Gabe Cole Novoa
This is how you write an effective book on plotting.
There's a lot to love about this, not the least of which is that it is not at all prescriptivist. Brody understands that no one method will work perfectly for everyone, and that there are many ways to approach building a book, even using the same tools. Chock full of loads of examples of various structures and a helpful final chapter to give you an idea of where to begin, I found SAVE THE CAT! WRITES A NOVEL to be incredibly useful. I know I'll be going back to page through this one again and again as I plot and revise my work.
There were things I liked about this book and found helpful, and things I definitely didn't like.
Of the good, Story Genius pushed me to dig deeper into my characters in pre-writing than I usually do, and I found the exercise to be pretty helpful for brainstorming before I dive back into my partially-written WIP. It helped me generate some new ideas and make some connections where things were previously fuzzy.
That said, this book was very prescriptivist in a way I didn't appreciate. I'm always very leery of writing advice that claims a “my way or the highway” approach, and it was very critical of pantsers in a way that—even though I'm not a pantser—irked me. Much of the advice was wrapped in “you must do this or you will fail” type pressure which was not only unnecessary but obviously not true. No one writing technique works for everyone.
It also uncritically quoted Joyce Carol Oats (insert eyeroll emoji) and ended with a weird send off that claimed Harper Lee was hugely influential in the success of the civil rights movement with To Kill a Mockingbird? It was an odd, white savior-y way to end a book that was entirely unnecessary and left me frowning at the final pages.
So overall, this was okay. I'd say if you read it, only do so if you're able to ignore the prescriptivist pressure. There's some useful stuff in here, but it's not a book I'm going to recommend without caveats.
This was okay! There were some good and interesting ideas, and I appreciated the emphasis at the end about not getting so caught up in writing and productivity that you don't enjoy just..living. But there was also some prescriptivism that I didn't love, and some unacknowledged privilege that made some of the advice, to me, fall short.
On a neutral point: a lot of it was geared toward self-publishing which wasn't particularly useful for me, but others may definitely find that helpful.
This was okay. I was invested, it's a great study of “make everything terrible and then make it worse” and upping stakes and there was definitely lots of effective tension and action throughout, not to mention the voice and premise are absolutely unique.
But IDK. As a trans person, I'm not really an enormous fan of stories whose entire premise relies on how different boys are from girls and vice versa. There were some things I certainly appreciated about this book, but the gender stuff kind of killed it for me. YMMV.
