Our Minimum Complete Story (MCS): Better Novels in 90 Seconds

Can you tell your novel's story in 90 seconds? We mean to really tell it, not just recite an elevator pitchy summary. Among the hundreds of authors we've worked with, few have ever tried to tell their story. When they do, their first attempts often stumble over awkward pauses as they dig through memory, desperately trying to recall its essentials and piece them together. It takes weeks of practice before even the best can deliver a complete, concise, stable and engaging version of their story on demand. Try it to see for yourself. Though it takes practice, you'll get better and better. We guarantee no other way to spend 90 seconds will serve you better.

This exercise is so valuable we've given it a name: the Minimum Complete Story (MCS). The MCS is simply your story, told aloud, in about 90 seconds. Constructed properly, an MCS distills a novel to its essentials, a 10,000-foot overview, which orients and checks your writing. Our next three blogs go over how you can use it to help your work. Today's long post describes this tool's benefits and reveals the reasons it works so well. Next time, we'll explain how to create your initial MCS. We hope these two posts encourage you to attend our 11/15/25 MCS workshop. This safe space offers you an opportunity to practice telling and testing your current MCS. Then, before Thanksgiving, we'll explain how to perfect your MCS and apply it to your work.

Your MCS has two functions. First, it acts as a compass to guide your writing. Telling your complete story aloud sets goalposts because your published novel should roughly match your telling. Of course, a hundred thousand words supply much more detail than 90 seconds, but: the essentials stay the same. Mathematicians (who cares about them, right?) call this isomorphism, the property that objects can be similar regardless of size. For example, we recognize Cinderella's story when presented in a few pages or many hundreds. Put another way, changing the length or the media won't prevent anyone from identifying the tale.

The MCS has the same scope and essential content as your novel. This match means that every section of your book has a place somewhere within your MCS. One immediate benefit: saying your MCS each time you sit down (or stand) to write puts you in the right frame of mind, so you actively remember where the story's been, where it's at, and where it's headed. This sense of direction not only boosts your confidence (and helps eliminate writer's block), it also ensures that what you're typing aligns with the overall narrative. We call this coherence, an absolute necessity that we'll explain momentarily.

Past coherence, a good compass empowers exploration. Developing your novel requires making choices. Consider a biggie; where do I begin? The MCS won't answer; rather the big picture it paints and repaints will help you decide. The key is that your MCS fits into "active" memory. This means you can reconfigure it nearly instantly and examine any change's effect quickly. This dexterity motivates you to play around with alternatives to find the best, those that cohere and capture your audience. If you come up with another start, for example, you can shift your MCS to reflect this new beginning. Likewise, you can investigate suggestions. As our coaches discuss these tellings, they often suggest new ways for members to tell their MCS. Then, assess whether the updated telling makes the story more or less satisfying. If so, make the change; otherwise, go back to the previous version.

Second, the MCS provides a ruler; using it ensures that your story's parts measure up and fit together. These two aspects of great writing also involve coherence. To explain, let's define "story" the Bardsy way. All stories, novels included, are coherent combinations of five elements: character, world, conflict, theme, and plot. This definition puts coherence front and center, meaning writing requires organization to become a story. Failing to orchestrate your words, at the extreme, produces a confusing jumble. You'd be wise to see coherence as your main goal. Aiming for it pushes you toward great stories and satisfied readers.

Writing for coherence means choosing your words and forming them into sentences and chapters. Yet, you're also writing a novel in that the sentences and chapters must tell a story. In the former, the rubber meets the road (or the fingers meet the keys) at a low level; meanwhile, the latter demands envisioning the entire novel, holistically. Keeping these two tasks simultaneously in mind presents a real challenge. Why? Initially, it requires constantly shifting between the two perspectives, both what I'm working on at the moment and what I'm doing overall. Further, and more dangerously, the story inevitably changes as you write. A builder charges extra if an architect's plans change. You, in contrast, get a brilliant idea and accordingly write it, but it changes your story. In short, the writing affects the story even as the story guides the writing. Bardsy's tools, especially the MCS, both encourage and help you manage this interdependent process. The overall idea is to keep the story, the big picture, aligned with every word you write. In this vein, the MCS concentrates on highlighting and addressing divergences, so they can be effectively addressed by either updating the MCS or by revising the writing. The payoff: matching your words to the big picture guarantees coherence.

On top of overall coherence, your MCS helps you assess parts of your story. If you're missing one of a story's five elements, the gap will stand out in telling the story aloud. For example, stories need settings, a sense of their world. This tool alerts your brain and any audience to its absence. Usually, missing elements are floating around in the back of your mind, but aren't connected well enough to the story to appear in the distillation. Likewise, when an element is underdeveloped, like a plot without a clear peak, your brain and any audience will ask for more. Finally, if the pieces don't fit together, you may not be able to tell the story. Flaws in story logic, such as events that don't connect or a conflict and theme that don't synergize, can bring your telling to an abrupt halt. Your brain trips over the problem. We've seen it happen over and over. Don't despair! The MCS also helps fix the issues it uncovers.

Through repeated tellings, your MCS will automatically become more coherent as your brain comes to know and develop your story. It, in fact, continually adjusts every time it's told. This reflects your brain thinking through your story. You will add, delete or rearrange parts, sometimes beneath your awareness. Better yet, saying the MCS also helps integrate the parts into a singular story.

Finally, the MCS gauges relevance. Distilling your story leads to a focus on essentials. Everything else, of course, is less important. For example, mentioning a character in the MCS indicates their importance while leaving one out suggests they're more minor. These signals help revision immensely; obviously, you want to keep and expand on what's relevant and discard or deemphasize the rest. Main characters, in this vein, deserve more attention (and full development) while others deserve less. So, delete that minor character flashback and turn that space over to your star. You can try to reverse salience, too, by consciously giving a character more or less MCS space.

Besides isomorphism, a second factor empowering MCS is a kind of universal story, which we call the "generic" template. It works as follows. Whenever you encounter a story, your brain appears to fit it into a metaphorical story-shaped box. Think of fairy tales. Their cues (which we'll use next time): "Once upon time," "then, one day," and "they lived happily ever after" exist because we have this template. Crucially, the fitting-into-a-box process helps us understand a story and what it means. Thus, this process boosts great stories, namely those that fit the box perfectly. They are more memorable and have a greater impact. Think back to your favorite childhood story to illustrate. What was it? By unpacking its box, even if you last heard it long ago, you can tell it now, fully and without hesitation. By design, the MCS provides just enough information to fill this template; it's literally a minimum complete story.

A third factor is active memory's limits. Put simply, we can only keep so much in our heads. Science shows that past this boundary, putting new things in pushes old things out. The MCS should fill your mind, just enough and nothing extra. Indeed, being able to keep it in mind demonstrates its memorability. More importantly, this helps you deal with a novel's length. After all, a hundred thousand or so words can't possibly fit into what scientists call active memory. The MCS allows you to load the entire story into your active memory, ready to go.

Success, then, comes from going back and forth between micro and macro while drafting, regularly changing the order of, dropping, or adding sections, even as you continually reconfigure your characters, world, conflict, theme, and plot. This fluidity remains until that final moment when you decide your creation has come together into a polished manuscript. The need to be able to change either the micro or macro at any time reveals why less flexible approaches to writing may leave you feeling frustrated. No matter how many scene cards and character sketches you use, the result falls short. Why? Because stories, again, inevitably change as you write. Any method that doesn't accommodate a changeable big picture is unwieldy or counterproductive. Worse, sometimes the method can't accommodate change. The only option with some step-by-step plans is to start over. Booooooo!

Now you know the benefits telling you Minimal Complete Story confers as well as why it works. We trust you'll stay tuned as our next post will describe how to make yours. And reserve your spot to learn more or practice yours at our 11/15/25 MCS workshop.