Today, I'm trying to do some resketching of yesterday's shard.
Terms
Form. Refers to the broad shape of a piece of work. This can be at the macro level of 'video game', 'stage play', 'novel', etc., or some of the subdivisions within those e.g. 'first-person shooter', 'TV episode', or 'one-woman show'. There are obviously distinctions between those, but the slight squishiness of the term is in itself useful.
Medium. Perversely, I'm going to use this to refer to the means by which written material is present. NOT in the sense of narrative units -- that comes later. But in the sense of 'an intervening substance' the word implies at its root. Prose is a medium to me. As is dialogue (spoken) and dialogue (displayed), or images and set dressing in the story-world. A video game can use prose, and so can a novel. So, medium and form are distinct.
Narrative Unit. Generally, 'the bits you can break the narrative into'. This is the bit that stands well for me from yesterday. Narrative units are things you can generally poke at when writing to interrogate specific information/content/function and effect in terms of how you want it to reach the audience. Specifically:
Dramatic Units: Scenes, acts, plot beats, and the like. Anything that can be used to carve up a story irrespective of its form or medium.
Form-specific units: Commonly used chunking in the specific form you're working. Comic pages, novel chapters, audiologs, in-game texts, storylets, etc.
Atomic medium units: For prose, words, sentences, paragraphs. For dialogue, mostly lines. Probably gets a lot squishier as you branch into other mediums.
The taxonomy here is still hideous and horrible, but it's still one million degrees in here, so that's a 'fix it later' problem.
So, the issue I was talking about with prose yesterday is that I have a good handle (I hope...) on the atomic medium units of prose as well as the dramatic units, but less on the form-specific units.
I think (in yet another terrible name-collision) that 'beats' is really what I'm looking for here. Not so much in the 'plot beat' sense, though also yes -- but in the mode of a... I guess unit of timing. This happens. Then this happens. And this happens. If you described the prose in highly simplified but exhaustive bullet points, they're all the things you couldn't leave out.
And yes, these really occur everywhere, they're kinda an atomic medium unit in some ways, EXCEPT I don't think they're strictly tied to medium or form. Nor, strictly, do they sit in 'dramatic units' since they're a writing tool to me rather than a breaking tool.
Sigh. I think I just described something not actually captured in my taxonomy. Well, this is still a work in progress, I guess.