In the summer of 2015 in a run-down part of Berlin, three guys made their way to a notary.
They were in the process of founding the company Beemgee GmbH. There was no product yet, but they did share a conviction and a vision: to help writers and storytellers everywhere conceive, develop and outline their stories.
Today we are proud to celebrate five years of Beemgee with a whole host of new features. Premium users can now access a dozen new attributes in the PLOT and PITCH sections of the Beemgee story development tool.
> > NEW PLOT FEATURES
How ever you work, whichever is your favoured process, you can do it in Beemgee.
The additional plot attributes live now are:
- Dramaturgy
- Hero’s Journey (new)
- Hero’s Journey (classic)
- Plot Beats
- Story Anatomy
- Audience’ Journey
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Want to see what a completed Beemgee project looks like?
Click one of the links below.
When the project opens, feel free to drag and drop or edit whatever you want – any changes you make will not be saved. It’s the perfect way to explore Beemgee functionality. Try the FILTER function, for instance, or the NARRATIVE-CHRONOLOGY switch. Go to the CHARACTER tool, mark your favourite character and hit DEVELOP in the tool bar. Or read the STEP OUTLINE.
If you don’t have an account yet, you’ll still see all the PREMIUM features, such as STORY QUESTIONS in the STEP OUTLINE section or the detail views of PLOT events or CHARACTER sheets.
THE GODFATHER
SEA BATTLES (Look closely, you might recognise this story!)
Have a look at a list of CLASSICAL CHINESE LITERATURE. Click the NARRATIVE-CHRONOLOGY switch to see the order of appearance and the order of when the stories are set.
Or disentangle the complex chronology of THE STAR WARS SAGA. Click the NARRATIVE-CHRONOLOGY switch to see the difference between the year of production and what happened when in the story.
Finally, read THE BEEMGEE STORY as a Beemgee project. Try opening the DESCRIPTIONs per event at the bottom of the sidebar, or read it as copy text in the STEP OUTLINE section.
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The step outline is the scene by scene (step by step) account of what happens in the story.
Like a textual storyboard, the step outline presents the narrative in its entirety – without actually being the narrative. It is a complete report of the story – in the present tense! – that describes every plot event.
Cause and Effect
The step outline therefore makes one of the most important principles of storytelling very clear, cause and effect.
Apart from the kick-off event and the closing event, every plot event fulfils two functions, at least to an extent:
- It is a precondition of events that follow it in the narrative
- It is an inevitable consequence of events that have preceded it in the narrative
The step outline should make it easier to understand how the individual events relate to each other in this chain of cause and effect. The step outline may thus be read as the author’s construction plan of the narrative.(more…)
It’s the way you tell it.
Narrative is the choice of which events to relate and in what order to relate them – so it is a representation or specific manifestation of the story, rather than the story itself. The easy way to remember the difference between story and narrative is to reshuffle the order of events. A new event order means you have a new narrative of the same story.
Narrative turns story into information, or better, into knowledge for the recipient (the audience or reader). Each story event is a unit of knowledge the audience requires.
A narrative is paradox, because it seeks to convey truth by hiding it. A storyteller arranges the items of knowledge in such a way that they are revealed gradually, which implies initially obscuring the truth behind what is told. Such deliberate authorial obfuscation creates a sense of mystery or tension, and creates a desire in the audience to find out what is happening in the story and why. In this sense, a narrative is effectively the opposite of an account or a report.
A report presents information in order to be understood by the audience immediately, as it is being related. A neutral, matter of fact presentation probably maintains a chronology of events. It explains a state of affairs blow by blow, and aims for maximum clarity at every stage. It seeks to convey truth by simply telling it. While the point of a narrative is also that the recipient perceives the truth of the story, in a narrative this truth is conveyed indirectly. Narrative is therefore responsible for how the recipient perceives the story.
In this article we’ll look at
- Story Basics
- The Components of Story
- Text Types That Describe A Story
- Author Choices: Genre and Point of View
- Causality in Narrative
Story Basics
First, let’s state some basics as we understand them here at Beemgee: a story consists of events that are related by a narrator; events consist of actions carried out by characters; characters are motivated, they have reasons for the things they do; there is conflict involved; one and the same story may be told in different ways, that is, have varying narratives.
Note that we are talking here about narrative in the dramaturgical sense – not in the social sense. Like the term “storytelling”, the word “narrative” has become a bit of a buzzword. We are not referring here to open “social narratives” such as “the American narrative”. For the definition and exploration of such collective narratives, see our article in The Bigger ‘Narratives’ of Society. Here, we are pinpointing the use of the term primarily for storytellers creating novels, films, plays, and the like. Such works tend in their archetypal form to be closed narratives with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
A narrative may present the events of the story in linear, that is to say chronological order or not. But the story remains the story – even if it is told backwards.(more…)
