J.K. Rowling’s Plot Spreadsheets | Hacker News Reader

J.K. Rowling’s Plot Spreadsheets

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66 pointsdanh26 comments

To work on paper is a pretty standard way of working for creative people, I think.

I'm working on a digital comic project with a particular direction twist (more on this later). My friend is the creator of the comic and the director. I made a software for the creation of the content of our app and he could use it for the entire process. Still, he uses special sheets he printed for the purpose. I will modify the software to look more like those sheets he created, but they will remain his main medium to work on.

And when I'm developing something, I like to to grab a pen and to think on paper from time to time, despite all the software designed with this purpose in mind.

Writing down your thoughts is a kind of hill climbing process. As you dump your thoughts out onto paper you free up your mind to think about a different part of the problem / the bigger picture / the finer details. But your entire thought process up to that point (including the dead ends you crossed out) is still there in front of you as an external structure of concepts that can be built on. The more open and "invisible" the tools are the better, and there are few that can match a simple pencil and paper.

It's hard for me to imagine writing anything without a word processor. The amount of times I would move entire paragraphs, cut words, and the like in just a standard college paper was unreal. I envy the letter writers of days gone by who would draft long letters (any one of them easily longer than any I've ever written) only to crumple them up and toss them into the fire. Despite the frustration of having to throw away something you've spent substantial time on, it must have been pretty refreshing to look at that blank sheet of paper and know you have the chance to fill it up with something even better.

> To work on paper is a pretty standard way of working for creative people, I think.

For the 180 degree opposite way of doing it, check out Stephen King's "On Writing" - he creates characters, fleshes out their personality, puts them in weird situations, and lets them figure it out. It's why he's gotten so many books out, though you do some serious deus ex machina type events in his works, as well as interesting books just petering out and dying after a strong start. But hey, he's shipped a lot of books, and some of them are pretty stories. I'd definitely recommend On Writing for anyone who wants to do any serious amount of writing.

I second this recommendation. This is required reading for any fiction writer.

Are you suggesting that his characters write themselves?

That's kind of what King suggests. He recommends starting with life-like characters and an interesting setting, and seeing where the story takes you.

The result is that some of his characters and settings are more interesting than his plots. Example: later Dark Tower series.

"Novel geneticist" (= looking in detail how literary text/novel are produced cf. link) P.M. de Biasi distinguishes between "with Plan" literature and "au fil de la plume". 1st example is Flaubert (Many Plans and scenarii before "writing" the text) vs Stendhal eg. La Chartreuse de Parme: 3 weeks to write without detailed plan. http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14021.html

You could try putting it on a tablet PC (one with a stylus).

I do most of my software design stuff (UML etc.) on paper first before transfering into a software tool. I find it much easier to do that way.

I would love this if there were a really competent stylus based tablet for this kind of thing. I prefer to write down creative and technical thoughts... and I almost always require a white board in order to share thoughts with someone else. A 'Notebook Paper' sized tablet with a stylus ( or 2 for collaboration?) would be really nice I think. Any suggestions for something like this? Most of the stylus based tablets I've tried have been entirely unimpressive.

Perhaps you could try using a collaborative whiteboard (either web-based or app) on a iPad?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=886713

You can get styluses that work on the capacitive screen, if desired.

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10443415-233.html

I use Xournal on a Lenovo ThinkPad X-60 tablet as a white board. It works well (almost as well as a $10 white board).

Lenovo's Thinkpad X tablets are generally thought to be pretty kickass. It maxes out at 12" though, so it's a bit smaller than notebook paper sized. But it's using an active digitizer, so it gives results every bit as good as using a Wacom tablet. And having used a Wacom tablet, its almost every bit as good as using paper, except plastic on plastic will always feel different than metal on paper.

Any device using an active digitizer should be great. And in fact, if you had a ridiculous amount of money to blow, you could get a Wacom Cintiq, which is basically a 20 something inch LCD monitor which has an active digitizer built into the entire thing.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, each of these solutions can only handle one stylus at a time.

And in fact, if you had a ridiculous amount of money to blow, you could get a Wacom Cintiq, which is basically a 20 something inch LCD monitor which has an active digitizer built into the entire thing.

I only had four bucks, so I got five hundred sheets of paper.

FWIW, earlier models of Wacom tablets supported two styluses at once, but they dropped the feature because no one was using it.

http://forum.wacom.eu/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3552

I actually want to do this in reverse. I want to do a careful read of the Baroque Cycle trilogy by Neal Stephenson and make a note of the location of every major character for as fine of a time period I can. Then I want to load it all into Timeline (http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/)

I've done this for the wheel of time.. Satisfying but a lot of work. (Hoping to put it properly online in the next week or so -- having some hardware issues on my development system)

I'm upvoting you just for the crazy amount of work that you've put into that. It's hard enough just keeping things straight to a 1st approximation when reading the books, meticulously keeping track of every character is pretty intense.

Oh thanks but I don't deserve it. Compared to some of the sites like enc-wot -- mine is just a hobby. It just tracks things at a Point-of-View level. I did it basically to try and keep track of what the hell was going on before Gathering Storm came out.. wotsummary.com

www.wotsummary.com/map.html

It's a really useful exercise to reverse-engineer a writers work in this way. It gives you a good insight into how they structure plot, flesh out characters etc.

Regarding using pen and paper, for certain tasks, I'm never fully satisfied with either working on paper or doing it on a computer.

For things like UI, mapping out the basic architecture of an app, on one hand I find that pen and paper is much faster and more convenient: you can scribble notes here and there, easily scratch out parts, draw arrows; but on the other, I wish it were more digital to reorganize things: make more room here, duplicate this, move that...

With software, if I want to add a small note, I need to select a different font or a different tool, click where I want to put it... On paper, I can just write smaller.

But on paper, if I realize that I need to add an element in between two others, the best way is often times to start all over again,

So neither are perfect, but maybe some touch interfaces will get us there.

A nice middle ground is a whiteboard + a digital camera. That sort of plot list I would draft in a whiteboard, first the global, then the specifics, and later worry about making sense of it in excel or something.

>A nice middle ground is a whiteboard + a digital camera.

Or perhaps a digital whiteboard using the Wii adaptation, a cheap projector, computer and an IR pen?

http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ http://www.google.com/search?q=wii+whiteboard

JRR Tolkien worked this way as well. He wrote out all the days for the books and where everyone was, even down to what phase of the lunar cycle the day was. There was actually an exhibit of Tolkien's notes that toured around for a bit, and they looked not entirely unlike what Rowling created. For reference, the collection was from Marquette University. (http://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/tolkien.shtml)

Can we please change the story link to http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/10/08/potd-jk-rowlings-plot-sp... subtraction.com adds nothing.

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