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    Story Trumps Structure: How to Write Unforgettable Fiction by Breaking the Rules
    Unavailable
    Story Trumps Structure: How to Write Unforgettable Fiction by Breaking the Rules
    Unavailable
    Story Trumps Structure: How to Write Unforgettable Fiction by Breaking the Rules
    Ebook351 pages5 hours

    Story Trumps Structure: How to Write Unforgettable Fiction by Breaking the Rules

    By Steven James

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Don't limit your fiction - LIBERATE IT

    All too often, following the "rules" of writing can constrict rather than inspire you. With Story Trumps Structure, you can shed those rules - about three-act structure, rising action, outlining, and more - to craft your most powerful, emotional, and gripping stories.

    Award-winning novelist Steven James explains how to trust the narrative process to make your story believable, compelling, and engaging, and debunks the common myths that hold writers back from creating their best work.

    • Ditch your outline and learn to write organically.
    • Set up promises for readers - and deliver on them.
    • Discover how to craft a satisfying climax.
    • Master the subtleties of characterization.
    • Add mind-blowing twists to your fiction.
    When you focus on what lies at the heart of story - tension, desire, crisis, escalation, struggle, discovery - rather than plot templates and formulas, you'll begin to break out of the box and write fiction that resonates with your readers. Story Trumps Structure will transform the way you think about stories and the way you write them, forever.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWriter's Digest Books
    Release dateApr 29, 2014
    ISBN9781599636559
    Unavailable
    Story Trumps Structure: How to Write Unforgettable Fiction by Breaking the Rules
    Author

    Steven James

    Steven James is the critically acclaimed, national bestselling author of sixteen novels. His work has been optioned by ABC Studios and praised by Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, the New York Journal of Books, and many others. His pulse-pounding, award-winning thrillers are known for their intricate storylines and insightful explorations of good and evil.  When he’s not working on his next book, he’s either teaching master classes on writing throughout the country, trail running, or sneaking off to catch a matinee.

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    Reviews for Story Trumps Structure

    4/5

    17 ratings4 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The two main points of this book are (1) all good stories involve things that go wrong and (2) you should not write an outline of your book and try to stick to it. He also has other important ideas that will help you write an entertaining book, but those are the most important. His point is that a good story, with conflicts, obstacles, and setbacks, is much more important than things like an arbitrary three-act structure or a set number of words.

      I liked this book even though I'm an outliner. I use the Scrivener app, and enjoy planning out the plot in advance. His objection is that doing it that way may cause you to write your story in an unnatural way simply to have it conform to the outline. For example, you may have a character do something unrealistic just to get to a particular situation in a scene that you've outlined.

      I'm not too concerned, because I am willing to change the outline as I go, and as the story develops. However, I can see his point because it might be hard for you to discard a scene you like simply because it would cause a violation of cause and effect. It's a warning that I keep in mind as I write.

      There are plenty of other practical tips such as how to polish your work and how to avoid or fix plot holes.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I read this with a couple of other authors—we'd do three chapters a week and get together over VOIP on Sundays to discuss it. We all found Story Trumps Structure extremely useful, especially since we all had projects going that we could apply the information to. (My copy is stuffed with Post it Notes now; I have to dig through it at some point to pull out all the ones pertaining to the book I'm revising.)

      The only complaint we had was the tone from time to time. Mr. James can be very...adamant about his opinions. If you're a plotter (like me), you'll be disgruntled a lot through the first half of the book as he goes out of his way to tell you why You're Doing It Wrong. He also takes a brief moment to crap on literary fiction and self-publishers. And for a while you might be wondering why a book on "story" trumping "structure" is focusing so much on what looks like structure.

      If you can look past that, though, there is a lot of great advice here to help you recognize, diagnose, and solve story problems, such as places where your story drags or character believability is "off." His explanations are clear and easy to grasp. I've already recommended it to several people. I think it's a very helpful book for writers—though not so much beginning writers. I wouldn't make this your first writing book. The authors I read this with agreed that you might want to have a novel under your belt already before you read this guide.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This is one book writers need to read. This should be on the bookshelf of all new writers.
    • 5/5
      An excellent book for writers of genre fiction, and though it probably skews toward suspense or thriller writing, the advice applies to every kind of fiction. I found it refreshing not to have to plod through yet another iteration of all the classic advice about plot; though nothing in this contradicts the standard view, it is said in a way that I am able to use more effectively. While reading it, I understood what I needed to do in order to revise a work in progress and make it much more effective.