Plot Considered as a Four-Dimensional Array of Brightly Colored Beads Registration
In this class, students will consider story as a collection of related events, each of which occurs at a point in space and time, like a four-dimensional array of brightly colored beads.
Date: Sunday October 15, 2023
Class Time: 5pm – 7:30pm CDT
Sessions: 1
Location: Zoom (online)
Instructor: David D. Levine
Price: $60 (with discounted rates for SLF members)
“This is a new theory of mine in which I consider a story as a collection of related events, each of which occurs at a point in space and time. If you picture these events as beads, you can create a plot by stringing them together in chronological order. There may be more than one plot string, but plot is always chronological, because the events of the plot are connected by cause and effect (unless you are writing a time travel story). Once you have a plot, you can snip those strings into segments and lay them out, not necessarily in chronological order, in a single line which is the narrative of the story. Thinking of story in this way can lead to some interesting insights into the relationship between the events of the story, the cause and effect relationships between them, and the order in which they appear on the page.”
David D. Levine is the multi-award-winning author of the Regency interplanetary airship adventure novel Arabella of Mars (Tor 2016) and more than fifty science fiction and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the 2006 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, his story “Nucleon” won the James White Award, and he has been shortlisted for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, Sturgeon, and Locus. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Realms of Fantasy, Tor.com, numerous anthologies and websites, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies, as well as his collection Space Magic from Wheatland Press, which won the Endeavour Award for the best SF or Fantasy book by a Pacific Northwest writer. David is a contributor to George R. R. Martin’s bestselling shared-world series Wild Cards. He is also a member of Book View Cafe, a writer-owned publishing cooperative, and Oregon Science Fiction Conventions Inc., a non-profit organization which produces OryCon and other SF conventions. He has narrated podcasts for Escape Pod, PodCastle, and StarShipSofa and the audiobook of Space Magic, and his video production “Dr. Talon’s Letter to the Editor” was a finalist for the Parsec Award. In 2010 he spent two weeks at the Mars Desert Research Station, a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert. David lives in a hundred-year-old bungalow in Portland, Oregon. His web site can be found at www.daviddlevine.com.
