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