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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Nice one. There we go, letting everybody in.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: just going to

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: see if I can see everybody.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Yeah, there we go.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: People are coming in. That's good, nice one.

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Kristina Stanley: It always makes you feel good when people are showing up.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Yes, absolutely.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Okay. Let me see if

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: there we go.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: If I do that, are you still seeing the opening slides.

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Kristina Stanley: I am.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Perfect nice one. Okay, that means everything's working.

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Kristina Stanley: Fantastic.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Hi, everybody. I can already see people putting their names and locations in the chat. So yeah, if you're not familiar with the way that we do things usually. That's how we start.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: I'm just having a look at the chat. Now we've got people from Wyoming from Alberta, Canada.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Let's see someone. John's back from the dentist. Nice one hope it went. Well. We've got people from Texas, Colorado, Palm Springs.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Oh, I could go after it. There are so many messages. The chat is going really, really fast. So yeah, keep them coming. So in the meantime, before we get started, we've just got a few housekeeping items. And I'm going to run through them now. So first of all, how to access your replays so replays will be added to the Hub page. Once they're done processing by zoom.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: the time it takes for this can vary. Usually it's a matter of hours these days. We've been putting them up already. Today I've seen Michelle been doing that. So that's been very quick. But if they don't get added straight away, then it's probably just because Zoom is taking a while

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: and then replays will be available on the providing a community page for all members to view. By May third.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: I wanna go that way and then for your premium day details. So Monday to Thursday, sessions are free for everyone to attend. And then Friday sessions are limited to premium and premium pro users

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: and then you can upgrade your account by Friday morning to gain access, and for those who are premium or premium pro users. You will receive an email Friday morning with instructions for attending the live session. So if you're worried during the week that you haven't received an email. Don't worry. It's coming on Friday morning, and then if you don't see it, you can email in and and we'll sort you out.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Okay, so your offer for fantasy writers week 2024 is 25% off yearly premium or premium pro

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: so we've got lots of premium and premium pro features that we'd love you to take advantage of. So this offers really good for that. So we've got features like rephrase sparks critique, all really good for editing your fantasy. Stories or novels this offer ends on May tenth, so you can find more about on about that on the Hub. But I will also share a link to it in a second.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Okie Dokey, next thing, want to keep talking fantasy. So we have an amazing online writing community. And it just keeps growing every single day, especially this week. So we'd love for you to come along and join us and talk to other fantasy fans. Keep talking about the events or talking about writing in general. We're all on there, and we love seeing you guys getting active and getting to know each other? It's also a great place for you to find out about any future events that we host as well.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: And then just some reminders for this session. So please use the Q. And A. Box. If you've got questions for our speaker. If you'd like to chat with other viewers. Then use the chat, so you'll find the Q&A box. It should be down at the bottom, and it will say Q. And a. And there'll be another one that says chat. So if you want to chat to other people, click, chat. And if you want to ask a question. Click Q. And a. And we'll do that at the end.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: And then links to offers for our speakers will be available on the fantasy of writers, week Hub, and in the participants guides. So I will also share them in a second.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: So I think that's about everything. I can still see people putting their names and locations and things in the chat which is always nice to see. So I'm just going to stop sharing and introduce

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: our speaker for today. There we go. Where's my screen? There we go. So today we're joined by Christina Stanley and combining her degree in computer mathematics, and with her success as a bestselling, award-winning author and fiction. Editor Christina Stanley is the creator and CEO of fictionary creative editing, software for fiction writers and editors. She is a fictionary, certified story coach.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Her novels include the Stone Mountain Mystery Series, and look the other way.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: She is the author of the Author's Guide to Selling books to non bookstores, and she's also a passionate guide, dog, trainer and hiker. So I will pass you over to Christina and disappear because Christina is gonna take over now. I think.

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Kristina Stanley: Sarah, you don't have to disappear. Don't abandon me. Oh, hi! Everyone! I see some fictionary. People here very excited about that. Linda put her kindness message in the chat always can count on her for that. So I'm gonna start. I'm gonna get right into this. I'm gonna share my screen.

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Kristina Stanley: And today.

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Kristina Stanley: of course, you know, we're in pro-writing. It's fantasy week, and I'm going to talk about how to perform a structural edit on a fantasy novel.

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Kristina Stanley: So first, I'll just tell you a little bit more about who I am. I'm CEO and founderictionary. So I created the fictionary software and have built a company around it. And what we do is we try and help writers with the structure of their story and the structure of scenes within their story. So we're all about structure. I'm a super fan of pro writing aid. We work so well together, because when you do your structure, let out what follows next. It's a copy edit, and

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Kristina Stanley: the 2 of you know, fiction and pro writing aid were great together. My nonfiction books are secrets to editing success secrets to outlining a novel and secrets, to writing a series which is coming out this week, and these books are all about how to perform a structural edit on fiction or outline using an actual way. So at the end of every chapter, your book is actually better, and, as you know, I'm already. I'm also a fiction author. So let's skip over that

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Kristina Stanley: because Sarah so nicely gave me an intro so just a tiny bit more about who we are. So we're outlining writing and editing software. And with that you can visualize your manuscript, evaluate it. And we focus on the characters, plot and settings. So we're really looking at the structure. We have live guided courses.

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Kristina Stanley: and these are so you can work with our trained editors on your manuscript in a live setting. So you create a structurally sound story, and we have a community of writers and editors.

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Kristina Stanley: and you can connect there. We have free events, our our favorite word in the community is kindness. We also have a special offer for everybody. Here is Pwa Dash. Fantasy is the coupon code, and it's 25% off the first year of the software. And you can see the link here of how to access that coupon code. Alright. That is that. So we are talking about fantasy.

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Kristina Stanley: So I wanted to just kind of narrow down first what we're talking about. And you know, what is a fantasy novel versus horror versus sci-fi. And the reason this is important to discuss ahead of time is, everybody brings their own experience to reading a book and to writing a book. And so what I consider fantasy might be a little bit different from what you consider fantasy, or horror, or sci-fi.

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Kristina Stanley: And so this is. This is my view of it, and the lines here are are

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Kristina Stanley: kind of blurry, because I want to show that

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Kristina Stanley: there's there is.

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Kristina Stanley: There's no hard line between. What's a fantasy? What's a sci-fi? And what's a what's a horror? So if we look at fantasy, typically, there is a bit of magic, it happens in a world where there's magical things like dragons or vampires, or

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Kristina Stanley: you know, creatures that we don't have in our own world.

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Kristina Stanley: And usually the protagonist has some journey they're going on. Horror is just about surviving the night.

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Kristina Stanley: Sci-fi is. It's speculative fiction, because it's stuff that doesn't exist in our own world. But there's no magic in it. And so if we look at fourth wing.

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Kristina Stanley: it's a pretty. It's a fantasy. Straight up, lots of magic. We're going to cover that a little bit in more detail today.

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Kristina Stanley: And then the unbroken is closer to sci-fi because it has technology in it. But it also has magic, and twilight is a nice combination of fantasy. Tahore. So if we look at

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Kristina Stanley: twilight unbroken, and fourth wing, they all have something in common as well, and that's romance. Fourth wing super strong romance in there. So it's kind of hitting the romantic category there. Twilight also has a romance and then broken also has a romance. So this is just a very high, level view of what I'm gonna cover when I'm talking about outlining, editing, writing your fantasy novel.

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Kristina Stanley: Okay? So these are the books we're gonna talk about.

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Kristina Stanley: first one is the unbroken. And I wanted to talk about magic first. All of these books have magic, and they all use them differently. And so the unbroken by Clark super popular, commercially successful book last year is a military fantasy.

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Kristina Stanley: and it's got the magic in. It is magic about healing, so obviously healing another healing. A person.

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Kristina Stanley: Fourth wing is very strong on magic all the way through. It's got a magic system that starts very early in the story and moves through.

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Kristina Stanley: Well, K. Book one and book 2, because book 3 isn't published yet, but I'm assuming it will be the same. And here it's magic in connection with dragons.

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Kristina Stanley: Game of thrones has magic interspersed through it. So a couple of examples with Denaris she can survive fire. She's the mother of dragons. And so that's the dragon magic. There's the woman in red who can bring people back to life. That's a different type of magic. And

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Kristina Stanley: okay, I just see someone there, Sarah saying they can't see the full screen. So are you not seeing my chart that has unbroken fourth wing, and George Martin on there.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: I can see it.

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Kristina Stanley: Oh, other people are saying, I see it fine. Okay. Somebody else might have an issue with their screen. Okay, good. Alright. I just wanted to make sure. I don't like talking for too many charts when you know if I'm not showing the charts, that's always a tad embarrassing. Okay, so there will be spoiler alerts.

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Kristina Stanley: So if you haven't read these books, I'm I'm very, very sorry, but I'm going to spoil the endings, because I do want to talk about the story arc.

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Kristina Stanley: and what that means for a couple of these books?

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Kristina Stanley: Alright. So

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Kristina Stanley: where you're at. If you're thinking of doing a structural edit on your fantasy novel is you've written your fantasy novel. You've got a draft, and what do you do with it? So I'm going to give you a process for that.

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Kristina Stanley: So first story editing, it's a structural review and revision of your manuscript. So you're going through looking at the structure of your story before you do anything else, and the reason for that is, if you don't have a strong structure, there's no point in revising scene by scene, by scene, by scene until you know what your structure of your story is.

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Kristina Stanley: And so again, we're looking at the story Arc, which I'm going to talk about character's plot and settings.

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Kristina Stanley: And why, if there's no structure, there's no story. And if there's no story, there's no book, and I'm going to explain that statement. And I. And it's something that is true to my heart that when we look at commercially successful books

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Kristina Stanley: they have a structure doesn't mean the books aren't unique. They are very unique to the artists that wrote those books.

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Kristina Stanley: But they do have a structure.

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Kristina Stanley: Ok, so here, this is a snapshot from within the fictionary app, and we take you through a story editing journey from writing, a story, skeleton, blurb.

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Kristina Stanley: story structure, the chapter structure, and so on. All the way through to a story review. I'm only going to cover part of this today because it's already a quarter after, and we don't have enough time to go through the whole thing. But I'm going to give you enough that you can take away actions and start editing your story.

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Kristina Stanley: Okay? So the first thing in here is to write a skeleton blurb. So what is a skeleton? Blurb? A skeleton? Blurb is the shortest version of your story

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Kristina Stanley: that you can write in a sentence. So who is the protagonist? What's their story goal? And what's at stake?

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Kristina Stanley: And what that means is, basically, who is the story about

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Kristina Stanley: if they have

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Kristina Stanley: a goal for the whole story which they must. What is that goal? And what happens if they don't reach that goal? So something bad must happen. And so that's what's at stake. This is a tool just for you. Nobody else is meant to see it. It can be as rough as you want.

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Kristina Stanley: and why you do this is to keep you focused while you're you can use it for outlining. You can use it for writing, and you definitely need it when you're editing, because you can evaluate every scene against this, and know if it belongs in your story, and what I mean by that is, every scene should take the protagonist closer to or farther away from the story goal.

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Kristina Stanley: And if it doesn't, there's a question of whether it belongs in your story or not.

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Kristina Stanley: Okay. So let's start with the first thing in a skeleton. Blurb with these 3 books, and so when we look at the unbroken by Seal Clark. There are 2 main characters Terrain and Lucca.

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Kristina Stanley: When we look at the fourth wing it's violet violence. She's also called that in the book Violet and and Zaydan.

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Kristina Stanley: And then in the first booking Game of Thrones, there's a whole bunch of characters. So who is the protagonist? And I'm going to show you how to figure this out.

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Kristina Stanley: Am.

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Kristina Stanley: And again, I want to mention, all 3 of these books are very successful, and they're all very different. And they're they're following a similar structure with different point of view strategies.

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Kristina Stanley: So when we look at the point of view

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Kristina Stanley: for the unbroken, there are 2 points of view, every scene is either written from Terrain's point of view or from Lucas' point of view.

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Kristina Stanley: and when we look at Fourth Wing she's done something interesting in both the first and second book. Every scene is written from Violet's point of view, except for the final scene in the book which is written from Zaden's. And so it's almost like

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Kristina Stanley: she's added an epilogue, and she's done it without calling it epilogue. But that's just my speculation on what that is. But all the way through. It's Violet, and then one for

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Kristina Stanley: Satan in game of Thrones. There are 9 points of view in the first book.

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Kristina Stanley: Okay?

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Kristina Stanley: So what that means. Now we want to look at. We're still looking at what we want with

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Kristina Stanley: to find the protagonist. And and so if we look at the protagonist as an entity.

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Kristina Stanley: This is how you figure out what or who the protagonist is. So with a single protagonist.

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Kristina Stanley: when there's more than one character with point of view goals.

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Kristina Stanley: A single protagonist has their own goals, their own stakes, and their own journey. A combined protagonist would be 2 characters together, so they have the same goal, same stakes, same journey, and a group protagonist, which is game of thrones. They all have the same goal, but they have different stakes and a different journey.

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Kristina Stanley: Alright. So if we look at the fourth wing.

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Kristina Stanley: we can see so I wrote a I I wrote my version of what I think Violet's skeleton Blurb would be for her story, and so the protagonist must do something, otherwise something bad happens. So Violet must use her intelligence to beat the other cadets, otherwise she won't survive the year, so her life is at stake. This is her goal for book one

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Kristina Stanley: violet is the point of view for all scenes except one

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Kristina Stanley: and that makes her the protagonist. The reader is gonna read this and experience this story like she is the single protagonist, even though this story is really about her and Zaydan, when you're evaluating your scenes for editing, she's the protagonist, and I'm just gonna I'm gonna pop over to fictionary. So this is the fictionary app.

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Kristina Stanley: and what you're seeing here is one of the insights that draws automatically about a story. And here you can see out of all of the scenes in the story. Violet has 71. Scenes are written from her point of view, and if we scroll all the way across to the bottom. There's Zaydan. He's got the last 2 scenes. And so you can see that 97% of the scenes are written from her point of view, 3% from Zaydan. So she is clearly the protagonist of this story.

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Kristina Stanley: Okay?

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Kristina Stanley: Then I'm going to go back

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Kristina Stanley: here.

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Kristina Stanley: Okay, so we should be back on, sir. I just want to make sure. Can you just confirm. I went to the app, and I'm now back on the charts.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Yeah. You're back on the slides.

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Kristina Stanley: Okay, perfect.

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Kristina Stanley: Okay? So if we look at the unbroken, we'll do the same thing.

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Kristina Stanley: So here Terrain's goal, she must stop a rebellion, otherwise she will never gain her freedom.

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Kristina Stanley: Luca's goal is, she must prove her worth as a leader, otherwise she won't become a queen. So, if you remember

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Kristina Stanley: for this to be a combined protagonist. They need the same goal, and they don't have it here. So one of these characters is the protagonist of this story. And so the question is, how do you figure that out?

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Kristina Stanley: So here we look at now we're on the unbroken. And so, Sarah, come on. If I'm not showing the app

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Kristina Stanley: here. I'm showing the point of view characters, the scenes written from Terrain's point of view, and Lucas. And so you can see it's much closer. Terrain has 61% of the scenes, and Luca has 39, so terrain is the is the character the reader spends most time with. They're going to experience her as the protagonist. So when you are evaluating each scene.

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Kristina Stanley: you're looking at it from the point of view that terrain is the protagonist and not Luca.

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Kristina Stanley: And so we've got the 2 point of views and Train and Luke have different goals, and so terrain is the single protagonist in this

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Kristina Stanley: am

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Kristina Stanley: a group, a group. Entity is

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Kristina Stanley: good question. Game of thrones. Thank you for saying that whoever said that I just saw go by in the chat. So game of thrones.

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Kristina Stanley: the the skeleton blur for game of thrones is humans must defeat the white walkers, otherwise the humans cease to exist.

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Kristina Stanley: So this is one group against another group, many characters. There's 9 points of view in in total, all of those are humans. And so the humans are a group protagonist. They all through it. They all have their own journeys, they some scenes are good for some of them bad for others. You know. Ned's seen at the end of book. One is particularly bad for Ned.

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Kristina Stanley: but good for Joffrey.

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Kristina Stanley: so

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Kristina Stanley: it's more about the whole. Is it good or bad for the entity. And that scene in itself is bad for the humans as a whole, because Ned might have calmed things down and helped them fight the white walkers better than if he were dead and couldn't help them at all.

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Kristina Stanley: So the game of Thrones is a beautifully written book

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Kristina Stanley: on on control of point of view.

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Kristina Stanley: having a combined protagonist that shows really one group of people against another.

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Kristina Stanley: Okay, so once you've you've written your

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Kristina Stanley: your skeleton blurb, you have that now as your high level reference.

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Kristina Stanley: So now

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Kristina Stanley: What we recommend is that you name each scene in 3 to 5 words.

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Kristina Stanley: and you do this. So you know what the scene is about, and you also create an afterdraft outline. So if we go back into fictionary and I'm now in manuscript evolution that we use for for demonstrating things. And so we've written our story Blurb. So here I don't have them. But if you were in fictionary you'd choose your protagonist, and then you would add, in what's their story goal? And what are the story stakes?

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Kristina Stanley: Okay? And so then you always have that for reference. Then you look at your story structure. And here we're going to look at naming scenes.

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Kristina Stanley: And so what I'm doing here. This is fictionary using our AI functionality. And by hour I mean Google

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Kristina Stanley: and what we're doing is

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Kristina Stanley: it's naming all the scenes for me. If a scene is too short, AI has trouble with it. If it's over 5,000 words, it has trouble with it, and what we've chosen to do with AI is one we never use it to train AI. We use it only to evaluate. So we never change the text of your manuscript. That's up to you as the artist. What we're doing is using AI to help you analyze your story and figure out what's working and what's not working

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Kristina Stanley: and naming scenes is one of the most beneficial things you can do for editing a story, and it takes a long time, because really you have to read your manuscript

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Kristina Stanley: and go through and figure out what the scene is about. If you can't name a scene.

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Kristina Stanley: M, or if it won't name it, then M.

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Kristina Stanley: There's something wrong with the scene. Maybe it's not focus. Maybe there's no goal. Maybe it's not related to the story, and you need to figure out why.

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Kristina Stanley: And so with this, you can see on the left here. I'm going to just leave this up for a minute. You can see on the left. Here are all the scene names, and so now you have an afterdraft outline.

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Kristina Stanley: What we've done here is we've created a story outline where you can see

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Kristina Stanley: all of the scene names in relation to your 5 story arc scenes and where they sit in your story. So fictionaries also pulled out your inciting incident, your plot. Point one your middle plot. Point, plot point 2 and the climax. And so now you have a full afterdraft outline with the entire

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Kristina Stanley: story arc on top of it.

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Kristina Stanley: and then we can also have a quick peek at the story Arc. So fictionary has drawn the story arc for you. So you can see where everything sits for this manuscript in the story.

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Kristina Stanley: Okay, I'm just gonna go back here now. So with this named.

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Kristina Stanley: Then you wanna identify your story arc scenes. So pictionary will take pass data for you. You can change those you can. You know, as you edit and write, you can obviously write new scenes and make those be your

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Kristina Stanley: at story arc scenes.

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Kristina Stanley: So with the with the story arc.

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Kristina Stanley: these are 5 scenes. And and we've chosen these 5 scenes because they exist in all of the different story structures that you see of. You know the writer's journey, the hero's journey, save the cats, Km. Wylands one.

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Kristina Stanley: and we've taken the 5 that are in common in all of them. So you have a baseline to move from without being as too complicated.

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Kristina Stanley: and you do this to determine one. Do you have a story

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Kristina Stanley: and 2, you use it to evaluate the structure and the pacing of your story.

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Kristina Stanley: Okay? So

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Kristina Stanley: I'm just gonna talk about the story. Arc for a minute

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Kristina Stanley: in case there's anyone here who's not familiar with it. But the story arc has the 5 points. So there's an inciting incident.

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Kristina Stanley: and all this is is something that disrupts the ordinary world of

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Kristina Stanley: the protagonist. So in a fantasy, this would be something that typically is going to kick off a journey.

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Kristina Stanley: That's a normal thing. It can be something else. But that's typically what it is.

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Kristina Stanley: If there's no inciting incident, there is no story, because we're just in an ordinary world watching someone have an ordinary world. So there must be an inciting incident that shakes things up or there is no story.

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Kristina Stanley: and it can happen before the story starts, and anywhere up to about 15%. And these are flexible. They're meant to be ranges. They're not to be meant

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Kristina Stanley: to be followed. Exactly. Your story has to work for you.

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Kristina Stanley: Then we look at Plot Point one, and here we come back to the skeleton. Blurb with the protagonist must do something. So that something is, you know, Violet, in fourth wing. She's got a user intelligence to beat the other cadets. That's she. At some point in the story is going to figure out how to do that.

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Kristina Stanley: And without this, if if the protagonist doesn't accept the story goal, there is no story. So again, this scene has to be in in your story.

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Kristina Stanley: and it really means all other choices has been taken away from the protagonists. They can't go back. They have to go forward.

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Kristina Stanley: The middle plot point somewhere between 45 and 55% is

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Kristina Stanley: Well, one is connecting Act one the middle of sorry, the middle of Act 2 to the second half of act 2.

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Kristina Stanley: And it's something that's a life-changing event.

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Kristina Stanley: And here again, with the fantasy you can look at.

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Kristina Stanley: You know, the goal is really going to be threatened at this point. It's usually something typically bad.

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Kristina Stanley: Plot point 2 is very interesting, because it's got 2 things it needs to do. One. It brings the protagonist to the lowest point in the story, and 2, it gives them the final piece of information they need to get to the climax. So after this, there's no new revelations. This is it. This is all they're going to know, and then it's a race to the final. If there is no plot point 2, the reader won't worry

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Kristina Stanley: about the protagonists reaching it to the climax, and the protagonists won't have the information they need to get to the climax. And so again, without Plot point 2, there's no story.

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Kristina Stanley: And then one of the most important things are.

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Kristina Stanley: The climax. So this scene is relates right back to your skeleton blurb. The protagonist must do something otherwise something bad happens. This scene shows whether they did that something or they didn't, and it must do that, or the story's not over. And so, if every one of these scenes is in your story. You have a story. And this is the basic structure for your story.

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Kristina Stanley: So let's go through the fourth wing. So here are spoiler alerts. I'm gonna tell the story of the fourth fourth wing. It's fabulous. By the way, I recommend highly recommending reading this book for structure of a fantasy, and also how to intertwine a romance into a fantasy. If you're writing romance to see great example.

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Kristina Stanley: So in the case of fourth wing, the inciting incident happens before the story starts. So the big shake up in Violet's life is her mother, who is a general, has changed

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Kristina Stanley: Violet's life by saying she can no longer be a scribe, which is a person who studies.

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Kristina Stanley: She's going to be a dragon rider and go into the rider's quadrant, so she has 6 months before the book starts to get herself trained, figure out how to fight, get herself in shape.

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Kristina Stanley: And this is not her normal.

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Kristina Stanley: a normal world. So this shake-up has happened before the book starts.

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Kristina Stanley: Then we have 35% in. And this is very late. So this is to show you. And I love this example because it's showing you really how flexible the story arc is.

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Kristina Stanley: So it comes in at 35%.

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Kristina Stanley: And here Violet has to bond with the dragon.

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Kristina Stanley: and if she doesn't bond with the dragon, then

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Kristina Stanley: basically she dies. So the story is over. This is a must in the magic land of this book. It's part of the magic system rules. So she has to do this, and at 35% she she bonds with her her dragon tear

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Kristina Stanley: so she can't. She can't turn back. Once a

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Kristina Stanley: dragon rider has bonded with their dragon, they're bonded for life. That's it. There is no turning back. It's a very clear plot. Point one, no turning back.

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Kristina Stanley: Then we have the 50% in the middle plot point. So again, here, this can be a false victory or a false defeat.

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Kristina Stanley: or the protagonists can gain some really valuable piece of information that's going to change the direction of their story. So it's something in in a fantasy. Typically, this is something that puts their life at stake. It's difficult for them.

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Kristina Stanley: And in this case its violet channels power through her dragon tear.

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Kristina Stanley: and the risk of channeling is, if they can't control the volume of the channeling, it kills the rider, and so it's a very dangerous moment for her that she has to be in control.

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Kristina Stanley: And so here it's a beautiful plot point right at 50%. She gets her channeling, and again, if she can't channel, she can't be a dragon rider, and she dies, and the story's over. So there's a theme in this story, and and part of it. She needs to survive her first year at this school.

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Kristina Stanley: So now the direction has changed from Violet trying to bond with her dragon to now she's bonded. She can channel. Now she has to control that channeling and learn how to use her power. So her her magic is getting stronger

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Kristina Stanley: here. 2 things happen in

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Kristina Stanley: Plot point 2 one. She kills another character. Jack. This is the first time she's killed another person. She really is unhappy about it. It's a low, low point for her, and she struggles.

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Kristina Stanley: The other thing she discovers here, as she has her power, which she didn't know before this moment in the story is she can channel lightning, and that's a very powerful thing to do in this world of magic.

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Kristina Stanley: She can't control it at this point, but she can channel it. And she needs this piece of information. So when she gets to the climax, she's gonna need this lightning. So this, again, at 70% nicely placed, is giving her or giving the reader the experience of Violet as is really hurt by killing another person. So she's at her low, and she's got this new piece of information to get to the climax.

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Kristina Stanley: so she gains her power. Then we get to the climax. So it's the final battle. And and in a fantasy, this is where the protagonist, is going to control their magic.

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Kristina Stanley: So here, because this is a series. She can

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Kristina Stanley: partially control it. So you know, as she goes to the next book, she's gonna have to get better at this talent she now has in this book, but she controls it enough to win the battle, and if she doesn't win the battle.

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Kristina Stanley: the story's not over. That's her goal. She has to live through this. This is her goal, and the stories to live through this first year, which means she has to win this battle. So when you write your skeleton live. You already know the ending of your book.

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Kristina Stanley: because she must use her intelligence to beat the other cadets, otherwise she dies, and this is what gets her through the whole story.

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Kristina Stanley: gasped somebody. Just put because, you know, I'm giving away the whole ending of this fabulous book, but still warned me did. It's really good.

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Kristina Stanley: Okay? So now I'm just going to do the unbroken very quickly because of time constraints here.

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Kristina Stanley: So the unbroken is a military fantasy.

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Kristina Stanley: It's about a soldier terrain. She leaves her country where she's grown up in and goes back to her birth country

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Kristina Stanley: in her birth country there's also a princess. So the inciting incident in this story is, terrain gets off her boat, she lands in her homeland. Her goal is to be. She wants to, you know, really be part of her unit, and do all the right things and be respected and become an officer. And right out of the gate. There's an assassination attempt on the Princess Luca.

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Kristina Stanley: and terrain saves her life. So that's the shake up, because now she's not just visible to her own unit. Her life has changed because the powers that be have now focused on her.

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Kristina Stanley: Then, 23% in

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Kristina Stanley: terrain accepts an offer from Luca, and the Princess has decided.

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Kristina Stanley: basically between the inciting incident and plot point one. There's a lot of action in this story.

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Kristina Stanley: Luca is put in prison.

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Kristina Stanley: and

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Kristina Stanley: sorry terrain is put in prison, and Lucas saves her

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Kristina Stanley: and brings her out of prison if she'll work with her and terrain accepts that offer and has to leave her unit and moves in with the Princess.

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Kristina Stanley: Then in the middle. Here's where Terrain reveals a bit of magic. So in just before Plot Point one there was a bit of magic shown.

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Kristina Stanley: and then in the Middle Plot point she shares that knowledge with Luca. Now Luca

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Kristina Stanley: has different motives for this story than terrain has, and uses it in a bad way, which is really bad for train. And now now train is on a different adventure

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Kristina Stanley: in Plot Point 2. So many things happen here.

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Kristina Stanley: but the gist of it is. There's a rebellion in this book. The priestess of this rebellion. Her wife is taken. Train feels like. It's her fault because she gave away the knowledge to Luka about this magic. It's all linked together. And so that's her her lowest point.

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Kristina Stanley: She also figures out

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Kristina Stanley: partly where the magic is coming from, and then, in the climax scene train attacks a compound. She wins, but it means Luca has to leave the island. So there goes. The romance train is staying.

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Kristina Stanley: And so that leads us, of course, into Book 2 of the story.

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Kristina Stanley: Okay. So once you have your story. Arc there, I just wanna check. I didn't miss anything here. Yep, we're good. Okay. So once you have the story arc done.

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Kristina Stanley: then you wanna move to structural editing of scenes, because scenes have a structure just like the the whole story has a structure. It's not exactly what this this is, but it's pretty close. And so I'm gonna show you how to look at

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Kristina Stanley: a structure of a scene and evaluate the structure of a scene. Oops. Let me go back over here. I've lost my cursor. There we go. Okay. So when you edit a scene.

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Kristina Stanley: it's an in-depth evaluation and revision to ensure every scene moves the story forward

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Kristina Stanley: and the right story. So we get back to the skeleton blurb again of Who's the protagonist? What's their goal? And what's at stake. So every single scene should move that protagonist closer to or farther away from their story goal. And it should be a mix of these, and it doesn't matter if the protagonist is in the scene or not in the scene, the scene still has to make this happen. So if we look at the unbroken where Luca is in a scene.

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Kristina Stanley: and she's scheming about getting control of the magic. Well, this is bad, Forine. Train doesn't know it. She's unaware of it. But that scene takes Luca farther away from her story goal.

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Kristina Stanley: And so, even though she's not in it, sorry, it takes terrain farther away from her story goal, even though she's not in it. It's still closer to or farther away from that story goal. And that's when it means when someone says you need to move the story forward. It's always moving it to

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Kristina Stanley: achieving or not achieving that story goal.

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Kristina Stanley: And really, a great story is a collection of great scenes in the right order at the right time. And this is why we look at the story arc first, and then we're going to look at the scene level. And then we're going to go back to the story level.

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Kristina Stanley: Alright.

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Kristina Stanley: So let's look at the different story elements within the app. We've got character elements, and I'm only going to show a few. We have 38 story elements within fictionary and

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Kristina Stanley: so I can't go through them all. But I'm going to give you just some highlights of one. And we talked out. Point of view. Point of view. Goal is like a story goal. So every scene, the point of view. Character is going to have a goal for that scene, and there must be consequences if that goal fails. Otherwise the scene is gonna lack tension.

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Kristina Stanley: Every scene has to have a purpose.

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Kristina Stanley: It can be one of the story arc scenes, so its purpose is to be the inciting incident it can be to have a revelation. Add back story, move the story in a different direction. All kinds of things, and there must be tension and conflict on the plot side, and then for setting location, time, and object are very important.

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Kristina Stanley: and location and objects, particularly for fantasy, are super duper, important, that fantasy readers love to read about the world. And so location becomes extremely important

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Kristina Stanley: and objects, typically because of the magic systems will have value in a fantasy novel.

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Kristina Stanley: So if we go back to evolution.

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Kristina Stanley: I'm gonna go to not this one. I wanna go to a different bookshelf. I wanna go to this one. I think.

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Kristina Stanley: Let's go to story structure.

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Kristina Stanley: So if we go back, we've done, we've named our scenes.

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Kristina Stanley: Do we do it here? Yeah, we've named our scenes.

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Kristina Stanley: And now

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Kristina Stanley: if we look here, here are the 38 story elements.

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Kristina Stanley: and then here are the plot elements.

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Kristina Stanley: Here are the setting elements. Here you can add notes. But over here we have just as fictionaries. So we already named our scenes.

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Kristina Stanley: and here we're going to look at tension and conflict. And this is where

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Kristina Stanley: we're using AI. So as a writer, you have a choice. You can do this magically sorry, magically. Yes, magically. You could excuse me, you can do this automatically.

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Kristina Stanley: using AI, or you can do it manually yourself. So if you're not comfortable with AI, you don't have to use it. If you use AI, what we're doing

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Kristina Stanley: is we're analyzing the scene in a very specific way to show if there's tension and conflict in it, we're not touching the scene. So this over here is where you would edit. So let's just pretend I'm editing. You can see I'm typing nonsense there, but this is where you would edit. Revise your scene.

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Kristina Stanley: Over here we see jazz. Cooper is the protagonist for this scene, and if we click, evaluate.

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Kristina Stanley: then AI is now having a look at what this scene is doing.

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Kristina Stanley: so we've got

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Kristina Stanley: The goal of this scene is for her to escape the overwhelming crowd of her husband's funeral. She doesn't want to be there. She wants out of the funeral.

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Kristina Stanley: and then what Jen AI does it is gives you what happens if the goal fails, it gives you. Is there tension in the scene, and is it related to the scene, and is there conflict? And so, if these come back as new. You can go over here and just add notes to your scene of of you're making a revision plan, and you could say, you know, needs tension and why you think it needs tension.

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Kristina Stanley: You can visualize tension and conflict on the story map.

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Kristina Stanley: And here you can see this is, and I'm going to show you a full story map in a minute. But here we've looked at one scene, and you can see the scene together on what if the goal fails? Is there tension and conflict? And the reason this works? So if you were to do this manually.

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Kristina Stanley: you can figure out well, what's the point of your goal?

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Kristina Stanley: You can then look at what if that goal fails? So it's just like the skeleton blurb. What if the goal fails?

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Kristina Stanley: And if there's a consequence for it failing, and if that is related to the overall story back to your skeleton, Blurb, then there's tension.

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Kristina Stanley: If there's conflict, but is not related to the scene. It's irrelevant conflict. It's conflict for the sake of conflict. It's not driving the story forward, and so you always want to come back to what happens if it fails? And is it related to the point of view goal? In which case it's good tension and good conflict?

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Kristina Stanley: And here, with the story map, you can. You can look at scene, structure, timeline, story, goal and pacing, or you can look at the whole thing together. Everything in it.

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Kristina Stanley: So if we go back now, so let's say you've gone through, and you've edited all your scenes, and you've revised them. And now you have a new manuscript there.

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Kristina Stanley: What you wanna do is test it, and all you're doing at this point is confirming the placement and timing of your story arc scenes. And you're doing this because you wanna make sure your story works. So when you revise your story, you write scenes new scenes. You cut scenes. You join scenes together, you take parts of scenes out. And so there's lots of changes. And so your whole structure can change. And you wanna make sure it still works.

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Kristina Stanley: So here we are. This is a fully filled out manuscript for the same manuscript evolution.

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Kristina Stanley: And here, so if we go, we're going to go to the visualized page, and I want to show you the story arc first. So here we have a plot point one, and this is where the protagonist jazz Cooper of the story is accepting. The story. Goal is way out here.

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Kristina Stanley: And so with this, it's too far off. And you can see here, when a line goes too straight up and down, it means the story's lacking depth, so I don't have enough of a story in between here and here

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Kristina Stanley: and here it means that the story's going to drag. There's too much time between the inciting incident and plot point one. And so there's lots of work I can. I can do on structure

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Kristina Stanley: to fix this. This is typically how you would start your story edit. And then, when you do all your editing. You come back and you see it in a much better place.

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Kristina Stanley: and I want to show you the story map fully filled out. So here

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Kristina Stanley: we're going to go back. I'm just going to show you tension and conflict, and you can see now I have a full revision plan here.

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Kristina Stanley: and so here you can see the tension and conflict are weak, and it's weak because it's unclear. What the point of view goal is for that scene. And if it's unclear. What the goal is. You can't have tension or conflict because there's no stakes. If you don't know what the goal is, you don't know what happens if it fails. So this is just a poorly written scene, and it needs some revision or possibly cutting. And then, you know, I put some check marks of. I'm really happy with the tension and conflict in these scenes, and so I have a full out tension and conflict.

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Kristina Stanley: A summary of my story.

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Kristina Stanley: Here we can look at scene structure.

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Kristina Stanley: So to look at the structure of a scene just like you would for story. I always like the scene name, because it tells me what the story is about.

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Kristina Stanley: Then is there an entry hook in the scene? And in this case we started a funeral. But we don't know Hughes, whose funeral her goal is to get through the funeral, the middle. There's a turning point, because there's an unknown man there.

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Kristina Stanley: and so we have a middle point like, why is he doing there? Why does it disturb Jazz so much that he's there? The scene climax. She takes off from her husband's funeral, and then the exit hook is, why does she? Why does she leave? And so, when you look at every scene in the context of an entry hook, a goal, a middle, a climax, and an exit hook. You've got a strong structure. And again, here you can see your whole book, and here.

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Kristina Stanley: There's a weak asset hook, so that needs to be fixed for this scene to really do what you need.

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Kristina Stanley: You can also look at timelines and settings, and I'll tell you for me. When I first edited a book I had 0 smells all the way through. I didn't use a single smell, and that tells me I don't write smell. So I had to go and fix that

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Kristina Stanley: story goal and pacing, also interesting. So here you can track whether you're getting closer to or farther away from the story goal. What's the purpose of a scene? And whether it's an action or a sequel? And this helps you with the pacing of your story. So I'll just show you one more quick thing here if we go to

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Kristina Stanley: character insights and we look at

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Kristina Stanley: story goal tracking. This is showing scenes that are bringing the protagonists closer to the story goal farther away. And this is showing neither. So these are bad scenes. I can see it's scene 17. I can read the scene. I know this scenes need revision, and so now.

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Kristina Stanley: I know for each scene whether it has value in my story. Okay, we're running our time. So I will speedy up here a bit. Okay. So when you do this, you can take it slow you start, you go bit by bit. You figure out what you need as an artist to work on, and you follow this journey through from a very high level to the next level down.

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Kristina Stanley: And you get to the end and do your story review

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Kristina Stanley: alright. So I'm gonna go to Q&A in just a second. I just wanted to share with you. So in our community circle.so. We have a free event next week on May first, and we're gonna talk about in detail what a magic system story Arc is, and the 5 scenes that you need, or a story needs. Not you personally, but a a fantasy novel needs for a magic system. In a story.

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Kristina Stanley: We also have dictionary live. And so these are guided editing courses. They're live. They happen on a rotating basis. Some are 6 weeks long, some are an hour, and the next 2 that are coming up for a fantasy author that might be of interest to you is one is 6 weeks to edit a romance novel, and the reason I say this is because so many fantasy. Novels have a romance aspect to it, and this will show you how to

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Kristina Stanley: get the key scenes of a romance into a story, and the other one coming up is 6 weeks to structure your entire book series, and because fantasy are so often written as a trilogy or more books in a series, this will set you up to do that really well.

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Kristina Stanley: and it's included as part of our software for a storyteller premium subscription. Of course we have a special on for you. So it's 25% off to 39 a month to do that. And these courses come with it. You can attend these courses as many times as you like, and it's live. So you actually work. We don't record them. So you work, live on your book as we go through

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Kristina Stanley: so just recap fictionary. We've got a 25% offer off on all of our our software and our softwares for our outlining, writing and editing from a structural level. You can use pro writing aid in it to do your copy editing there. We've got our live guided editing courses, and we have our community

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Kristina Stanley: of writers and editing experts who they answer lots of questions live

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Kristina Stanley: alrighty. I'm gonna pretend to. So I'm gonna stop sharing. And Sarah. Maybe you can come on and we'll go to Q. And A.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Yeah, absolutely.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Thank you for that. It was such a good session. I've learned loads about all these books that I need to read and try and forget all the spoilers.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: but if you've got a memory like mine, then you're probably fine.

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Kristina Stanley: That's good, and you know what sometimes I find, even though you need read the ending like I've read the fourth wing. I don't know 8 times now by analyzing it, and I love it every time, even though I know the story. And I really know the story. I still love it.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: I mean, I recently went on a binge of a film called Mr. Right, and I watched like 6 times in one week. So.

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Kristina Stanley: Are you like? Alright!

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: I do that with books, too. So there you go. Yeah, awesome. Alright. Well, I've shared all of the links in the chat so everyone can go and join the community and obviously take advantage of the promo code that you are sharing. And we have so many. We have like 30 questions. So I don't think we're gonna yeah.

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Kristina Stanley: Speak fast, even.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: 10 min, but we will do what we can. So just as a caveat. Yeah, just sorry if we don't get to. Don't get to all of the questions. We will give it a try, or you can always join the fictionary community and ask Christina in there, I'm sure.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Awesome. Okay, let's get started. So at the very beginning we had a question from Diana. Asking what the difference between fancy and magical realism. I think you are touching on the different kind of types of genres at the beginning. So if you've got any points on the difference between fancy and.

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Kristina Stanley: So that's an interesting question, because you can have

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Kristina Stanley: like

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Kristina Stanley: So a book like twilight, it happens in our world as as close to our world as you can be, except there's, you know.

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Kristina Stanley: vampires which we clearly don't have. So there's the fantasy aspect. But most of the world is really normal.

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Kristina Stanley: And by normally, I mean the world we live in today that you can experience

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Kristina Stanley: when you get into things

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Kristina Stanley: like dragons and and fairies and all of the rest in in a serious way. It's no longer realism, because everything in the world is really different from what we experience today in our world.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Nice one. I love that I love what? I think it's Michan said. Also we think you never know there could be vampires.

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Kristina Stanley: And there could be, and we just don't know it. But I'm gonna pretend that there's not because I'll sleep better so in my world.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Yes, no.

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Kristina Stanley: Players.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Fair enough. Okay, thank you. We've got a few questions about the fictionary app. So we'll go over those. So you mentioned about the AI. This was around about the time that you were dragging out the scene names. So this question from Mari says, does that AI only recognize English, or would it work in other languages as well? That's a good question.

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Kristina Stanley: It's it's actually pretty good, which is really surprising. That's a great question. It's it's pretty good as long as it's Roman character sets like, it's not gonna work in Tiny. For example, I can't read that. But as long as it can, it's it's Roman character sets pulls it out. It's amazing stuff. Actually.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Okay, donkey and then another question from Janice, I think, is, does fictionary also help with the 3 act structure.

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Kristina Stanley: Yeah. So that's the the story. Arc fits right into 3 acts structures. So act one goes from page one to plot point one act 2 goes from Plot point one to plot point 2. So you go past the middle point. That's 50% of your book. Boom is act 2, and then act 3 is from Plot point 2 to the final page of your story.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Perfect. I think we've got a few questions about the 3 X structure. Someone said. Does it have different settings? I think Michael says, does it have different settings for the hero's journey, for example? So obviously, you've mentioned it about the 3 X structure. But would we be able to use it for the hero's journey.

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Kristina Stanley: You can. And so we're just about to actually come in with a fantasy outline where we're working on it now. So it automatically put scenes in for you. But what you can do right now is you use the purpose of a scene. You can do that with that you can do it with save the cat.

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Kristina Stanley: So as you're doing your scenes, you just put those right in the purpose, and you can see it. Really, we have an insight that shows you all of the purpose of the scenes, the percentage of scenes that hit. So if you want, say, I don't know 10% of your novel is set up, you can label them, set up.

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Kristina Stanley: and then you can see it.

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Kristina Stanley: so that you can. You can pick your points, you know. With the hero's journey you could show where the mentors coming in. That can be a purpose of a scene. You can see how you're using that within your fantasy novel.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Perfect. Okay, and then I think it's Lisa. I always forget how to pronounce your name. I think I gotta worry about her, but I'm sure she'll pop up in the comments, saying in a minute. So, thank you. Does the AI point to specific moments that it assumes are the inciting incident, plot, point one, etcetera. Or do you have to manually label all of these.

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Kristina Stanley: So there, I'm very proud of that piece of software because the story Arc is actually not AI. I have, I mean, as Sarah mentioned, I have a degree in math and so we developed a formula to actually pull out the story arc scene. So that's our proprietary software. It's got nothing to do with AI. We analyze the story and we pulled them out.

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Kristina Stanley: It sets them for you. If it gets it wrong.

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Kristina Stanley: There's probably a structural reason why.

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Kristina Stanley: and so the novel is imbalanced on the word count on the, on how many scenes per chapter, on how long the scenes are on, where they are. And so then you go and look and think. Okay. So Dictionary thought my inciting incident was seen 3. But it's actually seen 10. So you gotta figure out what's structurally off about the story. But then you just go and relabel it, and you put you put Scene 10 as the inciting incident, and then you look and see your story arc just redraws. So every time you make a change to your story it redraws.

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Kristina Stanley: and you can see then with it at the new spot.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: I'm just loving. I think it's Jean or Jan. That's brilliant.

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Kristina Stanley: My life, so please don't blow it up. It's really important to me.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: That's awesome. Okay, so do you include sorry. This is from Nikki. Do you include or allow your antagonist redemption arc to affect your skeletal blurb if they become a protagonist. By the end of the story.

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Kristina Stanley: Nikki. That is a really difficult question.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Yeah.

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Kristina Stanley: Writing something very complex.

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Kristina Stanley: So what I would do there is

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Kristina Stanley: you know, as the author that's going to happen. So you write your skeleton blur if that works for you, that you're going to keep track of it.

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Kristina Stanley: So the the reader's probably not going to know that until the end, and they don't have to. And that's why the skeleton blurber is for you only, and and and you adapt it to the style of book that that you're writing.

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Kristina Stanley: which sounds like you're quite an advanced writer.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Yeah.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: absolutely. Okay, we have a few that ask questions about whether or not the fiction fictionary story Arc will adapt to a book that's part of a series. So I got one from Lindsey, one from Joseph. They're all talking about how I mean, Joseph says in their current work. The first major failure is the end of Book one. So how would it deal with a series.

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Kristina Stanley: Right? Okay. So there, we're about to deploy a series outline toward the end of this week should be out by Friday.

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Kristina Stanley: And then what we're doing. We're teaching 6 weeks to structure

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Kristina Stanley: your series and have a great foundation from it. And during that course we're going to work with our subscribers on what they want for actually breaking out the story arc and breaking it into how many books are in their series, etc. And so we're at early days with the series. So we have an initial part coming out later this week.

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Kristina Stanley: And then what we find because our community is so generous with feedback.

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Kristina Stanley: We can really work with our writers to figure out exactly what they need. And then we build that and put that out.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: I love that. That's awesome. I keep. Every time we answer a question, I swear like 5 more. Come in. Okay, let's ask some questions. Let's ask this one from Lucy, so they've got a question about the inciting instant. Can it happen in a prologue? Because I think one of them, you said happened at like 0%. Something like that.

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Kristina Stanley: That one the fourth wing, the inciting incident, is before the book. The other great example of it is the Jason Bourne series. He's shot before the book starts, and it opens with him unconscious.

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Kristina Stanley: So it can happen anywhere before 10%. So writing it in a prologue is quite interesting. And so my question would be, why is it a prologue?

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Kristina Stanley: Could it just be chapter one?

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Kristina Stanley: And sometimes people get really.

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Kristina Stanley: I don't want to read a prologue, and they skip it. And so there's some very interesting things you can do

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Kristina Stanley: by just naming it different. So you don't name it, chapter, or you don't name it a prologue. You name it

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Kristina Stanley: before time began, or something. You know there's a reason. It's a prologue, and so you have to be very careful to fit it in can definitely be the inciting incident. You just want to be careful that

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Kristina Stanley: it falls in in the right context of what you're trying to do with the overall story.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Perfect awesome. I've got a question from Lauren who said, do fantasy names and naming conventions confuse the program when processing a scene. There's a very good question of a fantasy room.

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Kristina Stanley: But fantasy.

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Kristina Stanley: It will a little bit. And so what this software does is it? It pulls out names based on context. So even a name like April.

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Kristina Stanley: is also a month, and so it has to look at that and go well. Is that a person, or is it a month? And and fantasy is the same. Right? So you'll have a really

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Kristina Stanley: 28 character with lots of X, y's, and Z's in a name. And that person said, Okay, so it can pull it. Well, somebody said something, so it has ways of looking at it and figuring out what it is

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Kristina Stanley: won't get at all.

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Kristina Stanley: because it can't find it in the context. And then there's a way. Of course, you can manually add it into the software and just put it in there and then it's there.

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Kristina Stanley: Yeah, perfect.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Awesome. Got a couple more software questions. So one from Colleen, are you copying and pasting directly into the program? Or does it integrate with your writing program. I also saw in the chat someone asking whether or not they can export the document to scrivener. So it's.

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Kristina Stanley: Kidding.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Integrations, yep.

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Kristina Stanley: Yeah. So, Scribner, you can export from Scribner to a Dock X file, and then you import whatever you write in, you can import directly into fictionary. If it's a Doc X. File, it just comes in and and fictionary, then analyzes it, draws your story. Arc pulls the characters out, links them to scenes, does all its all of its magical things. It does, and then, you work away, and then you export. It goes back out to a dock X file, so you can use that and import it into whatever it is you want to do. After you've you've finished your

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Kristina Stanley: your story structure.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Perfect awesome. So I will say that one's done. I had another one that seemed like to pop up quite a lot. There we go? So Lauren, and Naveen asked very similar questions of it's like, Lauren asked. Is this program best used after having a draft, or can it be useful in early stages, too? And then, Naveen was asking if fictionary works on short stories or only for novels? So it's more about like, you know the kind.

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Kristina Stanley: Sir.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Content that you could use for.

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Kristina Stanley: Yeah.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Pictionary on yep.

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Kristina Stanley: So fictionary works right from outlining. And so what we do with the outlining is we. We provide an actual a universal outline. We have an outlines for a romance novel series is coming later this week. Then fantasy will add, so that you have a starting point. It's a little bit different from, you know, plotter versus panster. We're giving guidelines of. This is what you need in a fantasy novel, and you can go away and create whatever you want. So we start right there, and you can write in

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Kristina Stanley: and then, once you've finished writing, then you can do your structural edit. Every every artist works in a different way. Some people write a scene, edit the scene. Some people write the story, then do the whole. You know you have to do what makes you happy and what you enjoy as you're going through this whole writing journey. But basically, we started outlining writing

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Kristina Stanley: and then structural editing. And then, when you're ready, you just turn on your extension from pro writing aid and you do your coffee editing. It's right there. Boom, thank you for writing aid.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Yeah, we work very, very well together. It's great. Awesome. So it is literally a minute past the hour. So I think we could probably wrap it up there.

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Kristina Stanley: I just before you do that, sir. I just wanna say so Lucy Cook, who's a certified story coach editor and I are coming back on Friday on the premium day, and we're doing a full out. The whole session is QA. So if your questions didn't get answered here. And you wanna ask about structural editing of fantasy novels come to that session on Friday, and I will answer to your heart's content.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: So, yeah, that's really helpful that you mentioned that because we have, like 19 questions still left.

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Kristina Stanley: I know there's a big, long list there.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: And get their questions answered. But yeah, you can always come along to the session on Friday, if you are a premium or premium pro user. So if you're considering upgrading, and you know, you want to ask Christina, our question is definitely worth it. But there you go. So this has been a great session. Thank you so much, Christina, for joining us and generously spending time with us and sharing all of your wisdom about

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: structuring your fantasy novels, everybody saying Thank you. In the chat.

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Kristina Stanley: So nice.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Had had a lot of input on that. I did just see a question asking if there is a lifetime membership option for prairie. There is.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: I mean, if that was a question for fictionary, then you are welcome to answer that.

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Kristina Stanley: Yeah, no, no, we've got an annual and a monthly.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Perfect. There you go. So we both answered that one for you. So yeah, thank you for joining us. I'm quickly going to drop the links in the chat. I've dropped them a few times, but just in case you need them.

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Kristina Stanley: Ok.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: And we, as we've mentioned before, the replays, are all on the hub. So I've just dropped the links in the chat for you to go and grab them. We've also got our live event chat in the community. If you want to go and get to know each other and chat about more stuff about fictionary, or you could join the fictionary community and chat about it on there as well.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: So I hope you all enjoyed this one and then we've got another session in just under an hour's time, which I will be hosting, which will be crafting a create, crafting a fantasy character. Oh, my gosh! How am I gonna get through an hour of talking? But we'll see. We'll see. Awesome. Alright. Well, I will catch you guys later. We hope

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: you enjoy the rest of fancy writers week, 2,024, and thank you again, Christina, for joining us.

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Kristina Stanley: Thank you, Sarah, and thank you everybody for your fantastic questions. That's always fun.

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Kristina Stanley: Yeah.

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Sarah @ ProWritingAid: Absolutely. Thank you. Bye.

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Kristina Stanley: Bye.