WEBVTT
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No, there is nothing wrong with your mobile
device or your computer. This was how my world
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was when my kid was born 11 years ago.
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Hello, I am Bala Ramadurai, author, professor
and consultant. 11 years ago in Bangalore,
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my son was born. My wife and I had hardly slept
through those days. That's when my grandma
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visited us to take a look at her great grandson.
As joyous as that sounded, it came with a peril.
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My grandma was a Scrabble addict. She hardly
spent any time at all with her great grandson,
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but she spent most of her time playing Scrabble.
She insisted that my wife and I join her.
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That's when an idea dawned on me to write about
my Scrabble obsessed grandma. What if I could
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make it into a novel. Not many people have
Scrabble obsessed grandmothers, after all.
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I wanted to expand this to a novel, but did
not know how. I bumped into Dan Wells' video
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on 7-point story structure. I was now convinced
that a seed idea could indeed be converted into
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a novel, so I tried out many tools at the
time - million dollar tools like MS Word,
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Excel, Scrivener and the lot. In my research of
tools, I found that George RR Martin famously
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had used Wordstar for typing out Game of
Thrones. At that point, I remembered about
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an old editor - Emacs. I knew about Emacs from
my undergrad days and my earlier software days.
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Thanks to the emacs community and particularly
the orgmode community, I had what I wanted.
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Now, it was time to put the idea into action.
I used another method called snowflake and also
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Tony Ballantyne's emacs writing template. The main
features from org-mode that I used - fold, unfold,
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columnview, tags, distraction-free writing
experience, clocking, project tracking and export.
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Now, the demo. We start with the plotline (a one
line summary of the story). Then we write out the
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characters, describing them in detail. Write
the main story arc, followed by the secondary
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character story arcs. Here is where org-mode
really scores. Move the points in the story
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structure to form a coherent story. We
get into location research. Write them
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all out in the columns. Once you are satisfied,
now scene design. Each point in the story
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requires at least one scene. In columnview,
you can see many things - Act, scene,
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story point, location, POV or point of
view. Make sure you finish this and read
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the whole story if it makes sense. Now, create
a project file to track your project and clock
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your project to see how long it takes. I used
a similar structure for my non-fiction book,
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which I published recently, all
written and edited in emacs-org-mode.
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Thanks to you guys at the community, I
am now a published author and I plan to
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publish and help other authors publish using this
wonderful tool called emacs-org-mode. Thank You.
