Fillers: What? Why?

[mkoskim]

Story speculating

Fillers are part of making speculations of the final draft. Depending if you are plotter, plantser or pantser, you start speculating what the final draft looks sooner, or later - or never.

As an example, let's take a look of this Manuskript screenshot:

https://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/outliner-1.jpg

The writer of this story is definitely a plotter. We see that the story's target length is set to 3 x 25,000 words = 75,000 words, but there is just around 800 words actually written. Still, the story is already splitted to sections splitted to chapters splitted to scenes, and scenes already have their target lengths.

This is what I mean about this speculation: you have an idea, how long the scenes will be, and the editor can track the completeness of your scenes and the entire story.

Personal motivation

I have many unfinished stories, and I'd like to try to organize them in the diagram view. Currently the view works mostly with close finished stories. To make it usable also in early phases, I'd like to artifically set the goal lengths for scenes and/or parts.

Progress tracking in MaweJS

MaweJS tracks completeness of scenes from missing words. Parts get their missing word status derived from the scenes within it. When writing, you can leave a comment telling what is missing at this particular point. In the index, it looks like this:

Here you can see small blue stars with scenes that contain no missing blocks, and red number telling how many missing words there is in the scene.

Tip: In the index, there are four buttons controlling the visibility of elements: scenes, synopses, missing and comments. By default, index shows scenes and synopses. Press missing button to show missing blocks in the index, and you can quite easily see where and what your story is still missing, and go to that particular place by clicking the entry.

Filling in current MaweJS

You already see in the picture above, that the fillers (named "Filleri/500", indicating that this filler contains 500 words) in that particular story are artificial. So far I have used lorem paragraphs marked as missing to fill in some length to scenes or parts. The main purpose for this is to see, how some added words would affect the story compared to story templates.

Here is a small screenshot showing the fillers (named "Filleri/500") inserted in the story diagram. In this particular case, I am adding fillers between midpoint and climax, to make them both closer to the story template points:

I particularly changed diagram to include missing words to scene lengths for this purpose.

Improving filling

Adding some placeholder text (lorem) and marking those blocks to missing is a bit crude way to implement filling. Moreover, adding fillers in this way happens in wrong place: you add them in the editor, while actually you should be able to add filling in the diagram view!

Changes to diagram

Diagram view needs an index. In that index, you should be able to drag'n'drop scenes and parts to reorganize your story. Also, you should be able to move parts and scenes between body and notes.

And you also should be able to give the scenes a specific length!

So, improving fillers starts by improving the diagram view so that you can edit your story there. Then we add an ability to set the scene length (and the diagram could show added "shadow" part in different color).

Changes to editor

Inside the software, scene objects would get a property like "fillto" or something similar.

The editor view would use this information. Index could show how much is still missing to reach the given length. For Slate buffer, we could add control block where the fillto attribute is presented and editable. This way, even if you delete scene, the fillto attribute would remain until you delete it by hand.

## Scene
@@fillto 2500 <-- returns enough missing words to fill this scene to 2500 words
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aenean luctus...

Other possibility would just implement simple control block, which returns the given number as missing words:

## Scene
@@missing 500 <-- returns +500 missing words
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aenean luctus...

Considerations

The description about improvement above is sketching. I don't know yet for sure, if that helps structuring stories in early phases.

In early phase, it is probably easier to speculate number of parts and part lengths. Many times first sketches have lots of very small scenes, which will later be combined.

Related issues

Project: https://github.com/users/mkoskim/projects/5

Generic control element: #81
Implement Filler element: #85
Diagram view improvements: #62