Book Review: Story Genius by Lisa Cron

ISBN: 1607748908
Published: August 9th, 2016
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Received: Blogging for Books
Read from September 12th to 18th, 2016
Synopsis from Goodreads:

Following on the heels of Lisa Cron's breakout first book, Wired for Story, this writing guide reveals how to use cognitive storytelling strategies to build a scene-by-scene blueprint for a riveting story.
Story Genius is a foolproof program that saves writers from penning hundreds of pages only to realize that something's not working and they have to start again. Informed by story consultant Lisa Cron's science-based insights into how story structure is built into the architecture of the brain, this guide shows writers how to plumb the nitty-gritty details of their raw idea to organically generate a story scene by scene. Once writers reach the end of Cron's program, they will have both a blueprint that works and plenty of compelling writing suitable for their finished novel--allowing them to write forward with confidence.

Review:

This book is unlike many of the writing books I've read in the past in that it lays out steps to take to follow a very specific writing process. Most of the books I've picked up about writing in the past offer general advice instead of laying out a direct method.

In the beginning, I was skeptical of how much information from Cron's book I would actually use, but by fairly early in, she had managed to win me over quite a bit. For one thing, I enjoy her writing style. It made just reading the book pleasurable. But, also, I enjoyed quite a lot of her ideas about how to brainstorm for the book, how to outline/blueprint using scene cards, and how to use those to write your story. It's a more detailed method than I have often used in the past, and her method sounds more organized than I often am about it all.

Needless to say, I was won over, and I have decided to start from scratch with a novel I was working on and was currently unhappy with. I'm going to trash what I had (not literally because I can't bring myself to delete so much work), and I'm going to start over with the method in this book. Actually, I've already started as we speak. It will be a fairly long process, of course, but we'll see how it all works out. Maybe I'll decide that it's too detailed for me and abandon it.

For now, though, I find this method appealing, and I also enjoy Cron's writing style. I would recommend this book to any other writers out there for both of those reasons. Her method won't be right for everyone, but I do think it could be very helpful, especially to newer writers who really need help with how to flesh out their plans for a story.

I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review.