wandering_not_lost 's review for:

The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne

2.0

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I am annoyed that I have to give this book two stars instead of one. ANNOYED. For a book written by an editor, good lord did this book need edited. For clarity. For organization. To not sound like a bunch of blog posts cobbled together. To not repeat itself over and over and over and over and over. To tone down the Silence of the Lambs fanboying just a tick. To, perhaps, suggest that if you're going to say that genre-obligatory things are SUPER IMPORTANT that perhaps you might want to define what those are for all genres, not just the one that YOU like. And so you don't repeat yourself over and over. Did I say that already? It's catching.

Also, if you want to write anything other than thriller/action plots, he has very little to say but the most basic advice. He went on about how genre conventions and obligatory scenes are a must, and he covers what those are very comprehensively for action thrillers, gives passing flybys to it for other broad categories like romance or westerns, but says zero on it for scifi/fantasy. It's super obvious that he really didn't know about those other genres and wasn't going to bother to research them so he could speak about them.

So yeah, reading this book was terribly annoying, and I am CERTAIN that other books more clearly give the same advice he does on scenes, story structure, themes, etc. In fact, if you look at who he namedrops, you could just go read their books. But, I gave it two stars because I think for a certain kind of person that actually graphing out the theme progressions the way he describes would be useful. And because the scattered advice on story structure and progressing plots (despite the author's best efforts) gave me things to think about and got me plotting about my own work. So, yeah - grudging two stars.