Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel by Lisa Cron
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Fun, clever, and full of insight. But also tricky, gimmicky, and kind of full of sh*t.
The book’s core premise is that your main character’s internal conflict and key misbelief should drive literally everything in your story. The author makes a great point about the centrality of personal, internal character growth as an essential element of effective storytelling. That’s my big takeaway, and it was worth the price of admission.
The author’s exposition on the failings both of Pantsing and Plotting is fantastic, if all too brief.
There is no brain science in this book. Or, if there is, it’s so thin and woo-woo that it might as well not be there. Don’t read this book for insights into evolution, cognitive processes, or anything scientific. The titular reference is supported only by a few pseudo-scientific statements that appear to have no basis in science.
The first third of the book contains a lot of infomercial style fluff about how the author is going to reveal the all important secret, and how it’s so important to know this secret, and and and… get to the secret, already! We already bought the book, so why the extended sales pitch?
And then there’s the 800 pound gorilla. This book purports to contain the secret ingredient to all great storytelling, the one secret that binds all good stories, the one approach that will make your stories good, and without which your writing will hopelessly and irredeemably suck. This secret is the only thing that matters. Good writing? Doesn’t matter. Good plot? Total window dressing. Setting? Genre? Even structure? These are, to quote the book, “the wrapping paper, not the gift.”
The Secret: All stories are entirely and exclusively about the protagonist’s inner emotional conflict. All of them. Full stop.
We’ve all encountered the chapters in writing books that talk about characters and their interior and external conflicts. The misbelief. The flaw. However it’s presented, the idea is out there and often discussed. The difference with Story Genius is that this idea is treated as the only idea worth treating at all.
Those Hercule Poirot murder mysteries by Agatha Christie? You thought they were about solving the murders? Ha! Not even a scintilla. The Martian was about surviving being stranded on a planet? Not in the least bit. And that story about the Hobbit? Neither hobbits, nor rings, nor Mordor have anything to do with that story. It could be about two amoebas in love and it would be exactly the same, but for a few trivial cosmetic details.
Ummm… I’m pretty sure that’s not true. Plot does matter. World building does matter. Themes other than how the protagonist feels about herself are possible and valid.
Note that this magic secret to writing was published in 2016. So, never mind that almost everything ever written, whether it sucked or not, came out before this book’s publication.
Fortunately, this book IS well written, notwithstanding the author’s dismissal of good writing as a factor in, ahem, writing. She’s clever and funny and rich with little moments of insights or chuckles. It’s a charming book that comes off as unpretentious in the text, despite the title and the back cover blurb and some hyperbole in the introduction.
In fact, I learned a lot and I’m quite glad to have read Story Genius. I’m excited to lend it to a friend.
More than that, I keep thinking about it, and I keep seeing internal conflicts that drive stories in ways I didn’t appreciate before. Those Hercule Poirot mysteries? The inner conflict is in the killer, and it’s always a juicy one. The Martian? It’s man against nature, and the protagonist must overcome himself as much as the harsh Martian environment to survive. Otherwise, it might as well be a technical manual for habitation tents. And that Hobbit? It was Bilbo’s transformation that made it a story, not all those elves.
Is Story Genius the first book to discover inner conflict as a key driving force in fiction? Of course not. But, somehow, it delivers the message in a way that I can’t forget or dismiss. This book will not by itself transmogrify me (or you) into a great writer overnight by teaching us some simple, hidden secret. But, I may never read or write fiction the same way again.
Thus, four stars.
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B. Warren Brown 