Automation, Fairy Tales and ASCII Art

Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey (aka The Monomyth) is one of the best tools I have for creating a fairy tale adventure story. But the prize probably goes to Pandoc, with Python and git close behind.

These screenshots show snippets from the build log of the story's continuous build system. It takes the chapters, written in Markdown, and transforms them into an epub format ebook, and other interesting formats. Google text to speech creates an audio book, then sox and lame command line tools help mix this with background music. We see ASCII art of characters, from the story itself, mixed in the log. Different characters govern different phases of the build process.

Red, pictured above, helps with the second part of the build, checking content: spelling, word occurrence statistics and synonym lookups for most occurring words.

Fairytale Build Process

Before her though The Knight gets busy. He's got everything required for the journey ahead, all the baggage. And not just his own angst, also enough equipment for every woulda/coulda/shoulda he can think of. For the build, he installs everything required.

The Knight is a decent bloke, confused about a few things, but he does a good job of installing the tools for the build.

The third phase, after The Knight has done his thing, and Red is satisfied, we have the creation of the epub book and other artefacts. For this we enlist the help of The Tailor.

If he were animated he would be bowing at the introduction.

Who is the Hero?

The real hero is a command line tool called Pandoc. From its own website:

Pandoc

...a universal document converter

If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife.

Pandoc converts my story, written in Markdown, into an epub format book. It is the star of the show. Markdown is a convenient format to write the story in, in a way that HTML is not.

For Pandoc see their official website. It was created by John MacFarlane, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Yes, Pandoc is a piece of software.

Pandoc's rival for place as alpha-hero in the project is Tom, the hero of the story itself. Actually, for Tom that is heroine.

Lets have a look at her:

The art was created by a friend, Jasmine the Yass Queen, aka J. He created pictures of each of the characters from, about roughly twenty descriptive bullet points for each character.

Then, with pictures created for the characters, they really started to come to life.

Simply put, my experience is that the power of collaborating imaginations, with the right person, elevates the sum of the parts.

'Wow' isn't always said, its a rushy, dizzy feeling; often stupefying. I felt this when I saw Yass' pictures for the first time. I still feel it now. I used a website called manytools.org to convert Yass' images into ASCII art (https://manytools.org/hacker-tools/convert-images-to-ascii-art/).

The Quest Begins

And so the characters embark on their merry journey, through the journey of their design as characters on paper, their place in the build process, and, of course, the actual story itself. After all, they are primarily literary characters.

About writing: I have found the same with code as it is for writing stories: I can create content no problem. However, cutting it back, or reducing, is where I need to spend time, and ideally get a second pair of eyes. I beg friends for constructive criticism but this will only go as far as helping me find grammar errors.

I need to reduce my output, make some parts more concise. To get help for this I realised I needed to ask friends for exactly, literally, that: help me cut back, abridge and reduce the content.

And so, when another, previously unmentioned friend popped round, I begged him for help. Suddenly, I had an editor. This friend, 'G', could judge the flow of the story, how the story read... better than I could. He had fresh eyes, I had been staring at the same paragraph for too long.

This meant that my over-worked paragraphs could be reviewed. I had long lost the ability to read the story anew. But G could judge how the story flowed as the reader would experience it. Too hard to be Hemingway on my own, but with my friends help, I might get closer to that high standard of writing than I could on my own. This poor friend only popped round for a cup of tea.

And now I had found I have a build process, and a workflow, which, broadly split into back-end (story/character creation, story arc, character arcs, world background, initial story writing) and front-end (how the story reads for a new reader, making compromises for the sake of a good reading flow).

Beautiful Things Like HTML and Git

Just like with software development I have found written stories benefit from content based tools and approaches. Git is a natural content management tool for a story, just as it is for a corpus of code.

And HTML comes into its own when mixing pictures and text. Ok so I work directly with Markdown and (X)HTML is produced by the build process, rather than my own hand. I find it funny using HTML as a document format, which it was designed for, instead of a web page with javascript all over the shop... which, as a software developer, typically has been my relationship with HTML.

I was flowing text round images, thinking: "This is a breeze with HTML, no need for javascript, ...feels ...all ...wrong.". LOL

Lets have a look at HTML in it's natural habitat:

Free Personality Test

So git, Pandoc, Python, yaml, Markdown and PowerShell are all the good tools that got me so far. The Monomyth mentioned at the start, a great tool.. but there are more that have helped. I, my humble self, have argued, in conversations, that Myers–Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI) are not necessarily static for people. For example, a person's type may change depending on the situation.

For my fairytale, the characters, their Myers–Briggs Type Indicators do not change. I found it more tiring than I expected taking the MBTI test for each character. But it was worth it; for every trait I had expected, there was another that the MBTI type described which was a surprise for the character, but totally made sense.

Tom, our heroine, is an INFP-T of course! Some may label this type "The Mediator" but I will always think of this type as "The Hero". The INFP type can be characterised as an introverted dreamer.

I myself seem to be an ENFJ, an outgoing, emotionally empathetic sort of fellow. The closest character to my type is The Tailor, an ENFP, myself being slightly more judgmental than he. To be fair to The Tailor, he is a nicer, more patient person than myself. Or would be, if he were real.

But watch out with Myers-Briggs types: they do not define you as a human, they just capture a snap-shot of you in a moment of time. Unlike my story characters.

Its easy to find free Myers-Briggs personality tests on the interwebs. You can take one for yourself, or like me: for yourself, then a bunch of imaginary friends in your head that you and your mate invented.

How to Win Imaginary Friends...

The story is called "The Return of Tom Thumb, and the seven league boots". Its a squeal to the classic fairytale "Tom Thumb and the seven league boots". I wanted to know what happened after the original story ended, so I started making notes on where I thought that idea went. Its a work in progress.

But now I have written a few chapters ahead I am releasing the first chapter. The story itself might be interesting, but Pandoc definitely is, and so is collaborating imagination with friends on hobby projects.

Here's the first chapter. Download links below.

Read the first chapter in a web page

Or download the epub < Recommended format for ebook readers like iBooks:

Or download HTML

Or cheap and cheerful audio book created using free google text to speech, mixed with music, download mp3