At the heart of any story are the characters, but characters are more than just paper cutouts on a page that do some actions. For a story to be truly engaging, characters needs to be fully fleshed out, including with a meaningful backstory that directly impacts the current story.
This book encourages writers to dive deeper into their characters, formulating backstory that has a direct impact on the current story being written. And this is done during the conceptual phase, because without understanding your characters and their motivations (and their internal beliefs), you will struggle to portray their actions correctly.
Thoughts from the BW Book Club
The book is worth reading, as long as you are prepared to recognize that there is a bit of a contradiction in the author's philosophy. This is one way to write a story, with exercises that encourage you to develop your depth of perception within the narrative. BUT this is not the only way to write a book, and the full blueprint methodology will not work for everyone.
Pantsers will find definite benefits in Parts 1 and 2, but use Part 3 as an editing/revision tool. Plotters… Enjoy! The concepts in this book will serve you well.
Please note that the BW Book Club also decided that there was no need to read Lisa Cron's first book, Wired for Story, as the concept of that first book were covered in the first part of this book.
(This book was reviewed by the BW Book Club in December 2022.)
This writing guide reveals how to use cognitive storytelling strategies to build a scene-by-scene blueprint for a riveting story.
It’s every novelist’s greatest fear: pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into writing hundreds of pages only to realize that their story has no sense of urgency, no internal logic, and so is a page one rewrite.
The prevailing wisdom in the writing community is that there are just two ways around this problem: pantsing (winging it) and plotting (focusing on the external plot). Story coach Lisa Cron has spent her career discovering why these methods don’t work and coming up with a powerful alternative, based on the science behind what our brains are wired to crave in every story we read (and it’s not what you think).
In Story Genius, Cron takes you, step-by-step, through the creation of a novel from the first glimmer of an idea, to a complete multilayered blueprint—including fully realized scenes—that evolves into a first draft with the authority, richness, and command of a riveting sixth or seventh draft.