Combining locked structure lanes with fluid writing lanes

[Siska]

I’m finally tackling a bigger project with Causality - I adore this software, thank you for creating it - and I find myself wondering if there is a way to use some lanes where I can assign “Story synopsis” blocks to certain pages, lock them in place and exclude them from the script? I’ve been playing around with different functionalities, and re-watching tutorials, but I can’t quite figure it out.

For example, if using a beat sheet for guidance, I’d like to assign say “The ordinary world” to pages 1-15, “Call to Adventure” to pages 16-20, etc… and have that reference displayed in a block in the lane across those pages, regardless of what happens in my more “fluid” script lanes where I’m actually developing the story.

The reason is that I want to lay out the emotional journeys of several characters and then create the story beats based on how they naturally intersect. The goal isn’t to be overly rigid or reliant on structure, but time/page limitations help me curtail the spiraling thoughts when I’m on a tight deadline.

So, is there a way to this (or something similar)? Thank you!

[perholmes]

Hi Siska,

I’m wondering if what you need is actually Sections. If you look at the following screenshot, sections are a kind of break that you can insert in the whiteboard and script that doesn’t have any predefined structural meaning, and is actually meant for these kinds of milestones.

You create a section by right-clicking in the whiteboard:

Sections, like the other breaks, don’t have a Synopsis right now, but we could easily make that. Then you’d have a synopsis field in this dialog, and then we could make a printing option. You already have an option for whether to print the break type, so we’d just need an option to also print the synopsis. We already print synopsis for blocks and groups, so it’s actually half-baked to not already do this.

Would that work?

Best,

Per Holmes
Hollywood Camera Work

[Alan_Knittel]

My novel uses a version of Vogler’s hero’s journey synchronized across five characters, each with the 12 steps of a “hero”. I also have an arc for the antagonist. I use Causality ONLY to graph the novel not to write it. Each character is in their own lane because it gives me flexibility to sort them out. Using lanes this way probably is not the greatest solution and may have drawbacks, but this works for me. The secret sauce is to use beat groups and their summaries to remind me how this hero relates to the 12 steps. Here’s a screen shot of the usage.

Per, please chime in if you do NOT recommend this, or with the drawbacks. Hope this is viewable as I cannot use export whiteboard to frame what I want.

[perholmes]

Hi,

Whether you’re writing in Causality or not, your plusses or minuses in the whiteboard will be about the same. So I’ll just explain what we’ve learned about lane usage. And to be clear, this isn’t about Causality in particular, but about spreading your story out vertically. If you did this on a wall, you’d have the same problems.

The main problem is cross-cutting. We’ve seen examples of people using 10 or 20 lanes as storylines, or themes etc., and this makes it very hard to understand the sequence of events. Imagine if one beat is in lane 20, and the very next beat is in lane 1, five screens above you. And then the next event after that is again in lane 20. The more a story is spread out vertically, the harder it is to understand. You really wouldn’t be able to understand this kind of a sequence in the whiteboard at all. You could only work with the literal sequence of everything in the timeline or script.

So lanes have a “right” way of use, which is in the docs, but I’ll list it here: Causality Story Sequencer

• Use Lanes sparingly. Once you get above 3-4 Lanes, it becomes really difficult to understand the sequence of events as we’re jumping up and down on the screen.
• Use Lanes for truly separate things. Use Lanes for A/B plots, like a Ross/Rachel storyline, and a Joey storyline about getting an acting gig. These are completely separate storylines that don’t touch, and could in principle be moved into separate episodes.
• Stay in a Lane for a while. It’s difficult to understand constant cross-cutting between different Lanes. When you go to a Lane, you should stay there for a while, and keep cross-cutting to a minimum.
• Don’t use Lanes for Tags. Don’t create Lanes for concepts, like a Lane for a theme, a Lane for a character’s anger problem, and a Lane for the same character’s drinking problem. This will force you into heavy cross-cutting, because you’ll often need to zig-zag between all of them. Lanes also force you to categorize your ideas into hard boxes. It’s better to keep many things in the same Lane, and use Tags to separate storylines, because this allows you to have fuzzier boundaries between ideas. Forced categorization is bad for creativity, because it’s often a difficult question to answer whether an event is part of this or that storyline.

You really should use Tags for storylines, and in Causality 4.0, with Emotion Tracking, this makes tags even more front and center.

What’s important to appreciate it is that categorizing things hurts creativity. We’ve seen this over and over with users, and experienced it ourselves, and the boundaries between story concepts are blurry in one’s mind. Even the boundaries between beats are fuzzy, i.e. it’s not clear where one beat starts and another ends.

For that reason, asking people to put anything into a container, such as a beat, is counter to how people think. But the super-power that you gain from beats is that if things are in some sort of box from the beginning, you’ll be able to manipulate the story visually for the next many months or years or writing, at a small up-front cost. And starting with beats as boxes can also be good therapy, because it asks you to articulate what the purpose of a beat is.

Since working in beats is already a bit of an ask, we want all other categorization to be able to start out fuzzy, while you’re figuring the story out. This is why you should use tags for storylines, or concepts, feeling, objectives etc., and then use the lanes as purely practical organization, e.g. (“the part where they get to know each other”, or “the bank robbery sequence”), and only use lanes for things are are truly separate A/B plots with very little contact between them.

And then you should write beats in the script without respecting beat boundaries too much, like we’re all comfortable ignoring a GPS. Sure, you have to write in a box, but you can always split and merge beats. So you shouldn’t be afraid of writing free-form and only splitting into beats once you discover what the beats are.

Ultimately, if your layout works for you, then I’m not the one to tell you not to do it. But it will be difficult to understand the sequence of events in the whiteboard. You can really only use it to understand the story from each character’s perspective.

And don’t forget filters, which are an amazing feature. You can slice the story along any angle, include for characters, and you can make presets. So you can easily make script views that only show the beats that a particular character is in. Or a particular storyline, emotion or objective, stuff like that. It’s a totally correct idea to want to examine the story from different angles. But spreading out vertically in the whiteboard would be my least favorite way of doing it.

I hope this was helpful!

Per