has anyone ever written a novel using "the mitosis method", starting with a single-sentence synopsis of the main plot & then expanding upon it exponentially, sentence by sentence, over time?
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Nope but sounds interesting. I will try it with short stories first.
let us know how it works for you. the concept first occurred to me a few months ago & its remained on my mind ever since. i'd attempt it myself, but i lost any skill i once possessed for composing fiction over a decade ago at least.
My biggest problem is having a plot, having the themes, the messages, having characters, having their arc, and etc. all decided and planned and then not being able to actually fill it all in.
>not being able to actually fill it all in
maybe the mitosis method would prove to be beneficial for you then, as it necessitates the creation of new plot points, characters, etc only as the story becomes more detailed, intricate, & descriptive
How would one start this? As in start off with "X did Y to get Z" then expand to "X did Y to get Z because A happened to him"?
i imagine in actual practice it would entail a progressive movement from a bare-bones thematic & plot summary to increasingly ever more detailed passages of prose. One would begin with something like:
>Once upon a time, there were a boy & girl from two warring families who fell in love with each other, & died because of that ancient blood feud.
& over the course of multiple sentence divisions & textual expansions, transform this basic, simple cellular idea into "romeo & juliet"
Thinking of a story is easy. People do it naturally. Everyone has thought of a cool film or book.
Actually writing it, though. That's a tricky thing, and is almost entirely divorced from the act of thinking about a cool story.
>Actually writing it, though. That's a tricky thing, and is almost entirely divorced from the act of thinking about a cool story.
op here, this fact is partially what first led me to think of a composition method akin to cellular mitosis. i'd been listening to a film courage interview about screenwriters suing each other for creating scripts based on redundant ideas everyone and their mom has imagined at one time or another, and this made me think about why its so relatively difficult for most people to translate their broad story concepts into fully developed, self-contained works of fiction. the answer, i realized, is because of the challenge of breaking down a general concept into its constituent parts and incorporating into them multiple levels of stylized, thematically relevant spatial and temporal detail. then i found myself wondering, does it all really have to be so hard and complicated? what if, through an autistic process of textual bifurcation, an author took a straightforward, TV Guide-esque single sentence plot synopsis and incrementally chopped it up and explicated each component element to produce a full-length narrative?
so glad that autism was mentioned in this. Well said though anon.
This is why I make an outline. Then you can edit scenes as necessary and with precision, as if scenes in a movie.
I just develop method with the work.
could someone do the first 3 or 4 steps of this I''m just a lil curious
I'll give it a shot with an old, unused, undeveloped story idea i once had inspired by personal experiences
>1. Once upon a time, a sadistic babysitter died & returned as a vampire, just like the stories she used to torment one of her charges when he was a small child.
>2. Once upon a time, in a small suburban town, there was an evil, sadistic teenaged girl named Hannah who would babysit many of the local children, and she liked to torment one of her charges by telling him bedtime stories about vampires, ghouls, and other nocturnal demons. One day, many years later, she died under mysterious, disturbing circumstances, but somehow returned from the dead as a foul, pale, fanged creature of the night herself, to stalk her former victim, now a young man himself.
>3. Once upon a time, in a small suburban town just like yours, there lived an evil, sadistic teenaged girl named Hannah, who would regularly babysit many of the local children. One of Hannah's charges was a shy, timid young boy named Charlie, and for her own cruel, perverted amusement, Hannah would often terrify him with bedtime stories about vampires, ghouls, and all other manner of undead bloodthirsty creatures of the night; under threat of the nocturnal monsters of these tales coming to get him, Hannah forbid Charlie from exposing her macabre emotional abuse to his parents, and it continued for several months. One day, many years later, when Charlie had grown into a young man himself, less shy and timid but nonetheless haunted by his childhood experiences with his former babysitter, Hannah died under mysterious and disturbing circumstances, her savaged body having been discovered in a dark, secluded patch of forest on the edge of town. Charlie felt a deep sense of relief and ferocious glee at the news of Hannah's death, but his feelings of comfort and vindication transformed into horror and despair one deep, dark night when he was awoken from an uneasy sleep to find her foul, pale figure floating outside his bedroom window, eyes as unendingly black as midnight, grinning a hateful, fang-filled grin, and cooing for him to let her in so she could tell him a bedtime story
I hope Charlie gets to hate frick her.
if i did flesh it out into a full-length story, it would probably end with her appearance outside his window, and thus leave possibilities like that to the readers imagination..
Nice, let the fanfic writers take care of that. I'd still read your story.
Not sure about novel but this is basically Ron Silliman's Ketjak if you can do poems.
When I make a story I have 2 questions that help me decide what's next -
How would the character likely react?
And, How can I ruin his day?
This sounds super interesting Im going to try it today on a short story
I had a piece of prose I wrote about a month ago that I still wanted to develop but it had no plot. I used this method to try and expand a very basic idea. I like this method a LOT the ability to very quickly change plot points and add things in is surprisingly inspiring, and I like the paper trail of where you came from in it.
Something interesting about this method is that an unconscious decision (splitting the first sentence to describe the main character and the next to describe the events of the story) has inadvertently given me two main themes to work with as I continue to develop this.
Incremental writing is a similar idea. You could also weight things so you do more on the earlier chapters, so that you can release them serially, but the entire plot is finished in the abstract by the time the first chapter is published.
I prefer the 'get really high on stimulants and see the next day what you wrote' method
god I wish I had cocaine
im only good at writting my erotic fantasies, but i writte those for myself
Didn't even know this was a method. This is how I write all my short stories. A sentence just comes to mind and I expand on that. it's really fun, the only problem is knowing when to stop ( you stop when you run out of ideas basically, but it can be a little abrupt).
Not sure I understand what this method entails. Are you saying that you start with a single sentence, then split that into two. Then split those two into four and so on?
How would that work exactly? At what point would you transition from summary into the words as they would appear in the finished work?
Anyway, there's already a method similar to this called "the snowflake method". Maybe you should check that out.
>Anyway, there's already a method similar to this called "the snowflake method". Maybe you should check that out.
>its real and this is what its actually called
can we think of a better name for this?
The snowball method? It starts small, then gets bigger and bigger
>snowball
that does NOT carry with it the same insinuations as "the snowflake method"
>How would that work exactly? At what point would you transition from summary into the words as they would appear in the finished work?
this is contingent on the author's personal discretion imo, and it depends on what type of story they're working to produce & how long & detailed they want it to be. its like the difference between a painter producing a mostly abstracted sketch composed of broad brushstrokes versus a highly detailed & intricate portrait in which as many elements of their subject as possible are incorporated
Don't know why the guy didn't just call it the "fractal method" since that's what the snowflake reference is from anyway.
yeah for real, i ain't no liberal snowflake
the way I did it was I started with a sentence. Then I split it in two. Then I developed those two sentences into paragraphs. Then I split those paragraphs in two again and continued to work. The key was that as soon as a sentence or paragraph was "perfect" (ie I was satisfied with it) I would split it in two and work from there. I imagine I could keep doing this until I developed whole chapters that I was satisfied with, and then declare them finished and not split them.
So you started with a sentence as it would appear on the page? And when you say you split a paragraph what does that mean? Meaning you rewrote the paragraph into two paragraphs? Or you just added a new paragraph to the existing one?
>Meaning you rewrote the paragraph into two paragraphs? Or you just added a new paragraph to the existing one?
You could probably go either way with it i think, the crux of the issue is that the author is widening their descriptive net to include more & more thematically pertinent information & doing do in a stylistically consistent way
Okay so I started with a simple sentence summarizing a plot. Within that sentence there were two ideas, so I split the sentence into two sentences, each one expanding on the ideas in the first sentence. I then added more sentences to those two until I came up with two paragraphs summarizing the two ideas in the original sentence. From there, I was able to find that each paragraph had two ideas in them, so I split the paragraphs along those ideas and then continued to add to each idea.
an author can probably utilize it in many different ways depending on their own particular tastes and temperament, but i think its fair to claim that the essential thrust of this style is
>expand
>split
>expand
>split
etc, like cellular division. Its interesting because, as simple as it sounds, employing this method in good faith necessarily forces the author to confront and resolve structural weaknesses in their concept/narrative; for example, i thought of this
idea literally years ago, but it wasnt until i began cellularly dividing and developing it earlier today that i realized the true emotional heart of the story lies within its mundane middle section and that i have very little idea of how to effectively conclude its supernaturally horrific ending
>i have very little idea of how to effectively conclude its supernaturally horrific ending
I think that's the weakness of the method. It's not very good at endings since it emulates a natural growth process. Probably, as in real cell division, you need some kind of natural constraint. The anon above mentioned stopping when you run out of ideas, which is sort of akin to running out of nutrient agar in a petri dish. Another idea would be something akin to differentiation into different tissues, so you keep revising paragraphs until you reach a point where you can no longer change them, then string a bunch of those together until you get the whole. I believe that's similar to how Nabokov wrote his novels: paragraphs on index cards.
In a Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders talks about how when writing he knew when to stop adding something when it felt like adding anymore would take away from what was already there. This is how I feel about this method, expand until adding more would take away, and when you reach there split it. You do this until splitting it would take away, and then it's perfect. BTW, that's a wonderful book I think everyone on here should read. It takes seven russian short stories and uses them to give lessons in reading and writing
It seems good in the beginning for coming up with a skeletal structure of the story, but then it gets dicey in terms of creating a smooth, coherent plot.
First time I’ve heard about it but it sounds fun — and feasible.
Once I say a guy writing whose method was writing all the chapter titles first then a little synopsis for each. I stole that idea for uni papers and it works great for me.
>Once I say a guy writing whose method was writing all the chapter titles first then a little synopsis for each. I stole that idea for uni papers and it works great for me.
this is a great idea too, but i feel like its main drawback is one has to already know exactly what they want to discuss & feel inspired to write about it. This
sort of bifurcating, bastardized-snowflake/fractal method is i think designed best for authors who spontaneously think of an interesting concept or plot but dont immediately know how to grow it into a proper, economically viable, organic story with a beginning, middle, & end
you tagged me and youre exactly right, this method is perfect for just expanding upon an initial idea
I thought that's how everyone wrote their books?
How many of you actually pre-plan your writing structure before putting it to pen? Almost everything I've written comes to me in 2 ways:
>think about what should come next while i'm doing something else, whenever i settle on something mull it over in my head until i get the chance to add it in
or
>as i'm writing, re-read the previous few paragraphs and decide on the spot what comes next in a stream of consciousness style
>How many of you actually pre-plan your writing structure before putting it to pen?
the reason i fell out of love with writing fiction
is because i gradually realized that i do my best composition off the cuff, extemporaneously, not knowing whats going to happen next, but then i always, always, always write myself into intractable corners from which my plots cannot escape no matter how hard i try to extricate them, but then if i pre-plan the narrative & its specific beats, i lose all desire to manifest it. its such a curse & a psychological disadvantage, its like wanting to explore riflery/sharpshooting & discovering that one is right-handed but left-eye dominant.
>Probably, as in real cell division, you need some kind of natural constraint.
>This is how I feel about this method, expand until adding more would take away, and when you reach there split it. You do this until splitting it would take away, and then it's perfect.
these two posts flow together amazingly
:3
People use the snowflake, which is vaguely like the mitosis method (did you make that up or is it something someone has coined before?).
>did you make that up or is it something someone has coined before
i'd never heard of the snowflake before posting this thread; "mitosis" seemed like a good descriptor because i feel like the central aspect of this style of writing is its reliance on binary division and reproduction
one might also think of it in terms of a fugue i suppose, originating with a single core thematic sentence & carving it up via repeated exponential bifurcations into a whole story
Short version the Snowflake goes like this:
You make a one sentence idea, that is basically your elevator pitch.
"John Badass goes to Elevator HQ to fight to stop the ban on Escalators that will put his mom's factory out of business."
Then you expand that to a paragraph.
Write summaries of your important characters. Note any characters who are less important but you will need to keep track of.
Expand the paragraph to a page.
Write backstories for the characters.
Expand your page synopsis to a four page synopsis.
Create 'character bibles' for each important character (basically know everything about them, from eye color to when they converted to Islam).
List the scenes.
Write a plan for each scene.
Write the book.
The idea is as you go along you'll notice shit you're missing or that is fricked up, and you can go back and fix it.
>Write summaries of your important characters. Note any characters who are less important but you will need to keep track of.
>Expand the paragraph to a page.
>Write backstories for the characters.
>Expand your page synopsis to a four page synopsis.
>Create 'character bibles' for each important character (basically know everything about them, from eye color to when they converted to Islam).
>List the scenes.
>Write a plan for each scene.
>Write the book.
>The idea is as you go along you'll notice shit you're missing or that is fricked up, and you can go back and fix it.
ngl this is all way too complicated for me bro, and it makes alot of assumptions about an authors relationship to their characters, like that they view them sincerely as representations of "real" & want to know everything there is to know about their history & psychology & such. Even the prospect of "expanding" a paragraph to a fullass page sounds like a colossal pain in the ass & a blanket invitation to crank out useless bloatn& filler material..
>way too complicated for you
And you've written a book?
THAT IS JUST HOW I WRITE: TOO MUCH, AND IT BECOMES CANCER.
elaborate
Not that anon, but i think he's saying that once he starts splitting and expanding his ideas, like a cancer, he cannot stop
So this method...do you just start with the base idea then write the story as it comes to you, outlining (so you remember characters and plot) as you go?
I explained how I did it earlier but I'll try and do it again now that I understand it a bit more. Essentially you start with a sentence or an idea, and you expand on it until it feels "perfect", ie adding any more would take away from it. once you reach that point, find a place to split it in two, and then continue expanding on those original two ideas. The key is remembering youre starting small, so in the beginning you will be splitting the ideas often. Only later do they start to become more concrete and taking more time to split
So at what point do you write a book and turn it into money?
Essentially, from what im testing, is throughout expanding ideas, themes, characters and plot will form. From there you just need to turn it into chapters, submit it to a publisher and bam, money