Step 8: Minimalist Bull Plotting Exercise

How to start with the simplest version of your story—and then expand from there.

Commercial Fiction Club is a paid newsletter documenting the process of building a $1,000,000/year self-published fiction empire—starting from $0. If you want to make money from your fiction, and learn what’s working in real-time, this is for you. New posts every Friday.

Weekly Update

Here’s what I did this week:

• New Different Publishing website/Shopify store is almost done. Did 3rd round of website edits, waiting for final revisions.

• Received printing samples from new 3rd-party printing company (so I can handle shipping/fulfillment separately from Amazon—and integrate with TikTok Shop). Books look awesome! Print version of The Monster Deck looks sick.

• Wrote & recorded next chapter of my next LitRPG series/book, called Lumina. (This project is about 50% complete.)

• Audio team held a music recording session with live musicians to score The Monster Deck’s immersive audiobook. Going to be so cool! Can’t wait for it to be done.

Between Amazon banning my account (taking my book revenue to $0 for months in a row), and a lot of big startup costs over the past year self-funding the creation of these Immersive Audiobooks, fiction is still cash-flow negative for me. All good. Part of the journey. Targeting profitability by January, 2026.

Onwards we go.

Dear Fiction Writer,

I am obsessed with simplicity.

It’s a core belief of mine that all complexities in life, art, and science, are built on bedrocks of simplicity. And the simpler the core idea, the more likely that idea is to “scale.” Whereas the less simple the core idea, the more any “scaling” of that idea (aka: more complex versions) will not get stronger in meaning, but weaker. The complexity will create confusion.

For this reason, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to distill any idea I have down to its simplest components, first.

10 years of writing non-fiction taught me this.

Let me give you an example.

A lot of times, writers think that in order to communicate certain ideas, they need to write lots and lots of words. Beginners hate constraints. And if you tell a beginner, “You only have 200 words… say what you’re trying to say,” many will hee and haw and insist they can’t effectively communicate their idea in such little space. And they will argue that in order to fully “say what they’re trying to say,” they need more and more words: 2,000 words or 20,000 words or, in some cases, 200,000 words.

This is incorrect.

Even the most complex ideas can be summarized in a single sentence.

• “The earth revolves around the sun—not the other way around.”

• “Anti-fragile societies are not only resilient, but they thrive in chaos and disorder.”

• “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed.”

• “What gets measured gets managed. And what gets managed gets improved.”

Etc.

The nucleus of every idea can, and should, be distilled down into a single sentence or small paragraph. And as a good rule of thumb, if you cannot articulate the nucleus of your idea in such a small space, I promise… having “more space” will not help you. It will only “scale” the problem—making the unclear more unclear.

An example I walk non-fiction writers through often is this idea that everything is a list.

Any idea you have, you shouldn’t start with prose.

You should start with a bulleted list. Because if you can’t summarize the main ideas of what you’re trying to say in a bulleted list, then again, “more words” isn’t going to help you.

Bulleted lists are also a forcing function for “value.” They’re a way of stress-testing the density of your idea before you take the time to expand it. And I can prove it with a very simple example.

Let’s say two writers want to write an 800-word article on how to cut expenses to save an extra $200 per month.

Writer A makes a list of the advice he would give (in this article) in this bulleted list:

• “Step 1: You gotta watch your money.”

• “Step 2: You gotta try to spend less.”

• “Step 3: You gotta save more.”

And Writer B makes a list of the advice she would give (in this article) in this bulleted list:

• “Step 1: Call your cell phone provider and threaten to cancel. They will offer you discounts to keep you as a customer, which will bring your phone bill down.”

• “Step 2: Buy in bulk. When you see a sale of any repeat-purchase good, buy a year’s worth. You’ll end up saving more on a yearly basis if you take advantage of these discounts.”

• “Step 3: Don’t buy Starbucks. It’s crazy overpriced. Instead, make your coffee at home.”

Which article do you think a) has more clarity, and b) will be “more valuable?”

The second one. Obviously.

Now, do you think Writer A would have won if you’d given them “more words?” Of course not, and you should be able to see why. “More words” would have just “scaled” their weak, flimsy, non-specific nucleus of an idea. “More words” would have just made the small problem a bigger problem.

Which is why my entire philosophy on writing has become: if you can’t say it in a sentence or bulleted list, you won’t be able to say it in a paragraph. And if you can’t say it in a paragraph, you won’t be able to say it in a page, a chapter, or across an entire book.

Picasso’s Minimalist Bull

One of my favorite metaphors for the importance of simplicity is Picasso’s Minimalist Bull.

This is a series of drawings he did where, in each repetition, he removed unnecessary pieces—until eventually landing on a stick-figure of a bull. The idea here was to show that even the most complicated ideas (a fully drawn, shadowed, high-definition drawing of a bull) can still be communicated and understood with only a small handful of variables.

The reason I love this piece by Picasso is because it so perfectly summarizes the true skill of writing. Writing is not a game of complexity. It’s a game of simplicity. Because in order for additional layers of complexity to be understood, they must sit atop a simple, “scalable” idea. When this happens, complexity doesn’t lead to confusion. It leads to depth and dimension.

This is true in all writing, but I am learning it is especially true in fiction.

Because if you cannot summarize the entire “point” of your story in a single sentence, I promise… having 300,000 more words isn’t going to help make your story any clearer.

Writing Exercise: What’s Your Minimalist Bull?

With all the above in mind, here’s a writing exercise I’ve been doing for the past 2 years—specifically to practice this skill.