Story Genius

If I could give this a 0, I would. This book wasted my time and robbed my brain of off its creativity with the very firm suggestion that EVERY NOVEL (no matter the genre) has ONE protagonist and follows their development. Okay, then how do you explain Game of Thrones which has multiple protagonists? Or Girl, Woman, Other which won the 2019 Booker? Or Normal People, which has two protagonist and doesn’t have just one misbelief but multiple. If you wanna create one-dimensional characters, Caron’s advice would be great; she erects a black and white formula which works for you know, LSAT Logical Reasoning sections not a novel. Creative writing has to come from a very intimate part of the author, it can’t be this straightforward and it never is. Writers have different ways of approaching, you simply can’t just say EVERY SUCCESSFUL BOOK follows this method. I suggest people listen to an interview by Hanya Yanaghira, author of Little Life — she gives solid advice — or you know, use suggestions from fiction writers who have successfully written a fiction novel, which, Cron hasn’t and she admits it too. Plus, the novel by Jess Nath which is used to repeatedly explain everything in this book, is itself just bland and boring and not something I would read anyway so I regretted this promising “brain science” genius, master of spewing big words confidently to essentially only sell a book to beginning writers. Cron just cuts and pastes some opinions from scientists — which you can find on Google — to prove her points, which by the way are not unique at all. If you wanna waste your money like I did, I’d say go ahead. If not, here’s Cron’s point for you to decide if this is worth it: every novel is character-driven, concentrating on the third rail which is the character’s internal struggle and development, and the external plot of the novel drives this development, and yeah obviously the motivations, actions, consequences and realizations should “logically follow.” If you’ve read books, chances are you already know that so don’t fall prey to this sort of manipulative marketing. Save your money and read another book or sth jeez.