story goal much more difficult to achieve than being the only man and to be slowly rotting away! :joy:

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#17

@prish, is that for the OS Benchmark of Getting Older?

If so, I really like the part about Clay still rotting after being unfrozen. Sounds like whatever he was frozen for hasn’t been cured yet! With that and @mlucas’s suggestion that he doesn’t want to be ‘put into action’, I think he’s a pretty strong contagonist so far.

Is there anything to discuss so far?

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#18

Like Greg said, if this is OS Benchmark of Getting Older and you’re talking about Clay, I definitely like the idea of him disintegrating, whatever illness he had getting worse (though there’s probably no exact timeframe; it’s an Optionlock). But I’m not sure about the android stuff since the central OS conflict is around getting women pregnant, I’m not sure what the point of transferring to an android would be. Unless you mean, that is part of his reason for Hindering everything as Contagonist, he wants to focus on that instead of impregnation?

#19

I was just working him out of the corpse. I didn’t grasp Benchmark is already been covered I didn’t see in the storyform. Pondering…mc is a corpse and contagonist? I say revenge is the next thing to determine. Also, who is the protagonist who wants the human race to continue? It sounds like the corpse guy is sticking around for revenge, so who wants to continue the human race other than all of them?

#20

The OS Symptom encoding clarified his corpse-ness to be that he was cryogenically frozen, but gets revived (possibly during the first or second act).

If you look at the top of the doc, you can see the 8 OS characters, Luwanda is the Protagonist most strongly pursuing the goal of “getting people pregnant NOW”. Note the goal is The Present so we have to make sure it’s more about the NOW in that sentence, than it is about the Future of the human race.