PraxisPoetica VIII. Step 5. Let's roll out the whole flow and Kanban Board of Process and Artifacts from the Premise

Jan 25, 2026 - 13 min read - 2700 words

v. o. kapelman

Author of the `Denying The Amerikan Dream` series of novels. `Wandering into the Promised Land`, the eldest, currently being born, right here online.

Intro

Yep. We forgot the Vision Document. And, more importantly, we forgot the flow, the rolling out from the Premise through the whole process. We forgot the benefits of the view from 30,000 feet. In both senses of the words. Last night I had, figuratively speaking, all of the digital artifacts I’ve already completed (well, except the manuscript) spread out on the floor and there seemed to be repetitions, conflicts, maybe superfluous elements… hmmm, what was that about conflict leading to change?

Talk about thesis-antithesis-synthesis broken

(Initial) Artifacts for DTAD-WITPL (Series Denying the Amerikan Dream. Wandering into the Promised Land)

• For Wandering into the Promised Land, our Story Blueprint consists of the following, in order of initial creation (all are, of course, iterative and incremental, except that once the scenes are being written we don’t want to be changing the cause-and-effect trajectory, whether Jennie Nash’s Inside Outline or Lisa Cron’s Story Cards in Development).

Artifact sources and listing reference used here

Lajos Egri	Lisa Cron	Jennie Nash	Section	Observations
Inspiration	Spark		01 Premise
Strong conviction regarding Premise Strong desire to prove Premise	Motivation (Why do you care?)	Why Write This Book (Step #1)	01 Premise
Premise	Point	Point (Step #2)	01 Premise	Jennie Nash same as Lajos Egri: character + conflict + conclusion
Synopsis	What If?	3-4 Sentence Super Simple Version of Story A very short and super simple description (Step #3)	01 Premise	What If? deals with inciting incident, but not the ending, or conclusion Jennie Nash same as Lajos Egri, where the short description of the story emerges naturally from the Point (premise)
Pivotal Character	Protagonist	Who is your Protagonist (Step #8)	02 Pivotal Character
Character, Orchestration	Layering: Storylines (Character Arcs)		03 CharactersAndOrchestraton
Story Blueprint	Story Blueprint	Story Blueprint	04 StoryBlueprint	See PraxisPoetica VI. Step 3. The Novel Blueprint especially the section Complete Set of All Blueprint Artifacts That covers Lajos Egri and Lisa Cron; here we will add many of Jennie Nash process artifacts along the way
Scenes	Scenes	Scenes	10 Manuscript	Bash Shell Scripts exist for concatenating Parts (concatenated markdown for Astro) as well as the complete Manuscript (in markdown, but easily exportable to docx for formatting in Atticus either via pandoc itself or Obsidian export plugin (installed: right-click on manuscript markdown file))

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Search for synthesis, not formal logic

I had a dream. So, to make a long story short, when I woke up this morning, I saw “in my mind’s eye” an imaginary photo of Lajos Egri standing on the lawn in front of his house. And next to him on the right was Lisa Cron. Both smiling of course. And then Jennie Nash appeared in the middle, between them. She took Lajos Egri’s hand, and then she took Lisa Cron’s hand. And the three of them were smiling even more now. On the lawn, in front of the house where Lajos Egri gave writing classes until the early sixties. That’s the photo.

Aha! Lajos Egri spells it out in 1946. Either directly or indirectly, Jennie Nash (going to UCLA extension classes on writing in 2000 and something)… gets it. Her examples of Premise are exactly the same as Lajos Egri’s (she calls it Point). The examples listed in her book have a similar format. More importantly she understands it in a similar fashion, as a thumbnail synopsis of the whole story driven by the protagonist in three parts (yep, character + conflict + resolution)(in plain English, the protagonist in their Transition from start to end); and Jennie Nash always says to go back to your point and expand here, expand there. And, the same as Egri, talks about knowing how your story starts and ends, and about how the first thing you have to do is know why you feel so strongly about all this as author (or else forget it), and who your Pivotal Character is. Then short description. Then start and ending. Then Inside Outline (based on Pixar Studios guidelines). Lisa Cron, smiling on the right, takes the point, the character driven approach, takes the Inside Outline and drives it up a notch to Story Cards in Development as a wonderful alternative to the mechanical application formal logic style of fixed plot pointed genre “grids”. Although, with Jennie Nash’s approach, you can if you wanna. The Story Cards in Development, however, provide a more detailed view of the flow of the story (flows right out of the Inside Outline and adds storylines, better view of protagonist transition with a clearer view of cause and effect, both in the external plot as well as internally to the protagonist’s transition through internal conflict). So the union is perfect. The photo is perfect. Jennie Nash gets it with Lajos Egri. Lisa Cron gets it with Jennie Nash (and they work together on Story Genius!).

👉 Jennie Nash takes the ball from Lajos Egri and runs as far as the short synopsis (one sentence description) and then the Inside Outline which serves as a higher view story big picture with the main transitions (the Kurt Vonnegut Story Graph). Then Lisa Cron takes the ball from Jennie Nash and fills out all the scenes, yes, all of them in development (i.e. those having won a place in the cause and effect trajectory; otherwise, out!). And Lisa Cron provides us with all the advantages of a filterable grid view: We can see a listing of all the story cards (scenes) having a given storyline, location, character arc, or all of them, what have you, filter to our heart’s content (techi: Obsidian Base and Views anyone?). Now it all flows. If you stay true to dialectics and iterative and incremental praxis (fractal (thesis - antithesis - synthesis) change) and not formal logic and rigid rules.

In the course of these PraxisPoetica Notes I’ve mentioned several writing tools, Scrivener, Plottr, Novel Factory, etc., that have templates for Story Genius. Or make your own, as I am doing in Obsidian (or Notion if you’re using that, or any PKM with a database).

Kanban Process Board please

What’s a Kanban Board?

Now, instead of the ugly conflict-strewn table above (well, actually, thanks to it 😄), we have the picture that graces the cover of our PraxisPoetica Process Note today.

Here’s each column rendered as a text outline with artifacts as tasks, so you can read the cards and sub-tasks listed for each one:

00 Vision Document

• PraxisPoetica Overview
• PraxisPoeticaUpdate

01 Lajos Egri

• Premise

• Pivotal Character

  • By any means necessary

• Character

  • Three dimensional characters
  • Orchestration

• Conflict

  • Avoid Jumping or Static Conflict

• Crisis, Climax, Resolution

02 Inside Outline Blueprint

• Story Fundamentals

  • Motivation
  • Point (Premise)
  • Roll out short description of story
  • Define genre (which shelf in bookstore?)
  • Define Ideal Reader
  • Write Jacket Copy

• Story Structure

  • Who is your protagoinist (pivotal character)
  • POV Who? Where? Time?
  • Story Timeline
  • Where does the story start (point of attack) and where does it end (resolution?
  • Pixar “Because of that” Story Summary

• Inside Outline

  Here’s the basic shape of each element listed in the Inside Outline:

  • SCENE 1: Something happens
  • POINT: What the protagonist feels about what happens, how they make meaning of it, why it matters to them
  • Because of that… (link to following scene)

• Revise Inside Outline (v 1.0)

  • standard manuscript formatting: 1-inch margins, Times Roman 12-point font, single line spacing, one full line space between the bullet-point pairings.
  • Required initial version: No more than three pages: bare bones of the story, not every single scene
  • Apply 10-point checklist

• Expand Inside Outline (v 2.0)

  • Now expand Inside Outline to include ALL scenes without any size limits
  • Apply 10-point checklist

• Use Inside Outline to Write Forward

• Use Inside Outline for Revision of Drafts

• Use Inside Outline to Develop Synopses of various lengths

03 Story Genius Novel Backstory and Blueprint

• What If? (Chapter 3)

  • Spark, Inspiration
  • Motivation, Why do you Care?
  • Point (Premise)
  • What If? (Inciting Incident driven synopsis)

• Backstory: Who is the Protagonist? (Chapter 4)

  • Protagonist Thumbnail Sketch (just before the story starts)
    • Where is she in her life?
    • Where does she see her life going from here on out?
    • What are her hopes?
    • What is she most afraid of?
    • What does she believe? Misbelief?

• Backstory: Protagonist’s Goal and Misbelief (Chapter 5)

  • Goal and Misbelief
  • What does your protagonist enter the novel wanting, even if he doesn’t think he has a chance of getting it? He may not even realize what it is. Concrete, not abstract.
  • Why does the protagonist want it? What will it mean to him?
  • What misbelief does the protagonist have that stands in the way of achieving his goal?

• Backstory: Protagonist Worldview (Chapter 6)

  • Origin Scene (backstory)
    • The moment in your protagonist’s life when his misbelief took root?
    • Remember, this is long before the novel starts, almost always when they wwe a child.
    • Origin Scene Prep: answer these four questions
      • What does my protagonist go into the scene believing?
      • Why does she believe it?
      • What is my protagonist’s goal in the scene?
      • What does my protagonist expect will happen in this scene?
    • Origin Scene: Write the Origin Scene

• Backstory: Unlock the Plot (Chapter 7)

  • The Beauty of Cause-and-Effect
  • Find the rising action Crossroads/Turning Points which deepen the Protagonist’s misbelief
    • Begin by envisioning your protagonist’s life from the origin scene up to the place where—for now—you imagine the novel might start in media res.
    • Find at least three moments where the protagonist’s misbelief was the deciding factor in a major decision. The decision will change the external course of the protagonist’s life, upping the stakes and be part of the cause and effect that leads to the start of the novel.
    • Keep an eye out for external turning points that in some fundamental way—via an intense internal conflict—cause the protagonist’s misbelief to deepen.
  • Write a sketch for each of the best candidates. Your goal is to zero in on three turning point scenes that will yield the most story-specific info, the most potent grist for the mill, so that you can, indeed, begin your novel in medias res.
  • Write the three or more scenes.

• Backstory: When does the novel begin? (Chapter 8)

  • Review the Crossroads/Turning Points, the ticks of the clock inevitably rising in crescendo
    • What, specifically, will happen to start the chain reaction that will cause everything to happen?
    • What will trigger your protagonist’s decision to take that first step out of her comfort zone?
      • The good news is, your novel’s ticking clock will lead you directly to the answer. It’s simply a matter of zeroing in on that seminal tick.
    • To find that seminal tick, we build on the Crossroads/Turning Points we have already sketched and written.
  • Extend the list of turning point sketches until we discover the one that reaches proportions making it undeniably worthy of being the Opening Scene
    • Your goal is to find the tick that catapults your protagonist into unavoidable action. When your protagonist must act and must act now.
    • Keep the clock ticking until you get there. Don’t be afraid to try this again and again until you get a tick that has everything it needs—the overarching plot problem, the main ticking clock, the third rail
    • When the protagonist’s internal conflict must burst into action and start the novel.

• Novel Blueprint (Chapters 9-11)

  • We’ve already mentioned in another Note that many templates for common writer tools exist.
  • (See for example the template for Scrivener by Gwen Hernandez: Using Scrivener with Story Genius)
  • But let’s list all artifacts required for the Blueprint and understand together why we need them, whether we’re using a laptop or a pencil and a bound notebook.
  • Obviously we need one folder in our writer tool for the Manuscript (the actual Scene instances making up the novel our readers are going to read)
  • We need a folder (whether of a digital or cardboard variety) for the Screen Cards in Development. Meaning an ordered, numbered set of Screen Cards reflecting our Cause and Effect Trajectory. Each scene card will link to the corresponding scene instance in the Manuscript.
  • We can have another folder, Random Screen Cards (following the Story Genius Nomenclature, or choose your own), which will be quick idea or flash generated scene ideas that barely have at least an Alpha Point; and haven’t been assigned yet to its place on the cause-and-effect trajectory.
  • A Characters folder holding character sketches, notes on character orchestration, and other artifacts we will soon present and explain in a forthcoming Note.
  • Within that folder, a Protagonist (or Pivotal Character or whatever you wish to name it) sub-folder containing all the artifacts from our previous note PraxisPoetica V. Step 2. The Pivotal Character Who Must Win By Any Means Necessary
  • A Research folder for notes and links to historical and/or whatever other kind of research that is needed for the novel. For this novel, social movements of the 60’s, particularly, say, the occupation of Universities as part of the movement against the War(s) in Vietnam, materials on G.I. coffeehouses, etc., as well as on many other topics. Specifically the Fort Dix 38, in Trenton, New Jersey, in which the Jewish Radical Community participated. The origins of the JRC in Los Angeles Conference for Jewish Action, May,1969, helped a lot.
  • A World Building folder if you feel the need for it. In the case of this novel, the hegemonies and counter-hegemonies are very much a part of (as they always are, in reality) each character. It is impossible for a character to exist without a world, and the world is not necessarily fantasy, it is the part of the character’s life without which they could not possibly exist. But if you feel the need for a folder to place all notes concerning hegemonies and counter-hegemonies, that’s fine.
  • An Idea List for ideas that just flash into your mind in the shower, while vacuuming the floor, or out for a walk. At least you’ll know where to find them; they should be kept in one place, and associated with the work you’re doing on the novel.
  • Probably more stuff; later on, things related to writer tools; or publishing, like jacket covers, artwork, blurbs, whatever; events related to the launching of the novel, whatever. It’s always nice to have everything in one place.

In Progress

• Shift Cards you are actually working on here, so you can see at a glance where you left off
• Keep a Daily Journal with links to Cards (so you can see the back-links from the Cards, and see what you were doing over time)

Blocked

• If a card’s tasks are blocked in any way, place here explaining what’s blocking you in the card or in the daily journal.

04 Manuscript

• Review Inside Story and/or Novel Blueprint
• Full Inside Story and/or Novel Blueprint Ready
• Scenes Written
  • link to [[SceneCardsInDevelopment]], which link to Manuscript scene instances
• Revise Draft
• Self-Publish 😄

The Novel Blueprint and the Scene Card artifact

The Novel Blueprint is the second part of the 03 Story Genius Novel Backstory and Blueprint column, following right after the Backstory cards and tasks. Which we have actually already covered previously:

• In an earlier Note, PraxisPoetica VI. Step 3. The Novel Blueprint the Novel Blueprint (covering Chapters 9, 10 and 11) is already dealt with in some detail.
  • There is a short Scene Card artifact example.
  • There is also a Scene Card for the Opening Scene of this novel, *Wandering into the Promised Land, Scene #1 Desert Rider in Gray
    • Scene Card for Our Blueprint Opening Scene
    • It is linked, in our Blueprint artifact, to the actual scene itself in the Manuscript, online here also: Desert Rider in Gray
  • There is a Complete Set of All Blueprint Artifacts (actually included already in the above Kanban Board outline)

Outro

Beautiful, everything fits. I’m doing it like this, then can write all the scenes. That’s wonderful. There are many other ways to do it, of course, but I’ve found mine. For this novel, at least. This is the synthesis and growth path I needed in order to complete the scenes.

Tags:

• PraxisPoetica
• Wandering Into The Promised Land

PraxisPoetica VII. Step 4. Transition. From Premise to Opening and Ending Scene