PlotSimmer
Mind-mapping tools for storytellers
PlotSimmer is a web app* that helps writers tackle big, complex stories. It does so by transforming a manuscript from a wall of text into a landscape of ideas, full of cliffhangers, character arcs, and hairpin plot twists.
Here's the blueprint:
First, break down your story into its components: character, setting, action, etc. The app has a purpose-built CMS to store these.
Next, turn your story from a one-dimensional timeline of events into an N-dimensional topology, where N = the number of things your story cares about.
Put more concretely, we want to make a map with an unusual compass: alongside North and South are abstractions like Power, Happiness, Good/Evil, etc. These are the new axes our story can move along.
In practice, this looks like: 1.) dragging sliders to rank elements, 2.) connecting dots on an overhead view, to capture relationships between elements.
We now have a representation of our story that a computer can process. But it's not dynamic, which means it won't surprise us, or inspire any new ideas.
To fix that, we give characters reasons to move. Goals are easy to pinpoint when even big themes like Freedom have a mailing address within our landscape. Just plug in a location, and pathfinding algorithms will find a route for your characters to take.
They can react along the way, too. Goofy example: let's say you tagged a character with the "arachnophobe" trait during data-entry. That wasn't just flavor text -- you were also programming a crude robot. This character now has a sensor dedicated to detecting spiders, and it will ping whenever one comes near. By encoding some of your knowledge into the text itself, you're freed up to focus elsewhere.
(If the arachnophobia is truly dire, the sight of a spider could activate a "panic" sequence, which, in terms of the app, means the character is now running a different program, with different actions available to them.)
When you're working on something as huge as a novel, it's handy to have different vantage points to study it from. Instead of endlessly rereading, you can zoom out and see literal plot holes in the fabric of the story.
Assigning numbers to narrative may seem punishingly left-brained, but here's the payoff: long vectors of numbers is exactly the stuff that modern machine learning feeds on. Which means we get to raid ML's algorithmic toolkit.
t-SNE can break down our data into usable 2D representations; K-means clustering can find groupings within our story, some which may have never occurred to us; and Ctrl+F becomes eerily good with the help of cosine similarity.
If you want to find out exactly where you are, you just need to know who heard what, when.
GPS satellites use synchronized clocks and a few laws of physics to pin down your distance precisely. Just four of them broadcasting their position and time lets you fix your own position, by seeing how long it took that radio wave to reach your device. PlotSimmer has a feature that works similarly: jump to any point in your story, and see who has sent what messages lately. You can also program characters to react to messages, which means you can reorder the story's action more freely, because their ramifications are attached to the characters.
This large flowchart is the same information as you saw at the top of this page, just laid out in a more readable way.
There are 894 story beats here, and the lines betwen them indicate causation.
This has been handy during revision when I want to cut a scene -- I can refer to this and see what else depends on it.
With this experiment, I wanted to capture the effect of time on an RPG module's "decision space". This is essentially a CAT scan of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. The X & Y axes here are based on Bartle's taxonomy of player types: "Killers" are in the top-left, "Achievers" in the top-right, "Explorers" in the bottom-right, and "Socializers" in the bottom-left.
The reason the shapes shift is that I'm taking cross-sections of a 3D space here, and the Z-axis is time. By stepping through this animation, I can have a sense of what kind of opportunities players will have at any given moment, and unusually large blocks of color may indicate that a certain type of player is being under-served.
The map is not the territory.
Writers are suspicious of tools, because writing is hard. So unavoidably hard, in fact, that tools cannot exist. If they did, it wouldn't be so unavoidable any more. (And we may secretly like it better this way.)
So in the 1990s, when a digital genie came in the form of the desktop computer to grant us all three wishes, we writers put up our hands to request: soft copies and spell-check, please, and maybe some rich text if you're feeling generous.
Then we went back to telling ourselves that the only thing that counts is getting words on the page.
But the story is the thing, and the words on the page are not that. A first draft is just a map, describing (in agonizing detail) one path
through the story's possibility space.