Story Stains: An Idea forms
For the last month or so I've been working on Story Stains, an app to help analyze stories and find out how they tick.
The past year or so I've been attempting to write my own stories and in this journey I've learnt the necessity to understand how they work. First, from a course on writing I took from Faber, and secondly from multiple 'how to write books'. I've written freeform reviews, structured reviews with template headings of 'Characters', 'Setting', 'Theme', 'Mood', 'Pace', and attempted to make a questionnaire: 'What are the main themes?', 'Do any of the Characters of objects represent a concept?', 'Who is telling the story?'. None have the techniques have quite stuck.
I often also lose patience for journaling. For a month or two, I enjoy writing long monologues on my thoughts and feelings, but at some point I usually get tired of it and find myself unwilling to face the blank page again. Something I've been more consistent with is Daylio. A mood journal and habit tracker. It has a cute interface for quickly noting what you did and your mood. It's restrictions are helpful to pigeonhole your thoughts.
Another 'How to write book' is 'A Swim in a Pond in the Rain' by George Saunders where he takes you by the hand in story analysis with Russian masters. In his newsletter he continues this vain, if you're into reading or writing I wholly recommend it. The structure of analysis is: He will publish a story and close comments to have a first impression of the story. After we write how we felt during the story, but don't write why. A second impression, we try and figure out why we felt that way. That he admits himself is it, that is how you learn to write great stories.
That's the inspirations behind Story Stains, and what I hope to accomplish. A way to get a first impression of a story with a simple mood tracking interface, which you can then try to understand why you felt like that.