New Short Story Published: The Glencoe Project - A Transportation Planning Adventure Story

You can read my new short story at either of these two websites:

http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/The_Glencoe_Project.php

http://authspot.com/short-stories/the-glencoe-project-a-transportation-planning-adventure-story/

This story draws on my experiences as a transportation planner. Experienced writers always tell new writers to “write what you know.”  That hasn’t been easy for me up until now. Several times I’ve set out to write a story with a transportation planning background, but I abandoned them all.

I took a different approach this time and it worked for me. If I get a good response to this story, I plan to write a series of them. Eventually I want to develop the ideas into a movie or maybe a novel.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

 

Publish Post

My Transportation Planning Adventure and the Lessons Learned

I completed the first draft of my transportation planning adventure yesterday. I got 2,500 words written, which brought the final story to about 7,600 words. That is much longer than the 6,000 word story I had planned. I’ll need to edit it down quite a lot.

My brother suggested I read Kathy Reichs’ book Déjà Dead. I’m about a third of the way through.

She has much more description in her writing than I have in my story. I realized was that her descriptions are there to create mood. In the past I have concentrated on film scripts. In film, the mood cues are not needed in the script, since they are added in production or post production.

This causes a problem for my rewrite. If try to edit the story down to 6,000 words, I won’t be able to add any description. I’m not sure I want to expand the story to allow more room for description.

Like my story, The Abattoir Project: A Ken Walker Adventure, I created an outline inspired by the Lester Dent master fiction plot. I replaced the physical confrontations with verbal ones, but otherwise I used the same structure.

The outline is broken down into four sections, which are broken down into five “chapters” which are broken down into three “actions”. That gives me 60 actions for the story. While the idea is for each action to be about 100 words, in practice they vary from about 13 to 250. This creates a problem for pacing.

Maybe I shouldn’t get too concerned about this. As long as the final story turns out OK, I don’t think it needs to accurately reflect the original outline. It does tell me that I have more to learn about what is needed in the outline. I’m sure that will come as I write more. Even in this second story, I found that I didn’t need to rework the outline while I wrote, like I did with the first story.

I am still worried that the stories won’t engage readers. Hopefully that will come with more experience.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

A Move Forward on My Transportation Planning Story

Some of the people I used to work with have encouraged me to do a story about transportation planning, so I have tried several times to do that. Nothing has come together yet.

I started to write a movie set in a transportation planning office, but got bogged down in the details. That experience made me realize that I need to focus on plot before I get into any transportation specific details. After 30 years focussed on those details, it is easy to get caught up in them.

More recently, I decided that I should write a series of short stories as a way to develop my ideas, which I would later incorporate into a film. I need more practice telling stories too. Back in January I developed an outline for a story set in a transportation planning office. This week I started to write it. I set a goal of a 6,000 word story. I got just under 3,500 done and I’m less than half way through. At that rate it will end up at 9,000 words. I’ll need to do some severe edits to get it down to size. That can be a good thing for the quality of the story.

I started with the Lester Dent master fiction plot that I used for The Abattoir Project: A Ken Walker Adventure. In the master fiction plot, the hero gets in to actual physical fights. I was tempted to do the same thing in my transportation planning story, but decided that would be silly. Instead I had verbal arguments rather than fist fights. Maybe if/when I do another story I can have some real knock down melees. Another approach would be to make it a comedy.

In the master plot, the heroes and villains are black and white (or rather white and black), but I’m much more inclined to make them more of a dark grey/ light grey. The story is about a fight over a development proposal. My heroes are the City’s transportation planners, while the villain is a developer. A consultant is caught in the middle. That isn’t the only situation where transportation planners run into conflict, but it was an obvious place to start.

I’ll need to avoid the temptation to preach about how transportation planning should be done. That can be a bore, and I’m bad enough at that as it is.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

The Abattoir Project: A Ken Walker Adventure

I finished and published my new short story.

A typical management consultant doesn't need to worry that someone will try to kill him, but then, Ken Walker wasn't a typical management consultant.

I used Lester Dent’s writing formula. It isn’t deep and the characters are a little thin, but I think you’ll find it a nice little roller-coaster ride.

If enough people tell me they like the story, I may turn it into a series.

You can read it on one of these sites below. The authspot website pays me more though.

http://authspot.com/short-stories/the-abattoir-project-a-ken-walker-adventure/

http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/The_Abattoir_Project.php

http://nut.bz/20kv_wad/

Text to Speech Proof Reading and “The Abattoir Case”

I rewrote my “Lester Dent” story three times this week and I have a new name for it: The Abattoir Case – A Ken Walker Adventure.

I used a text to speech program (Free Natural Reader) to help me with the proof reading. The program reads exactly what I wrote and it is much easier to catch errors. I did two readings, once with a woman’s voice and once with a man’s voice. I found that I caught different problems with each voice.

I found that when I listened, I could hear other problems with the writing that I didn’t notice when I read it. That helped make the whole story better.

The current version runs to 6,000 words, exactly. Not 5,999, not 6,001, but 6,000. I meant to publish it this week, but got onto something else. I have a couple more ideas for changes anyway. I should have it ready this coming week.

First Draft of “Adventure” Story Done

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

The Lester Dent Master Fiction Plot Test Drive

After I read over Lester Dent’s story formula, I wanted to try it out.

I developed a spreadsheet that I could use to organize the outline. I added some modifications of my own that I thought would help me write. This week I did an outline. I wanted to leave the project until later because I want to finish my Bright Freedom script first.

However, last night I decided to take a stab at it. The formula is supposed to produce a 6,000-word story. The formula is set up in four parts, each 1,500 words long. The longest short story I’ve done, Distraction is 2,700 words, so this would be considerably longer than any of the stories I’ve done so far.

It took me only an hour and a half to get the first part done. It came in at 1,703 words. That is a little longer than 1,500 words, but it needs some editing and that should shorten it down. I am a little unsure if I should finish this story or the Bright Freedom script first. I’m kind of on a roll with the formula story, so I think I will finish it first.

Links

The Master Fiction Plot: http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html 

Bright Freedom: http://dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog/?cat=14

Distraction: http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/distraction.php

Comment (2011 February 22): I published this story here:  http://authspot.com/short-stories/the-abattoir-project-a-ken-walker-adventure/

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog

Doc Savage, Lester Dent, and Formula Writing

When I was young, I read every Doc Savage book I could get, and reread the ones I had several times. I learned later that the writer, Lester Dent, had turned out one 50,000-word Doc Savage book a month for over 14 years. Not only that, but Doc Savage accounted for about a quarter of his output.

Just the other day I stumbled across an article he wrote about the “formula” he used to write so much material. http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/dent.html

Since I aspire to be a writer, I cogitated on what he wrote. I wanted to avoid formula writing and I know many writers are critical of formulas. But, as I read more on writing, I start to see the value of a formula. Ultimately, I don’t want to be a formula writer, but I realized that it takes time to develop your writing skills, and a formula can help you develop those skills.

I also have a new view of what a formula is. Since my background is in the sciences, I tended to think of a formula as something very mechanical in nature. The writing formulas I’ve heard about are not really like that. I would describe them as structures. When people talk about formula writing, I think they have in mind the few standard structures that get used. Many other structures exist, but most writers rarely use them.

I found out that all the Doc Savage books are available for download: http://www.stealthskater.com/DocSavage_01.htm