How J.K. Rowling Plotted Harry Potter with a Hand-Drawn Spreadsheet | Hacker News Reader

How J.K. Rowling Plotted Harry Potter with a Hand-Drawn Spreadsheet

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Famous Authors’ Handwritten Outlines for Great Works of Literature

* James Salter’s outline for Light Years

* J.K. Rowling’s spreadsheet plan for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

* Joseph Heller’s chart outline for Catch-22

* Henry Miller’s manuscript plan for Tropic of Capricorn

* William Faulkner’s outline for A Fable — written on his office walls.

* Sylvia Plath’s outline for The Bell Jar

* Norman Mailer’s character timeline for Harlot’s Ghost.

* Part of Jennifer Egan’s plan for her short story “Black Box.”

* Gay Talese’s outline for his classic profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”

http://flavorwire.com/391173/famous-authors-handwritten-outl...

Personally, I use Scrivener - http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

Infamous Authors' Outlines for Great Works of Bad Literature

* Martin Amis' UML diagram for London Fields

* EL James' Balsamiq mockups for Fifty Shades Of Grey

* Dan Brown's PowerPoint decks for The Da Vinci Code

Couldn't resist ;)

Though clearly Balsamiq mockups are the odd one out since they are useful.

The narrative quality of The Da Vinci Code does indeed scream PowerPoint. A quick Google search does not immediately yield support, but I'm going with this anyway as it meshes with my loathing for that particular work. :)

Actually, I really like Dan Brown's writing style. It really draws you in and is really effective. The only problem is that Brown has only written one book, really. All his novels have the same, highly specific format. It's only the details that are different. The plot exposition, the characters etc are all mostly the same.

Perhaps he ascribes to the aphorism "if it ain't broke don't fix it". People keep buying it for better or worse, if he wants to break out and try alternate styles he's probably better to use a pseudonym. Sometimes you like to have an idea of what you're getting in to with a book, sometimes not.

This is exactly how pop music today is made. It's all the same generic formula.

Why change a winning formula?

Because some of the best pop songs succeeded by breaking the rules.

Because at the third book I go "WTF? I'm not reading the same story thrice!" and put it down at page 30 or something.

The "difficult third album syndrome".

http://www.whiteink.org/blog.php?pg=31

Lots of popular novel writers use formulaic writing, applying the same recipes again and again, and that seems to please their readers. Pretty much all Agatha Christie novels share the same basic plots (one character is killed, sleuth asks questions to everyone, finally everybody is in the same room of a castle / manor and sleuth gives the answer), with the same stock characters (rich people), for instance, and she is one of the biggest book sellers ever.

Dan Brown's writing, at the sentence level, is infantile, and the dialogue is didactic and patronising. I will never read another of his books.

Pacing is what Brown is good at. He knows how to end chapters with cliff-hangers that make you want to keep on reading.

Wikipedia's plot summaries have sure saved me finishing a lot of gripping but bad books

Totally agree but they are entertaining fast reads. Realistic dialog is always lacking in his novels.

Realistic dialog, characterisation, plot, etc, is lacking. Sure, I've read several, but they simultaneously annoy and entertain.

Since when is London Fields considered "bad literature"? It's certainly not in the same category as the other two.

Amis sure has his detractors. I'm not from the UK so maybe that's why I don't get it.

Was just me expressing my distaste for Amis in general and London Fields in particular. He is highly regarded in the UK, but I cannot fathom why (I'm a Brit).

I think London Fields and Time's Arrow employ a lot of clever but bad prose (bad in that the prose does not flow). And specifically for London Fields I felt it quite misogynistic. Currently wading through The Information to see if there's something else that grabs me, giving him the benefit of the doubt.

So far I think Amis is massively over-rated. Not enjoyable.

Don't forget the Maniac Mansion design docs

http://grumpygamer.com/maniac_mansion_design_doc

Yup, I've cranked out two novels and a comic script with Scrivener. Hands down my favorite electronic tool for planning, plotting, and composing after I'm done sketching out general plot arcs on paper.

Heller's outline for Catch-22 is especially notable due to the story's non-linear plotline. I found it extremely useful when reading it the first time trough, since the plot is so difficult to follow.

Here's one half of Alan Moore's spreadsheet for the unfinished Big Numbers

http://www.bleedingcool.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/05/2005...

Best picture I could find, sorry.

According to wikipedia (I know, I know) the definition of spreadsheet is:

"A spreadsheet is an interactive computer application program for organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form." [1]

We drew grid charts in elementary school for a huge variety of reasons, but we never did them on a computer (because we didn't have computers back then. Spreadsheet software was (first) valuable as a calculation tool because it replaced tedious accounting "worksheets" (also noted by wikipedia) but now I'm curious what percentage of spreadsheets use the mathematic functions at all. Most of those I see around software development are simply ways to organize text.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet

I know of companies who use them for holiday hours, conversion calculators etc

It depends entirely who's doing the using right? I know my work has terrabytes of excel docs on network drives with calculations. There are doubtless innumerable google docs in the ether with collated responses to questionnaires. There are the checklist spreadsheets Dad had for packing prior to going away.

It takes all sorts :)

I might be misremembering but I'm pretty sure that when reading "Barbarians at the gate", they referred to these eighties' physical worksheets also as spreadsheets. The spreading of the sheet in the table is, in fact more physical than digital...

EDIT: This article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8526319

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreadsheet#Paper_spreadsheets

From the same wikipedia article:

---------------------

Paper spreadsheets

The word "spreadsheet" came from "spread" in its sense of a newspaper or magazine item (text and/or graphics) that covers two facing pages, extending across the center fold and treating the two pages as one large one. The compound word "spread-sheet" came to mean the format used to present book-keeping ledgers—with columns for categories of expenditures across the top, invoices listed down the left margin, and the amount of each payment in the cell where its row and column intersect—which were, traditionally, a "spread" across facing pages of a bound ledger (book for keeping accounting records) or on oversized sheets of paper (termed "analysis paper") ruled into rows and columns in that format and approximately twice as wide as ordinary paper

My father was a CPA and was trained to use spreadsheets for things like double-entry accounting.

The first time I ever saw a computer it was when he got a job where the accountants had computers [1] and he was so excited to show me a "computer-based spreadsheet" [2] and how it would do calculations automatically! Even with the computer doing the calculations, he still insisted on double-entry.

[1] I remember visiting a very large room with raised floors; raised so that the cooling system could do it's job properly. I believe he was actually using a DOS system, so my memory of the computers being like big lockers must be of tape-backups or something like that.

[2] i was a wee lad, but if memory serves, it was a predecessor to Lotus 1-2-3

Likely Visicalc [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visicalc

I liked Joel Spolsky's essay on trello and excel. The basic idea is that excel is mostly used as a simple way to make tables. That it can do calculations is also useful.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html

This describe a process used by J.K. Rowling to write the 5th HP book. Am I the only one to think this is also the worse book in the series ?

Personally, I found all of them to be similar quality-wise (though obviously varying in the tone in which they were written, as they catered to a more and more mature audience) until the final book, which -- and this is a point of view not many of my friends shared -- I found both appropriate and head and shoulders above the others in terms of both depth and character development.

Well, I've never read the 6th and 7th, precisely because I lost interest after reading the 5th, which I found confusing and unengaging. That said, I was relatively older when I read the fifth book, so my tastes may have changed in between.

If you liked the earlier books, I'd give it another try. I also thought the 5th book was the worst, but 6 and 7 are my favorites of the whole series.

Everything text is great if you listen to Stephen Frey reading it to you. But I personally think the "Goblin of Fire" (the 4th?) is the worst.

I have to wonder whether you either read some odd sort of knockoff of Goblet of Fire or whether you just weren't paying attention... ;)

Who knows what the mysterious "Stephen Frey" is capable of?

I remember there was more than a couple of years between the 4th and the 5th book's release. More than enough time for the general audience to grow out a bit of the books.

Personally, I hate the last book but all of the others are just fine.

> This describe a process used by J.K. Rowling to write the 5th HP book. Am I the only one to think this is also the worse book in the series ?

There are opinions. It was actually my second favourite in the series

I wouldn't describe it as the worst but I'd say it is not gripping. Half Blood Prince and the Deathly Hallows are gripping. Remember, the 5th book was also a very dense book because JK Rowling wanted to fill in a lot of information that hadn't been given in the preceding books.

So, in terms of how it keeps you excited, it failed but the book packs a lot of other useful information which were referenced in the books that follow.

It could have been, but it was also the cultural event of the year... and it was a book. I grew up in an era when "bestsellers" were written by the likes of Harold Robbins, so to see a genuinely massive popular attachment to books of the (variable but always good) quality of the HP series was a wonderful thing.

Its well known that JK Rowling plotted broad outlines for all 7 HP books before she wrote the first one - I'd like to see her notes from that, if she has any.

Good systems = good quality.

Compare this to anything in your business that is brittle, and see what benefit even a simple system can have on it.

It would be interesting to know about the systems that followed prolific, successful authors like Stephen King, Isaac Asimov or Agatha Christie...

In On Writing, by Stephen King, he goes into great detail about his writing process.

The upshot is that he's what some writers call a "Discovery Writer", he sits down at a blank page with an image, or rough idea, and just writes and sees what happen. (George RR Martin/Game of Thrones is also, believe it or not, a discovery writer).

I'm not familiar with Asimov's process, but based on Agatha Christie's genre, I'd be surprised if she didn't structure hers fairly heavily.

Looking at the sheet reminds me that the novels had a nice rigid timeframe to tell the stories in, and I imagine those constraints actually helped in the planning process.

Man, I would LOVE to see George R.R. Martin's plot outline

It'd just look like a bunch of git branches ending: dead, dead, dead, dead, raped, dead, dead, dead, tortured, dead.

"Anyone who accuses someone of over plotting is a crappy no-name writer."

I LOL'd.

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