Reading about project xanadu has got me worried, I’m one of the worlds worst procrastinators. Since it took 38 years to get some kind of prototype of xanadu out, the idea has become dead in the water. xanadu was voted the number 1 piece of vapourware by wired magazine! Bliss will get written. It’s not vapourware. To get onto the right footing, I’m going to investigate use cases that are outside my own domain. I’ve often discussed Bliss with my friend Jim (a budding author) and the use case we always get round to is writing a book. There is domain specific software out there for writing books, but Bliss will allow books to be written better than those pieces of software because it will allow the user to define their own domain – e.g. the typical book writing software will allow you to maintain lists of characters, plots, places, subplots etc. What they don’t have is the ability to expand their domain to include specific lists of information that are going to be useful for someone writing, say, a novel about the second world war. Here you want to keep lists of information about dates and times of events around which to weave your narrative, lists of weapons that were in use, lists of wartime recipes, wartime vehicles etc. Basically Bliss can be used as a research tool as well as a simple word processor.
Basic entities (better word required I think, entity is a bit too geeky)
Plot – Subplot
Character – Back Story – Relationship
Place – Event
Research – Dates, Lists
Writing a novel,
1. you’d create a new bliss document for the overview and contents
2. you’d create a new bliss document for each chapter
3. you’d link each chapter back to the overview
4. you’d create a new bliss document for the cast of characters
4.1 you’d create a new bliss document for each character, writing their back story
4.2 you’d link the characters back to the cast of characters
4.3 you’d link the characters together with a links describing the relationship, how they met, etc.
5. you’d create a new bliss document for the places
5.1 you’d create a new bliss document for each place
5.2 you’d link the places to the characters, describing their relationship with the place, multiple characters could be linked to one place and those unions described
6. you’d create a new bliss document for events
6.1 you’d create a new bliss document for each event you were interested in
6.2 you’d link the individual events to the list of events, along with places and characters
7 You’d create a timeline
7.1 you’d link the people, places and events to the timeline, describing how they interact
8. you’d create an ad-hoc list of objects you’re interested in
8.1 you’d link the objects to the people, times, places events…
…
9. profit!
the work of the author is still going to be in the narrative that you create, the story will live or die on that, not on the tool you used to write the document, but the one thing that’s true is that it will be handy to have all the objects, people, places, events and times visible within the software and linked together.
To satisfy this use case – lists of stuff will need to be able to be docked around your working area, cast of characters should be able to be linked to a chapter, say, and then be highlighted when you’ve selected that chapter, so you’d quickly see what your intentions were when you’re working on that chapter. Bliss is mean to be a mental placeholder system to expand on the mind’s natural abilities.
Feb 07, 2009 @ 20:12:31
I’m somewhat surprised by the necessity of the user to chunk this data in this way.
Surely the text can be parsed so long as headings such as “Character list” and Chapter one … were created. Then links can be made on the fly by the application.
Plots sometimes evolve – perhaps a too linear approach is being implied here ?
(or do I miss the whole point ?)
Feb 08, 2009 @ 09:17:09
Bliss is certainly meant to save work rather than create it. I think I was perhaps describing the user actions from a very system oriented way, the software would need to allow the user to create the model of all those items and their interactions.
The UI inferred above is really the telelogic doors UI (one that I dislike).
The Bliss user experience would be much less onerous with just the naming and creation of some simple lists and then drag and drop to connect them up. Creating a new bliss document, should really read, create a new list.
I’m not an author, so maybe I think about books and their construction from a programmers point of view, I would decompose the book into it’s component parts to expose the underlying relationships, to make sure that all the people, places and events lined up.
Imagine, say, a Miss Marple story. The places would be the vicarage, the town hall, the big house, the garden, etc. The people would be Lord Fortheringay, Miss Marple, The Vicar, etc. The events would be the Invitation, the Murder, the Red Herring, the Letter, the Chocolate Cake, etc. The plots would be Lord Fotheringay wants his wife killed, so hires an assassin, The assassin is actually the illegitimate son of the Baker. The Baker and Lady Forthingay… etc.
There is no linear approach here, rather it’s a way to outline the book in a very quick way. Make changes to a plot and make the appropriate links to the people, places and events and you’ll discover new relationships. All without really writing a word of prose. Some of the back stories and plot devices you model in the lists can then be woven into the narrative.
This won’t write the book for you, but it will allow you to model the book, making changes to the model as you see fit as the actual text of the book evolves.
The derived links you’re asking for are a feature of the software, I unimaginatively call them wiki-links, where you’ll be able to mark-up a selected bit of text and link it back to the appropriate entity.
Parsing sounds nice, but in practice, I think that Lord Fotheringay would sometimes be called his lordship, Arty, Lord Arthur, etc. Lots of synonyms to track there and as soon as you have, say, 2 Stephens in the one book, it would be a user choice every time to make the link. I’ll therefore leave link creation to the user.
I’ll put up a new post of a worked example, from a simple story. I’ll work back from a pre-existing kids story though and not inflict my vogon-esque prose on you!