Narrative First

Anyone know what’s going on with Narrative First? The last podcast was way back in August, and article frequency is dropping off Dramatica-lly? Am I missing something? Really need my fix, Man.

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Jim’s been working madly on a really huge update to Subtext functionality (the part of Subtext focused on building your own stories). You can see a bit of it in the last blog post on narrative first, but I think that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

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Funny you should ask…Find Expert Help Writing Your Story This Nanowrimo

Mike is right, from Aug.1 to Oct. 31 I took a break from posts and podcasts to build out Subtext. I’m super excited about what we have to offer to writers now.

Just a few noodle-some bugs to address and then it’ll be ready…

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Wow! You’re ears must have been ringing, Jim. Looking forward to the read and the new version of Subtext.

Ain’t it great to have people clamoring for your work?

Are you doing the Christmas Carol retell this year? You mentioned it last year, but I never can across it? Or did I miss it?

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That’s so funny. I was actually thinking of going through Christmas Carol as a way of showing some of the new features. That and that Red Lake story I started to do at the end of last year.

And yes it feels great! I used Subtext with two clients today and even I was surprised at how powerful a few random Storybeats were for the stories we were working on. Totally freed up and made possible all kinds of creativity.

Trust me, I miss doing podcasts and writing articles, but I think what I’m doing now is so much more important for the future of storytelling that I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.

I should also mention the weekly Writers Room in Subtext—which is essentially a live interactive podcast. Over 20 hours so far and even our first analysis (the phenomenal Leave No Trace).

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I’m not sure if I ever mentioned it but earlier this year (maybe March?) I used Subtext to sit down and make a story with my 7-year-old daughter. It was so much fun. All the ideas were hers – she chose the gists for every beat (sometimes I hit the refresh a lot) and gave all the storytelling. All I did was nudge her on the IC and RS throughlines a bit, and do most of the transcribing.

The resulting story treatment was a little silly, but actually quite touching with a kind of unexpected completeness to it. It’s about a group of agility dogs who get captured by bad-guys.

The best was how my daughter used this Doing gist that came up:

  • The dogs wet something.

The head bad-guy named Oscar is chasing them up the stairs when Slush tells all the dogs to pee on the stairs to make it slippery. Just as he slips down the stairs Oscar realizes that he is slipping on dog pee!

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Omgosh, that’s hilarious. And how wonderful that you’re giving her such valuable storytelling experience.

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That story was the best @mlucas!

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Looking forward to all of that, Jim. What you’re doing with Subtext and Dramatica is brilliant, worthy and valuable work. Looking forward to the Christmas Carol retelling.

I’ve been listening to the Writer’s Room. Sadly I haven’t been able to make it live to them due to my day job work schedule. May have to tweak that. They are so enlightening. And they keep getting better and better.

I watched the last Writer’s Room and loved the preview of the upcoming version of SubText. One questions though, your demo did not indicated different colors for each through line. I love that aspect of the current version. Hopefully, that will carry through in the update.

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Gee, Mike, what a wonderful thing to do with your daughter and lovely shared memory for the tow of you. How did she react to it? Did she have a blast? HAs she expressed interest in writing some more stories with her father?

I read the story. It’s sweet and silly and a complete storyform. Brilliant. Bravo to you, and Brava to your daughter.

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That’s interesting about the colors, I removed them to emphasize the idea that all Storybeats are equal within that perspective - you can see the colors when you go to Edit - but I’m willing to rethink. If you don’t mind - if you have any ideas like that, feel free to send them through the Help Desk icon down in the bottom right.

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Thank you, Jim. It’s nice to see the story form in different ways. Which is
why I love the new options you’ve created to view the Storyform in separate
throughline streams. But maybe, in the full story view, there is an option
to toggle the colors on or off? Or maybe, instead of a whole color
background, it’s simply a dot of color to make it more subtle in the full
storyform view while pleasing people like me that want to quickly reference
(in my mind) which throughline a point is (without having to change the view
completely). All food for thought as you continue to refine.

The more I use Subtext, I’ll reach out through the help desk icon, now that
I know that is the hotline.

In the meantime, thanks for all you do, Jim. You’re making the world great
through access to Story technology. Cheers. Have a good weekend.

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Anyone know if the Narrative First site is down at the moment or? Haven’t been able to access it for a few days now and now when I tried to search it on Google it’s not even showing up in the results.

I was just on it yesterday.

There was an issue with the domain registrar over the holiday. All resolved - sry for the inconvenience. :slight_smile: