Write It Now: Relationships

The kind folks who wrote WriteItNow recently sent an evaluation copy to a writers' group that I attend. Since I'm the geekiest fellow there, I snarfed it up and promised to write up a review.

This isn't that review. It's more of a first impression. Just one aspect that I have some opinions upon: Relationshps.

WriteItNow lets you define characters in your novel. I'm working through that right now. Each character has a description, relationships, and personality. The description is just plain flat text, with a drop-down box for sex. This could be improved by adding some structure for eye-color, hair color, height and other physical attributes common to everyone. The Date Of Birth would be better replaced, or perhaps augmented, with an age when story takes place. When I am designing a story, I like to think of it in terms of "today" or "five years from now." If you have in mind to use historical figures in your novel, the Date Of Birth feature will serve you well.

Each character can have a collection of relationships. When you define a relationship, you get a dialog that has two drop downs. The first specifies the nature of the relationship: it says "wife of", "husband of", "aunt of", "neice of" and so on for about 27 choices. When I entered the first relationship, this was a problem, because I wanted the character to be the "tutor of" another character. Not in the list. Hmmmmm. No "mentor of" or "protégé of" either.

Only later did I discover the drop-down let me type in anything I wanted if it was missing from the drop-down.

A nice touch is that relationships can have "start" and "end" dates. But my complaint about birth dates applies here, too. Instead of saying that Chaz and Kim were married 3 years before Kim files for divorce, I have to specify some Saturday in June 2004 and some Wednesday in March 2007. Some specificity is good, but I'd like to hang loose on some details before I make other design decisions.

So, I started defining relationships between characters. And I noticed another problem. If I said, that Kim was the wife of Chaz, it didn't automatically say that Chaz was the husband of Kim. I saw this was a potential difficult thing to put into a program. For instance, if I say that Art is a lover of Jennifer, Jenifer may not be a lover of Art: she might just be stringing him along.

But just now a solution occurred to me. In the bowels of the source code for Write It Now, there must reside a software entity, (called a class) named something by the programmer. I'll name it "Relationship" for now. This class would be responsible for holding everything associated with a Relationship between two characters. Right now, I suppose it holds a string that specifies the type of relationship (e.g. "husband of"), two date objects for start & end, and a reference to a Character object. I here propose a refactoring of that object. Replace the string that identifies the type of relationship with a RelationshipType object.

The relationship type object I'm proposing has a boolean attribute: Reciprocal. Some relationships are reciprocal, others are not: e.g. Chaz is a husband of Kim and Kim is a wife of Chaz, but Art is a lover of Jennifer, but Jennifer has no such relationship with Art. With this distinction in mind, the programmer can associate reciprocal relationships automatically. When I add a "husband of" relationship between Chaz and Kim, it creates a reciprocal relationship "wife of" between Kim and Chaz. If I change my mind and want to I delete a reciprocal relationship, the software must goto the other character and delete its reciprocal relationship, too.

If you buy into the notion of a reciprocal relationship, you also have to worry about the polarity of that relationship. When I look at a relationship between Chaz and Kim from the perspective of Chaz, I want to see "husband of" and when I look at Kim's relationships, I should see "wife of". In graph-theoretic terms, reciprocal relationships are "directed" arcs between characters and this notion of polarity or direction, captures this distinction.

This would entail updating the Edit Relationship dialog to add a checkbox for Reciprocal or not. And also a "polarity" flag to select between "husband of" and "wife of" when displaying the relationship.

This also has an impact on the Relationship drop-down. I don't think free text in the combobox works any more. Instead it has to enumerate all the known relationships plus one called "other" selecting other would bring up a dialog where one defines:

• reciprocal or not,
• relationship description (e.g. husband of)
• reciprocal description (e.g. wife of).

A good thing from the users' perspective is that the drop-down would change from being 27 choices to about half that. And the user would see explicitly what to do when s/he wants a relationship that's not shown on the list.

While writing this, it occurred to me that the WriteItNow folks would also do well to refactor their Date object. Sometimes dates are important to know exactly, other times exactitude is a disraction or should just be a deferred decision. This argues for "fuzzieness" in the specification of dates. The date specifier dialog in WriteItNow have some checkboxes for Month, Day, Week Day, and BC. I'm not quite sure how these work and should start searching the documentation. (They govern presentation of the date. Bad form to confuse data entry and presentation. There's no Help button on the date specifier dialog. It's unclear how the red X is different from the Cancel button, either.)

Instead, I think every Date object needs to recognize the distinction between absolute and relative times. Absolute times are points like 2:57 pm GMT June 2, 1934. Relative times are points like 5 years ago. Let's suppose I have in mind that Damien is 13 when the story takes place. If I write the story is to take place "now," his birthdate can't be specified absolutely. Similarly, I may want to defer decisions about how old he is exactly. I'd prefer to say Damien is between 12 and 15. When I know more, I'll narrow it down.

Same goes for absolute dates. I may want to say that an event takes place "during WW2" but I'm not sure exactly when. I had a story where my hero lost an arm (and a fiance) during a Nazi bombing attack. When exactly? I didn't know more than between 1939 and 1945. And I didn't need to know until later.

WriteItNow will do a better job if it enables the writer to capture artistic decisions in relative terms with some degree of fuzziness. Thus I think its Date object should be refactored to mind these two distinctions: absolute versus relative, and inexactitude. Relative times are tricky, I'll come back to them momentarily.

Fuzzieness can be handled by adopting intervals. Any fuzzy date is really a range between the earliest and the latest times of an event. My hero's injury starts out at [1 Sep 1939 - 2 Sep 1945]. Since my hero is an American I decide he has to be hurt after Pearl Harbor: [7 Dec 1941 - 2 Sep 1945]. So it goes, as I research and refine dates and narrow the range. Exact dates are simply zero-width intervals. In my example, these are all absolute times, but relative times may prove useful. e.g. Damien's age mentioned above.

Relative times are tricky because they are "relative to what." WriteItNow enables the writer to define events. Events seem to be the best candidate for providing reference points for relative dates. What makes them tricky is that you can have multiple narrative tracks in a story. Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon tracked WW2 and contemporary events in parallel, for example.

In my current story, I figure Chaz will be found dead in a locked room. (Someone named Chaz should always be found dead at some time in the story.) I figure he'll be married to Kim about 3 years before that, and she'll file for divorce about a month before that. Meanwhile, Art and Damien are establishing a love-hate relationship as tutor and student. I don't know exactly how those two narrative threads will merge. I don't want to decide that yet. I'll want to specify all Kim and Chaz events relative to each other. And i'll want to specify all Damien, Art and Jennifer events relative to themselves.

Where it gets tricky is when I try to harmonize multiple the narrative flows. I'll need to float all the dates in one narrative to let me slide it forward and back to match up with the other. And I need to check for contradictions. Like Chaz getting killed before he can insult Art at a dinner party. Thus the Date object must be made fuzzy to some extent, and must be either absolute or relative. Similarly, when events are "linked" (I haven't gotten to that part of WriteItNow yet), some kind of consistency check between them will be needed.

More on that later.