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For the record, [K a j o]'s pre-breakfast snack consists of a bowl of amazing, one small army, and the entire Buckingham Palace. And that's on his days off.

He's right. You will lose the pace that makes your story special.

It will be replaced by a pace that also makes your story special.

Agreed. However, (barring stream of consciousness stories) I've yet to meet one I can't break down into cause & effect chains.

Edit: I often leave orphaned effects in my stories. This system ensures when I do so, it's not by accident

I plan like a mofo. (Except Kim's story, where I just wrote and wrote and ended when she died. Even in her story, I had a rough outline because it occurs (on top of / simultaneously with)  other stories. That is, I knew before writing which major events were going to occur... I just didn't know yet how she would respond to them.)

My outlining strategies will be pretty useless to you since I try to make one character dominant and everyone else side-show. My result is that usually one character carries the canvas and everyone else gets to reach in and paint their own strokes.

All disclaimers aside, I start with the simplest possible description. ONE verb if possible. Never more than three verbs. I expand outwards from there in 3's. So column (B) in the spreadsheet = the major arcs and column (C) represents the sub arcs.

For example, in a recent story "Woman learns too late the wages of sin" I have 3 arcs:
1. Evil at the start
2. Change of heart
3. Retribution

Each of these arcs turns into 3 arcs which turn into 3 arcs each and so forth until I can't break it down any further.

Here: 3 nodes deep:

No big shocker, I picked three sins. Avarice, Mendacity, and Passion (Anger). Original intent was to go through each (in the style of Dickens 3 ghosts), but that didn't pan out , and all those nodes got culled.

The middle "Change of heart" story arc, explored one node deeper:

Anything that breaks the rule of 3's gets pruned until it does. If it can't be reduced, I sit down and ask myself some hard questions about the story. Is the story trying to accomplish too much? Is it too complex? What story am I trying to tell?

Right now, my scientist character (Marsha) faces those questions. She's the 4th strand in many nodes. Should she get her own (more structurally sound) story? Is she helping the current story or is she hindering it? I seesaw on this every day. She passes the relevancy test, but not the rules of 3. Difficult choice!

Btw, beyond the 3rd tier of branches, I rarely stick to my outline. Characters surprise me and make weird decisions. Sometimes reviewers go "hey, J can't kill her sister in cold blood. It's repulsive. I hope you can change it" and I'm looking at my sheets and it's like level M down the chain and not crucial to A, B, or C so ya, outline can go fly a kite.

Coming back to yours... if you decide to approach such a strategy, I recommend you lay out all your bullet points. Make a giant shopping list of all you'd like to happen. Then go through and split into two columns (A) cause and (B) effect. Some items will be sitting in "effect" with no apparent "cause". That's normal. Then, go through your causes and see if you can link them to a new column which is the greater causes. At this point, some of your orphaned effects will now join up. After several passes, you may be 3-4 nodes deep, but everything will join up. Anything that doesn't join up needs close scrutiny.

Never.

@Sol:

If you navigate to my profile and click the Rocket Baby story, you'll discover that you get the wrong landing page version. You may correct this by selecting the correct chapter-version from the dropdown list. However clicking "next" brings you to the incorrect chapter 2 version.

Question: Is this because I haven't deleted/disabled the prior versions? I would want them to be accessible so reviewers can compare past reviews to see if particular changes were a step forward or not... but perhaps the site is not designed this way.

On the chance that it is a bug, I must add that I don't find it a huge issue... just something to consider while you're working on the versioning system

-K

@amy: Ah, but that's in a perfect situation... it gets much more complicated in practice.

Let's say me, Norm dplume, and Leeanne Joseph are chatting about the Mrs Blue story (which we are). A quick scan of us will tell you that the Mrs Blue thread is in the fantasy group (excludes Norm and Leeanne), and my overlap group with Norm is the Sci-fi group. My overlap group with Leeanne is TNBW-premium.

Now say Norm wants to comment on Mrs Blue. He's unlikely to start searching miscellaneous groups for a threat that just happens to be discussing her. And if he did, I bet he wouldn't be looking for an alien invasion story under her main thread in "fantasy". He'd be more likely to post under an overlap group.

Let us assume that I can't invite all my reviewers into one Mrs-Blue-related group because they're all at their limits (five or ten, pending) or from different genres and not interested.

In all likelihood, before the year is up, there will be four or five separate, concurrent Mrs Blue threads, which is more than she needs, as much as I like the concept of that.

Adding the ability to form more groups increases the dispersion factor... it increases the chance that Mrs Blue threads will pop up in different groups.

A 5-group limit forms a rather Keynesian guiding hand, steering us away from group swarms. I believe this is the gist of Sol's approach

-K

Sorry everyone!

I sat down and thought long and hard about what Sol said about wanting the premium group to be the central forum, and I'm switching sides. I now agree that fewer groups is better.

Mainly because there aren't enough (regularly) active users to populate them all.

Partially because even with a five-group limit, we're already all over the place. Already there are interesting writing discussions I can't participate in. Raising the limit threatens to increase that number.

The site appears to be urging us to be in groups. Everything I click seems to be telling me I should be in them. I had no idea until now that it wasn't the plan. Right from the main menu I was like "aw, what's my group?" and "where do I fit in the puzzle" and "Which groups will the people I know be in?"

To fix this, I'd recommend a change in the menus:

This would mean that premium and free would have to pretend they aren't groups. Viewing "My groups content" would display everything but those two groups. The main page would, by default, only show content from the one group (premium or free) and not put the word group on them (even though they technically are)

maybe even... "Groups Content" should read "Small discussion groups" or in some way give us a hint that they aren't meant for large collections of users to wall themselves away in.

MzP: I'm still tracing that problem in order to do a bug report for Sol, however I've isolated the most frequent occurrence... If I visit a group where I'm a moderator and click around in there, when I visit another group, I seem to retain moderator privilege until I next log out.

Don't waste any points on it. Here's the problem...

I can't stay in this group long term unless they raise the group limit (from 5).

The genres (groups) I write in are:
steampunk (main)
science fiction (secondary)
urban fantasy (tertiary)
romance (quarternary(?))

I would also like to participate in:
YA
Historical fiction
Fantasy
(these groups I would not post in but would like to be active in)

Counting the main group TNBW-classic, that's 8... 3 over the limit.
Factoring in that only me & Bimmy on this site write steampunk, it would be better planning to not fill 20% of my groups with a dead-end option.

Everyone else must face similar choices.
Unless they raise the limit, I don't see how this group can survive