Details of ‘A Shining Star’

Indepth description of how Parametric Writing is applied to and assists and aids even this short Story to be consistent and maintainable.

I wrote a simple and straightforward Story wanting to show Parametric Writing in a simple way. Normally the system only applies to long-format Stories like books and novels. So, it seemed silly to me to write a short Story using Parametric Writing.

However, I saw two direct benefits to doing it this way:

  1. I made a slight consistency error by conflating which character was squatting next to Pat; the mistake lead to placing the actors in the wrong positions, generally confudling the piece until I took the time to create a Rule and verify it throughout the last third of the Story
  2. By providing comments and metadata to the Story Text, I think I have described the reason I wrote the Story as it is- justified the Story

A Shining Star came right after I read a friend’s self published book “The Sweetie and the Sanctuary” so I was coming from a framework of acknowledging the fault sof a mentally subnormal person and working that into a progresssive Story with a moral to impress upon the others a basic lesson of will and strength. Yet I decided to remove all of this from the work because it can be off-putting to acknowledge that not everyone is born with identical skills (high IQs) and some take these notions as something like a weak form of racism, some kind of ethnic offense.

In any event the idea that Pat was born with Downs Syndrome entered and left the sphere of Parametric Writing rules surrounding the Sentences of the Story and I consider the whole thing safer, more Politically Correct (PC) and much weaker for the effort.

The Story is basically split into a ‘behind the scenes discussion’ comparable to this WordPress Post and the publishable work. The work has Briefs that simply define it, with very few parent-child relationships, in a simple and flat hierarchy.

A Shining Star – a ten minute Story

I used Parametric Writing to create a short Story that is easy to understand as an example. The Story revolves around Pat, a young child trying to do good, but because of his innocent ignorance he wastes a pressious asset on a trifle.

The story is free online and available in audio (MP3- I read it aloud) on my personal website under ‘A Shining Star’. I’ve given it to a few friends to review and probably threw 3 hours at the short 3-page story, maybe 1 hour at reading it and editing the recording.

To see the behind-the-scenes author’s work on the Story, including the Briefs, Rules and Sentences, use the Parametric Writing Editor to view ‘A Shining Star’, a publically visible Story. You can save a copy to play with the storyline yourself if you make a free email verified account.

Learn how Parametric Writing is used in this short Story (without using the Story Editor) and get extra author notes.