QEDWhat a story is made of
Characters, places, objects, promises, and events: the five nouns every story is built from, and the page each one becomes.
What a story is made of
Tip
You do not need a vocabulary lesson. You have used all of these since the first story you ever told.
The reason they are worth naming is that each one becomes a page you can open, and a thing the engine can count.
| Noun | In practice | Page |
|---|---|---|
| Characters | The people. What they want, what they hide | Character |
| Places | Where it happens. Scenery that gathers meaning | Location |
| Objects | Not the fork on the table. The ring, the letter | Item |
| Promises | Open questions the reader is holding | Threads |
| Facts | The rules of your world, and when they were revealed | Lore |
Screenwriters call the objects props when they are furniture and plants when they will matter later. The gun on the wall in act one is a plant. NVS does not care what you call it; it cares that the gun was introduced in scene four and fired in scene forty.
You do not file these, you write them
Here is the part that keeps it from feeling like admin: you never sort your story into these boxes.
You write a scene. The engine reads it and notices that a character appeared, a place was established, a promise opened. You can see what it understood in the Inspector beside the scene.
Naming is not a chore you perform. It is a way of seeing that the app does for you, so that later, when you ask who is in this part or what have I promised, there is an answer.
Next
Once you can see the things, you can see what runs between them, which is where the story actually is. That is how things connect.