Structuring Your Novel

I did not finish this audiobook. While her book on character arcs was very informative and helpful, this one started too far into the basics for my liking. If you're wanting to get started with writing but have no idea where to start, this book is for you. Anyone who has a book or two under their belt would do better with a different one.

Compared with K.M.'s free writing guide “5 Secrets to Story Structure”, this book is packed with examples from literature and film to illustrate the different parts of a novel. It has a heavy-duty feel to it, more akin to a reference book than something to be read in one sitting.

Upon finishing the section on the resolution, I wondered why I had only finished half of the book. It turns out that the rest of the book talks about effective scenes and sentences, and I wanted to bludgeon myself for thinking, “I didn't see that coming.”

Decent. Nothing I'd take as dogma but listening to it in the context of the story I've been trying to get out forever has I think helped me get over some of the problems I've had with the pace etc of what I've written and sketched out. There's some confusion - three acts overlaid on a four-quarter breakdown is a bit awkward - and the last chapter (“make sure your verb matches with your subject” etc) was hilariously useless. But the points about how to structure the major plot points etc, with a lot of flexibility in what those really are, gave me some decent food for thought. Also it's short so it wasn't a huge commitment. We'll see if the effect it's had on my thinking lasts in any noticeable way.

The book started off strong with solid advice. It did a great job of organizing some simple, yet crucial details. Somewhere around part three is about structuring your sentence and that's where it started to drag for me.