The best writing book ever
It’s every writer’s greatest fear—pouring blood, sweat, and tears into writing hundreds of pages only to realize the story has no sense of urgency and no internal logic, so it’s a complete do-over.
The prevailing wisdom in the writing community is that there are just two ways around this problem: pantsing (winging it) and plotting (focusing on the external plot). Story coach Lisa Cron has spent decades discovering why these methods rarely work and coming up with a powerful alternative…
In this revolutionary guide, Cron helps you crack the story code…so you’ll end up with a first draft that has the authority, richness, and command of a sixth or seventh.
That’s a slightly truncated version of the back cover blurb to the best writing book ever, IMHO - Story Genuis by Lisa Cron.
When I came back to fiction writing after a too long hiatus (see Origin Story here for how the hell that happened), I scoured the internet and the library for writing books that would help me to shape this burning desire I had building within me.
I’ve got parts of me that LOVE structure. A plan. A colour coded calendar of steps. A process. A framework. Something that feels like some kind of certainty.
The idea of opening up a blank notebook or an empty Word document and writing into the complete and utter unknown, sends these parts into a spin.
They’re like, ‘How can you go off on a big hike without a map? Look at that big mountain you want to scale. You need a map, a compass and plenty of snacks, at the very least.’
I get it uncertainty is difficult
So they led me in the direction of plotting rather than pantsing. I read some very good, in theory, plotting books that said:
Conduct long, convoluted character interviews - you need to know what your character eats for breakfast (really?)
Map out your setting and do all the world building - you need to know where this is all happening (okay)
Create a scene list and make sure it follows one of those beat sheets - three or four story acts (but which one shall I follow?)
Here was the problem with that approach. The more I tried to map things out, the more this happened:
I felt constrained, hemmed in, constricted
You see I have other parts that don’t like to necessarily follow rules. They want some creative agency to play and follow their own way. They want to rebel sometimes - if it suits them.
They didn’t want to know what the main character eats for breakfast. They felt like if that was relevant it would come up as the story progressed.
I worried that I had to get this outline right
I had parts who were only prepared to spend all this time outlining if we got it right. Like not wrong. They don’t like being wrong.
And I’ve got parts who don’t like wasting time. The promise of the outline was we’d be more efficient. If outlining could short track this whole writing a book thing they were in. But again there was pressure to get it right.
I got too much in my head
One thing I’ve learnt about the creative process is that our head, minds, believe they can write the book. They want to take over. My thinking parts are convinced they know the best story to write and the best way to do it.
They don’t. Creativity does require some thinking, analysis, review etc. But from my experience, it’s not the most important quality and it’s almost never welcome in the beginning.
When I was too much in my head, my intuitive gifts got blocked. The story that was trying to come through me, couldn’t.
It wasn’t until I stopped thinking so much and instead started listening, that things changed. (Read more about listening, not thinking here).
Here was the dilemma: I didn’t want to fully pants or plot. I wanted a process that blended the best of both.
Enter Lisa Cron’s, Story Genius. The woman is a genius.
It’s not pantsing or plotting. It’s digging deep into the depths of your story before you begin and then writing forward in a compelling, cause and effect way.
It is the best process ever.
I trained as a psychologist so what’s going on behind behaviour is a fascination.
Story Genius understands that, which is why it gets us to go beyond plot to our protagonist’s deepest desires and struggles.
Not what they eat for breakfast but why they eat what they eat for breakfast - if it’s relevant for our readers to know about their breakfast.
Here are some of the key points that Lisa makes in her genius book.
Story is about the character’s internal struggle. What they need to work out internally to deal with the external struggle
Your character’s internal struggle is thought based - story is the difference between what your character is saying out loud and what they’re really thinking in their head
Anything that doesn’t impact on their internal struggle shouldn’t be in the book
The WHY a character does what they do is in their past (this is true for all of us BTW)
We need to understand who the character is, not what happens to them
We need to know:
Their deep seated desire, what they’ve always longed for
A defining misbelief that stands in the way of them meeting their desire
Plot makes your character’s unconscious beliefs and desire, conscious
Each scene must be inevitable
Keep asking WHY to get to the depth of the scene and the story
As far as story goes, there are three expectations:
Your story will make a point about human nature, what makes people tick
An external problem will trigger an internal change
The protagonist will be vulnerable, have a past and want something
Story Genius includes a process for working with these ideas
My rebel parts, of course, hacked her process and came up with a version of my own that didn’t necessarily follow all the steps in the way described but certainly did embrace the premise of it all.
I’ve written two books using this hacked process and it almost felt like they were writing themselves.
It took commitment and some effort, of course, but I didn’t feel like I was writing them all by myself. There were forces that were helping, supporting me.
I got out of my own way and I worked with the story. We were writing together.
That’s why I rate Lisa Cron’s Story Genius as the best writing book ever.