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there's nothing wrong
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with your mobile device or computer just
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that my world
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was upside down when my son was born 11
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years ago
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hi I'm bala ramazaray author professor
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and consultant I'm going to tell you my
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story about
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how I ended up using Emacs for writing
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11 years ago in bangalore my son was
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born
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my wife and I had hardly slept through
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those days
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that's when my grandma decided
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according to such a famous search engine
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visited us to take a look at her great
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grandson
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as joyous as it sounded it came with a
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peril
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my grandma is a scrabble addict
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she hardly spent any time at all with
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her great grandson
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but she spent most of her time playing
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scrabble
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she insisted that my wife and I joined
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her
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that's when an idea dawned on me to
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write about my scrabble obsessed grandma
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what if I could make it into a novel not
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many people have
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scrabble obsessed grandmothers after all
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I wanted to expand this to a novel but
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did not know how
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I bumped into dan wells's video on seven
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point story structure which is based on
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a construct called hero's journey I was
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now convinced that a seed idea
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would indeed be converted into a novel
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I tried out many tools at the time
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million dollar tools like ms word
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excel scrivener but none of them really
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worked
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so when I remembered about this old
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editor called emacs
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thanks to the Emacs community and
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particularly the augment community
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I had what I wanted I combined
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danville's method
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with another method called snowflake and
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also
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tony valentine's Emacs writing template
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some of the key features of arg mode
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that I used
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were fold on unfold outline
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column view tags distraction free
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writing experience
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using many packages clocking project
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tracking
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and export which is what you will see in
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my demo
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now to get into some action okay
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so here we are the superstructure of the
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novel itself how do we build it
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first is the plot this comes from the
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snowflake method
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you write a one line summary of your
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plot
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character design you can write the
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entire description of the characters the
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physical descriptors motivators the
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whole thing you can write all the
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characters
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in the novel including the antagonists
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I researched about the places that I'm
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going to be using in the novel
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this is the most important part the
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story arcs
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for this I used the very convenient
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notion of using a column view
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where when I open it you can see how
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I've used
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column view each plot point
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and who the character is what is their
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plot point itself so okay and you can do
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this for
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each and every uh story arc romance
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uh each and every character sub
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character okay I haven't
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uh labeled them so next is the story
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design so now we have the character
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independent character arcs
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uh here again column view comes in handy
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this is a different set of columns now
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you can use
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not only the main the main character arc
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is the
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backbone but in the middle of it
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supporting characters augment the
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main character and their own plot points
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are also
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can be filled up using the column view
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and you can find out where which act we
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are talking about
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and for the main character what what is
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it that we're doing
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okay next is the specifics which is the
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scene design
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uh this is going to be look like a mess
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but
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it's actually very very convenient can
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be as exhaustive as you can you can do
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the title of the scene
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the act the point of view as it's called
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point of views
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which characters point of view are we
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looking at in this scene
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is it outdoor indoor we can mix it up
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match
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and then where is the location and
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finally the city in which
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this scene is taking place now let's uh
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look at the novel itself I use this
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novel the distraction free experience
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for writing the novel 60 000 word novel
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this
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first manuscript you can even write
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comments based on
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I read this out to a writer's community
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locally
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and they give me feedback on what could
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be improved what could be something that
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they should be looking at
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you can write it as comments so it
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doesn't go into your final export
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as well I'm using pandora to export it
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to
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epub or pdf or word or whatever format
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you want to
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use it with the cover image that's how I
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wrote my novel
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I used a similar structure for my
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non-fiction book
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using Emacs and arc mode which I
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published recently
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all written and edited in Emacs or mod
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thank you guys at the community and now
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a published author
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and I plan to publish and help other
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authors publish using this wonderful
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tool called Emacs or more thank you
