Although I had published my science extensively, I realised I needed formal training, a fool-proof recipe, to cook up a good story.

As I started taking courses on creative writing, a constant advice I received from writers and tutors was  ‘get emotional, don’t stick to facts. Fly off the handle , suspend disbelief.’  And they made it perfectly clear. ‘Your past as a scientist is not really helpful for your current aspiration.’

For a former scientist, these words were hard to swallow. 

Yet, I accepted that I was a novice writer, and my past did not count in my new avatar.
Five years and one completed novel later, I have arrived at my ‘Eureka’ moment. My past as a computer scientist is a great help and certainly not a hindrance. 

Let me explain.

Creativity is not without form and structure as ‘creatives’ would have you believe. There is structure everywhere in fiction. Most stories fall into one of seven plot types. https://lnkd.in/eB9iw634. Most plots have a three act structure and a time-line. The Inciting incident occurs at 10% point in the story, the first plot turn at 25%, middle at 50%, climax at the last 80%, resolution at 90-95%.

Scenes are the building blocks for every story. A story has a beginning, a middle and an ending – forming the age old Three-Act structure. Each Act has  many scenes. A scene is a logical unit between 1000-2000 words. A collection of scenes form a chapter. And you can move scenes around like lego blocks to change the shape of the story. And a standard adult novel has 80,000 to 100,000 words.

If I wear my data modelling hat, I would say each scene is a software object, its attributes being characters, the setting, the plot event and messages passed across scene objects.

So all that creative endeavour, executed in isolation, is really like a mathematician identifying the variables and planning the steps or the algorithm to solve a problem.

The novelist has to go further in planning the plot, developing the character arc, planning the theme and genre of the story, and execute a perfect pace that makes a reader want to turn page after page. 

Yet, creative types say that they are are not good with numbers and techies say they are not good with creating stories. 

So, next time you read a novel, consider the math and the structure that went into its creation. Fiction writing is both an art and a science and a well-crafted story starts with a structure, but turns into a beautiful piece of art executed with microscopic precision.