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A review by josiahdegraaf
Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story by K.M. Weiland
5.0
I've read several books on writing before, including ones on story structure.
This book beats them all.
Pros:
Excellent advice on the overall story structure. I was familiar with the Three-Act structure before, as well as various ways of looking at it, such as Vogler's/Campbell's mythical writer's journey concepts. In my opinion, however, this book presents a much better structure that applies to more stories than Vogler's structure.
The wealth of examples used in the book does a lot in order to make all the concepts easily understandable--as well as seeing how well each of them work.
Scene structure was also excellent. I'd read a blog post before by Weiland about the whole scene-sequel idea/progression. But this book did an excellent job in introducing these concepts that I wasn't familiar with and showing how both of them matter, and how to do it well.
Cons:
While Weiland addresses areas how this advice applies to "pantsers" as well, IMO, this book is really most applicable to plotters. As a plotter, this book was amazingly beneficial for me. But I'm not sure it would help as much if I were a pantser.
Overall:
This book presents a great way of doing story structure that works really well. It's convinced me to try to follow this structure for future books that I work on. Highly recommended to anyone looking at delving more into story structure.
5 stars.
This book beats them all.
Pros:
Excellent advice on the overall story structure. I was familiar with the Three-Act structure before, as well as various ways of looking at it, such as Vogler's/Campbell's mythical writer's journey concepts. In my opinion, however, this book presents a much better structure that applies to more stories than Vogler's structure.
The wealth of examples used in the book does a lot in order to make all the concepts easily understandable--as well as seeing how well each of them work.
Scene structure was also excellent. I'd read a blog post before by Weiland about the whole scene-sequel idea/progression. But this book did an excellent job in introducing these concepts that I wasn't familiar with and showing how both of them matter, and how to do it well.
Cons:
While Weiland addresses areas how this advice applies to "pantsers" as well, IMO, this book is really most applicable to plotters. As a plotter, this book was amazingly beneficial for me. But I'm not sure it would help as much if I were a pantser.
Overall:
This book presents a great way of doing story structure that works really well. It's convinced me to try to follow this structure for future books that I work on. Highly recommended to anyone looking at delving more into story structure.
5 stars.