Story Genius

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.

The content about developing a character-driven story is good and interesting. The “brain science” is a barely-there gimmick. The author's quippy writing and lengthy case study of her friend's inane dognapping novel get old very quickly. A mixed bag to be taken with a pinch of salt, like all writing books.

I have mixed feelings about this book. The first half felt definitely stronger than the second. First off, there is very little brain science in this one, if anything. I am also wary of books and authors that tell you there is one way and one way only to do things correctly, and that "real writers would never do xyz". But I simply ignored all that stuff and tried to focus on what felt useful to me.

That said, the method presented in this book resonated very well with me. It's not too far off from what I was already doing, but it allowed me to bring in more structure and understanding to my writing process. Funnily enough, whenever I didn't feel like doing one of the exercises the author suggests - either because I was tired, or because I didn't think it would actually matter to this silly, little, definitely not serious thing I'm writing - I pushed myself to do them and surprise, surprise: they turned out to be very useful. They forced me to reconsider some aspects and also allowed me to see connections I was blind to before.

Unfortunately my biggest pain point with this book is the case study the author uses throughout the entire book to showcase her method at work. No shame to the novelist who agreed to lay bare her early thought process for her novel but, while initially the development of that story sounded worth paying attention to, I'm under the impression that in order to follow Lisa Cron's method the story took weirder and weirder turns. And while seeing how a writer applies the method to her own writing is quite interesting, the last 20% of this book is basically only focused on that, and by that point I didn't care - the story was not compelling, not relatable, it really just felt very weird.

The author also ends up reiterating the same concepts over and over. While repetita iuvant for sure, at some point it felt less like a way to drill the concepts into the reader's brain and more as a way to dilute the word count (and yeah, I think this book is way too long for what it actually does).

All in all, there are really good insights in this book and I'm glad to have read it as it sparked a lot of thoughts for my writing. I won't be taking this method as a religion but I've definitely found several valuable tools I enjoy.