Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere)

Pluses: Her emphasis on what characters feel, believe, and want, and the importance of having that be what drives the events of your story, makes deep sense to me. The exercises on writing backstory were interesting and useful to me.

Minuses: She's very insistent that this is the only way for a successful novel to be, whatever its genre, and I don't buy that. Agatha Christie's novels do not turn on Hercule Poirot realizing that some core belief of his needs to be revised; among other things, there's no way that he could go through that many dozens of changes of heart -- she wrote a lot of those books. To give another example, books don't necessarily have a single protagonist.

She's got a very specific process for organizing your work and ideas and developing your novel (and she's talking exclusively about novels, not addressing shorter forms directly) that I don't think will work for me and the things I write. The fact that all her ideas about how belief and feeling drives action are kind of embedded in a series of steps to take, down to what folders (physical or virtual) you should use to organize your work in progress, makes it hard to me to take what I need and leave the rest.

The example novel that's being developed to show us how the process goes doesn't impress me. I would not consider reading the resulting book.

And some of what she does doesn't really apply to fan fiction, which is mostly what I write, but that's not necessarily a strike against her. She should be evaluated on whether she's made a good guide to writing a novel, because that's what she set out to do.

I don't lover her writing -- a lot of the analogies she uses to sell her writing points seem overblown and unnecessarily complex.

So, I think I've gotten benefits from reading this book that will make me a better writer. But I didn't love reading it, and if I were setting out to write a novel I don['t think I would be following her methodology to the letter (and she's so detailed that modifying it feels tricky, plus it bumps up against some of my black and white thinking).

First, the positives: this book was a good way to get myself in a creative mindset. It didn't offer any mind-blowing insights, but it did help me refresh and rearrange my thinking about some of the stories I currently have haunting the halls of my mental house of ideas.

The reference to brain science in the title feels a bit overstated. This book contains brain science the same way that a can of La Croix tastes like fruit juice. Still, it goes down easy and might have some useful, if fundamental, stratagems to get you out of a writing fix.

The worst part of this book, by far, is the example novel she includes throughout. Yes, it mechanically satisfies Cron's criteria for a story: aiming for a specific narrative point, answering why everything is happening, establishing clear cause and effect on a scene-by-scene level, etc., and it's useful from that perspective.

The problem is that it's a bad book about a woman who dislikes dogs who proceeds to dog-nap a famous pooch, all written by an author who doesn't have any understanding of television production! I did my best to tune it out and only grind my teeth a little as I listened to this book on audio.

Honestly, I could still see myself going through a physical version of this book and taking notes on the homework assignments she gives at the end of every chapter, but the points I summarized above are probably the most insightful takeaways, and they aren't unique to this author.