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chinney's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Tomlinson: Best book on writing I've read in years. Summarizes the reason why I might write---or not write. It's about what you want to say. Great plotting advice.
josiahdegraaf's review against another edition
4.0
This book is perhaps one of the best books to offer a clear, step-by-step plan for developing a theme throughout a story after Weiland's Crafting Character Arcs. While Weiland delves more into each plot point than Williams does, Williams does spend more time explaining how themes work to impact audiences and he goes more beyond the character arc than Weiland does.
My main critique of the book is that Williams argues that writers should start with the message they want to deliver. I would posit, however, that starting with a question often creates more meaningful themes since they encourage the writer and the reader to explore a given issue instead of coming to a pre-decided conclusion. Combined with that, Williams also focused a lot on crafting messages that will resonate with the audience. To a certain extent, his argument that themes lead to greater box office success was helpful and interesting; the danger, however, is that if you hyper-focus on an audience's moral preferences in the messages you decide to include in a story, you can too easily just end up preaching to the choir as opposed to coming up with a deeper and more meaningful truth to help them see.
As a result, I worry that some of Williams' methods would lead to simple themes. But he does give a lot of valuable advice on how to develop even simple themes well in a way that moves the audience.
Rating: 3.5-4 Stars (Good).
My main critique of the book is that Williams argues that writers should start with the message they want to deliver. I would posit, however, that starting with a question often creates more meaningful themes since they encourage the writer and the reader to explore a given issue instead of coming to a pre-decided conclusion. Combined with that, Williams also focused a lot on crafting messages that will resonate with the audience. To a certain extent, his argument that themes lead to greater box office success was helpful and interesting; the danger, however, is that if you hyper-focus on an audience's moral preferences in the messages you decide to include in a story, you can too easily just end up preaching to the choir as opposed to coming up with a deeper and more meaningful truth to help them see.
As a result, I worry that some of Williams' methods would lead to simple themes. But he does give a lot of valuable advice on how to develop even simple themes well in a way that moves the audience.
Rating: 3.5-4 Stars (Good).
shaun_mc's review against another edition
3.0
The first half of the book was nearly useless to me. I nearly gave up reading it, but it was the only book I could find on the subject, and reading it did help me to think about my writing. But then I got to part II which is where this book really proved its usefulness. I actually got from it exactly what I needed.
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