Picking up Juicy Morsels off the Cutting Room Floor.
Katrina Moore’s workshop at the NJ SCBWI conference (June 2023) was about revising. She called it “Revise Your Writing into a Pot of Gold.” She noted that she used to hate revising, but now, several published books later, she finds that it’s in the revising that the magic happens.
Her first step was “Identifying the Core”. Another way of saying this is “What’s the MIT, or the Most Important Thing.” I first learned about the MIT when I was a storyteller and took a workshop from Doug Lipman. I discovered that I didn’t have to tell every last thing I saw felt or heard when I was telling personal stories. I needed to focus on those details that moved the story along and supported the MIT. A side effect of this was I left lots of juicy morsels on the cutting room floor for another story.
Over the course of the conference in June, I heard multiple times that my Paige and Webb story were actually two different stories. One historical and one playing with html tags.
<Pancakes> is my playful story that teaches the concept of how tags work in HTML. In my last post, I talked about how to write a pitch and I shared with you a couple of pitches I could use for my <Pancakes> story.
Today, I’m going to pick up what is left on the cutting room floor and see what juicy details I can make into another story.
Working Title: “The Dawn of the World Wide Web: How the Internet Came to Be”
OR: “Tim Churns: How the Internet Came to Be”
Pitch:
Tim Berners-Lee wanted scientists who lived all over the world to be able to share ideas and files. But in the late 1980’s the internet was a command line of white or orange text on a black screen. Sometimes your computer might be a white screen with black text. In order to access the internet, you had to use your phone line and connect to USENET. You could not talk to someone on the phone and access the internet at the same time. Sending files and information across the internet was involved and often clunky. In 1981 only about 200 people were using the internet. Most of the world didn’t have access to the internet. It was hard to share files over the internet and talking over a long distance on the phone was expensive.
What is at the heart of this story?
When you build upon what others have done and collaborate with others, you can make a difference.
Tim created the World Wide Web by combining technologies others had already developed and creating additional tools or helping others to create additional tools. His parents had taught him that he could do anything with a computer. He believed that “you have half of the solution in your brain and I have half in my brain. If we sit around a table, I’ll start a sentence and you might finish it. “
What do I want this story to do?
That’s a good question. As I did research for how to explain what I was doing with <Pancakes>, I came across Tim Berners-Lee and his belief that working together with other people helped you be more successful. That really excited me. And what he did to solve the problem is the way I solve problems: Put a lot of ideas together and let my brain churn on them.
The next part of Katrina’s step is to CUT.
Cut anything non-essential. If it doesn’t move the story along or add to the character development, it has to go.
Here are a couple of questions she shared to consider as you CUT:
Is this word/sentence driving the plot?
Is it adding to character development?