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One of my ongoing projects is to write articles about the craft of writing fiction. In several of my articles, I've quoted Evan Marshall, author of The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing and The Marshall Plan for Getting Your Novel Published, both of which offer insight and practical tips for fiction writers. In a third book, The Marshall Plan Workbook: Writing Your Novel from Start to Finish, Marshall presented a set of templates that writers could customize to create a solid plot structure for a novel.

Most recently, he has released his template system in software form.

I've never read The Marshall Plan Workbook, but my impression is that it's basically a set of templates for implementing the recommendations in his other books. I don't have a problem with templates, and frequently develop my own for various tasks. I do recall, however, deciding not to purchase The Marshall Plan Workbook because I felt that paper templates designed by another author would be too confining for my taste. But the concept of Marshall's templates in software form intrigued me, so I decided to try it.

Downloading the software was easy, even for someone as technologically impaired as I am. Once the program was installed, I just started exploring it. There are tabs for story idea, plot tips, character profiles, and subplots, each with hints on how to proceed. One page is dedicated to selecting genre and story length, while another features over 7,000 names, complete with meaning and origin. Another provides dozens of detailed tips for self-editing the manuscript.

The timing for trying the templates was perfect, as I had been struggling with a pile of notes that I hoped to develop into a novel. Without much forethought I just started filling in the blanks on the template. Sometimes I could quickly plug in information that I had already assembled, but other times I had to stop and think about my answers before proceeding. Before long, my haphazard pile of notes began to take shape on the template; it started to look and feel more like a story.

What astounded me was that in the process of organizing information onto the templates my creative juices started flowing. I began making stuff up that wasn't already in my notes. Organizing the story components into a predetermined structure forced me to think creatively about the specifics of the story I was developing. The story began to take new direction.

I found that I was able to quickly tune into the structure

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