I finished the first draft of my story based on the Lester Dent Master Fiction Plot formula.
It came in at 6,463 words, or somewhat longer than the 6,000 words that the formula targets. I will need to rewrite the story to fix some inconsistencies, and I can likely tighten up the story when I do that. I have some other projects I need to take care of. That will give me some distance when I rewrite in a week or two. I don’t have a title for the story yet, or titles for the subsections.
I found the story easy to write; the outline made a big difference. It didn’t perfectly though, several times I had to modify the outline. I also had trouble with some details that I didn’t plan out in advance. I thought of them as McGuffins, so I didn’t put much effort into their development. That was a mistake. I changed my mind about a couple of them half way through and that caused the problem with inconsistencies.
What I’m not sure about now, is how readable the story is. I can’t evaluate my own work very well. The characters are not very deep and there isn’t much in the way of a message. However, the characters are very busy as they run from crisis to crisis, so casual readers may not notice those limitations.
I would like to try a similar approach to a different kind of story. A while back, someone suggested I do a film like Before Sunrise. My efforts in that direction haven’t gone very far. Maybe I could write a short story with a variation of this formula.
The Master Fiction Plot: http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html
MacGuffin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin
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