My Year in Books – The Craft of Writing

I’m not a huge fan of books on writing that are long on discussion and short on showing. I can take the chat if somewhere all along the line I am encouraged to think with a pen in my hand.

In my book Back to Creative Writing School I have a a suspense template that helps you feel your way into the rhythmic flow of a story line. It doesn’t improve writing skills (the word template is a clue), but through the actual writing process questions about plot and structure emarge and need to be answered.

Writing exercises are not equal though. I long ago went off lists of story prompts that read like a masochist’s prayer: you are lost in a forest and it’s getting dark; you live in a world where no one has sex; you cannot remember your own name…Most writers don’t need a generator to churn out ideas: they want to discover ways of make the idea they already have live on the page.

I have two books that I’d like to recommend. The first is The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Mass, a New York literary agent. To be fair, I didn’t buy this book in 2023, but I did re-read this year so I think it counts. Actually, I think I re-read every year.

Read this after writing at least one full draft of your story. Be prepared. Maass may make you change your mind about your story, or the response you want from the reader, but that’s ok because you will be a better storyteller because of it. His exercises are long and written in such way that they can be applied to almost anything you’re working on.

Here’s an extract from a fairly typical Maass exercise about your protagonist. .

What is the big change he must go through? Whom will he become? Describe that new self. Now work backward. Define the old self, the one will meet at the story’s beginning. What key behaviour will we see? How will you know that your protagonist is happy with her old self? Who validates and encourages the old self? What’s good about being stuck?

What’s the first glimmer of the need to change? Find that moment. If it’s an observation, that’s fine. If possible, turn it into an event. How does the old self fail? What tells your protagonist that there must be some away?

Chapter Six The reader’s emotional journey

And now to the second book – Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell them by John Yorke, who has worked extensively in television drama as a screenwriter and as a commissioning producer for the BBC and Channel Four.

This is a fascinating and insightful exploration of why we crave stories and how they all follow a similar powerful pattern. It is academic enough to help if you’re working on a Masters or Ph.D. and practical enough to engage the new writer who wants to know how hook the reader.

If you’re writing for film or television the story is King. If you are writing a novel it should be king, but sometimes we lose sight of that. Yorke reveals common tropes, themes and ideas that you may want use in your own work because time and time again they have succeeded in keeping the reader hanging in there, turning the page or pressing the on button.

It doesn’t contain any exercises, not as such, but it does have lots of well thought out strategies that you can apply to your own work. I made a mistake, however, I listened to it as an audio book.
Do not do this.
You need to dip in and out, turn down corners and highlight sections. Sometimes only a real physical book will and this is one of them.