Story-writing Books

Started by eri0o, Tue 31/03/2020 22:59:08

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eri0o

I recently read some books on StoryWriting, so I would like to share them and possibly see if there are more that are recommended. If you guys have more recommendations on books for story writing be it for Screenwriting or for Videogames, I would be interested on opinions too!



The Anatomy of Story - John Truby

This is a medium-sized, well-written book, that will give multiple tools to help you layout your story. This is a book that I keep by my side on the computer, so I can consult it when writing a narrative. It does very short, one-sentence analysis of multiple concepts in different movies to help you understand the concept. It's also a great book to give you vocabulary. I thought it was a good compromise between the menacing huge Robert McCree's Story and the short and quick Syd Field's Screenplay. It's a book I finding myself picking up more often than not.

Screenplay - Syd Field

This is a good book, a bit short, and focused on the three-act structure strategy. This book gave me my first experience of reading a script and analyzing it. Overall, I find it is a good book to read at the start, it will call you to action, meaning, to read scripts of movies you like. Those can usually be found on libraries if you look into, but you can also find the pdf online if you search. Reading scripts of movies you have watched and liked is a good exercise to understand how to write your story before executing, but after having it planned.

Notes on Directing - Frank Hauser & Russel Reich

This is a brief book, with very quick tips on both leading a project and executing a story, it's cool how a lot of stuff from directing a play can be translated to directing a game. Even though the text of each note is very short, I don't recommend to read it when starting, read some other books to build vocabulary and understanding of the craft, then pick this up on a slow afternoon for a short read to help you solidify the lessons you have gotten so far.

Creating Character Arcs - K. M. Weiland

This is a good book if you need help writing good characters. It also has a  nice audiobook to pair with - most Storywriting books are read by their authors, but not this one, this has an actual professional audiobook reader that makes the experience good! This is a good book to read from start to end. The focus here is the characters since the characters exist in a different time and space than your story is told, you can kind of figure them out more easily, then go to figure out your story using tools from Screenplay and Anatomy of Story, and then come back to this book to figure out how you are going to pick the important bits from the characters arcs. This is a well written, well-organized book, with examples that are well explained.

Writing Vivid Settings - Rayne Hall

This is the only other book on this list that the audiobook is good, so you can pick it up too. This is the guide on how to write Look Ats in Adventure Games. It will give a lot for you to ponder. To me, this book clicked after reading chapter 8. After that, I finished the book, and read it again. If you find yourself drifting trying to understand what is the point, skip to chapter 8, then read chapter 7, and then read the book again. This is a good book, the way it's structured is boring and I also don't think the organization is the best. But the content is solid and I will say this is the one that is very very important when making a game.

Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman Writer's Guide Thesaurus collection

I am grouping here six books:

  • The Emotional Wound Thesaurus
  • The Urban Setting Thesaurus
  • The Rural Setting Thesaurus
  • The Positive Trait Thesaurus
  • The Negative Trait Thesaurus
  • The Emotion Thesaurus

When you are building your story, at some points you are either going to hit blanks or use some placeholders in your characters and in your story that will be hard to be replaced with an actual story relevant things. These are collections of really useful things. These books are to the point, well written, and they all have some initial chapters that help you understand how to use the collection that will follow. They will NOT give you a story from the void, but if you have something and need help filling the voids, these are good. I love the Emotional Wounds Thesaurus - A writer's guide to Psychological Trauma, and exploring the Urban Setting Thesaurus is fun too. My only regret is I got them digital (because I wanted to be able to search their texts) but now I think having them in paper format would be much more fun to browse and that some of they may have found a spot near my PC too to be browsed from time to time.

Psychology for Screenwriters - Wiliam Indick

Part One of this book is based on Freudian psychology. I read it with a fit of anger because the stuff Freud says falls flat to me. Overall even when considering other chapters a lot of the notions described felt dated, as the movies used to exemplify concepts. I didn't like this book overall, the tips are more useful if you are polishing some already existing character and I think there are better books for that. This is money I spent I wish I didn't. Reading this book felt like forever.

Write Your Novel from the Middle - James Scott Bell

The audiobook is terrible, don't get that, get the book and read. Also, the author tries too much to sell you his idea of writing the novel from the middle, in a constant sales pitch that is kinda nonsense since you already committed and bought the book. If you can ignore this, then this is a solid book with good advice to help you start! If you have watched Parasite and played Portal, you know the importance of the midpoint on your story. I liked this book, but I think it could be made shorter and again, not sure about how the book is organized. Still, if you are staring at a blank page, get this book.

Stupot

Stephen King’s On Writing is a fantastic read if nothing else. Very inspiring. I actually had two copies of it at one point.


TheFrighter


Intersting!

Quote from: eri0o on Tue 31/03/2020 22:59:08
If you guys have more recommendations on books for story writing be it for Screenwriting or for Videogames, I would be interested on opinions too!

This is probably unrelated, but friends of mine found useful Akira Toriyama's How to do Manga 'cause videogames are more similar to comic books than novel. It's just an opinion, however.  ;)

_

eri0o

Quote from: Stupot on Wed 01/04/2020 03:40:32
Stephen King’s On Writing is a fantastic read if nothing else. Very inspiring. I actually had two copies of it at one point.

I have On Writing at my home too, I like it as a motivational book! I didn't got much actual lessons from it other than keep going. But it's an interesting book!

Quote from: Laura Hunt on Wed 01/04/2020 06:31:56
Ohhh, are you going to get into narrative design? :)

Because narratives survives the test of time, this is a skill that I can study and learn and accumulate knowledge, with books to get passive knowledge, and Writing short stories, or evolving writing prompts; I will still practice coding, but because I am working from home, I need stuff I can practice away from my computer to keep sane. So yeah. :)

Quote from: TheFrighter on Wed 01/04/2020 08:13:49
This is probably unrelated, but friends of mine found useful Akira Toriyama's How to do Manga 'cause videogames are more similar to comic books than novel. It's just an opinion, however.  ;)

The books I mentioned they are a mix of aligning with Script/Screenwriting, and plays and movies are visual mediums, vivid settings is the only completely focused on Novels, but it can be applied to screenwriting or game writing or whatever. I will do check this one too, just maybe the title wasn't obvious, but I meant writing stories, not focused on the final media that will present your story.

KyriakosCH

I think that the better way to learn how to write is to read a lot of books which interest you. Eg if you are into horror you might like Lovecraft, Machen, De Maupassant, maybe also ETA Hoffmann etc.

It is what I suggest, in general, in my own literary seminar (which isn't available in english, so this isn't a self-promotion) ^_^
This is the Way - A dark allegory. My Twitter!  My Youtube!

Mandle

#6
Quote from: Stupot on Wed 01/04/2020 03:40:32
Stephen King’s On Writing is a fantastic read if nothing else. Very inspiring. I actually had two copies of it at one point.

Yup... King really demystifies the craft of writing in this book. He touches a little on the art of it, but art is subjective and the talent to write arty stuff is probably unobtainable unless you naturally posses it or try to fake it. He really concentrates on the craft of it and presents a nuts-and-bolts guide to how to write if you really want to.

Ponch

I'd also recommend Blake Snyder's Save The Cat.

The Great Underground Empire

Story by Robert McKee is mind-blowing.  He uses film stories, but the way he analyzes story structure, breaks down the beats of well-paced story sequences, etc...it'll make you understand story and look at your writing process in a whole new way.

I say this as someone who has read SO MANY books by writers who never made it as writers, so they wrote writing books about something they weren't successful at.  You see the same advice over and over about plot structure and characterization, and it usually amounts to nothing more than "just try really hard to be creative guys, okay??  TRUST YOURSELF AND FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS OK? GUYS?? OK???"

Even super awesome author Neil Gaiman fell prey to this - yes, he's amazing and successful and I love all his works.  But he produced a Masterclass on writing that's the same old fluff you read in every amateur book on writing.  He's great at what he does, but didn't have anything new to say, but wanted to say it anyways.

McKee's book isn't like that.  It's a genuine masterwork, like when Scott McCloud broke down comics.

eri0o

Hey, Just finished Lisa Cron's Story Genius, alternated between reading and listening the audio book. It's a pretty interesting one. It does goes over some topics that were already hammered by other books but it has interesting examples and really digs in the inner journey the character goes through. I think it could explain more on connecting the inner journey to the external observable plot, but overall, it's pretty interesting and I recommend. The audio book VA is really good too, the listening is very nice!

Snarky

I also read Story Genius a while back. A lot of the principles are familiar (e.g. to focus on story meaning rather than mere plot), but I nevertheless thought it was very interesting and had a nicely actionable approach with some good exercises. I liked the focus on character motivation and (what Cron calls) the main character's "misbelief"â€"i.e. the flaw that drives them, determines how they relate to the world, and probably causes most of their problems.

I did feel that its precepts will tend to produce one pretty specific type of novel, particularly because Cron takes it as a universal truth that every aspect of character is grounded in backstory: that it must be explained by some past event. So many of the exercises are about writing biographical flashbacks! I think that more or less guarantees that you'll end up with books about how events (especially from childhood) shape and reveal a person's personality, and how that in turn determines the course of their life.

I don't think every good novel has to follow this template, much less the specific writing process Cron lays out. At the same time, it certainly seems to apply to a lot of good books. For example, I just read and enjoyed Unbecoming by Rebecca Scherm, and it fits the Story Genius analysis to a tee.

Spoiler
Told in dual timelines, Unbecoming follows Grace as a kid and teenager growing up in Tennessee, and as young woman living under a false name in Paris, in hiding. The story gradually circles in on the heist-gone-wrong that sent her into exile and her husband and their friends to prison, to reveal what happened and why, and what the repercussions are going to be when the past catches up with her. But the real mystery of the book is who Grace really is, inside, and every part of the story speaks to that in some way or another.
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eri0o

I've rewatched the movie Contact, and it's interesting that compared to the book, it really is more focused and appears to reuse the same principles - as the focus in one character and the trimming of things that doesn't work in telling the main character internal journey.

I understand what you mean about type - like LotR really doesn't fit this type. But nonetheless, I feel it can be applied on top of in development stories to enhance it's message or meaning.

The background aspect you mention on the character is referred as the characters ghost in other books on writing. And the misbelief is something to power the change in point of view - to provide character growth.

Snarky

Quote from: eri0o on Mon 11/07/2022 13:28:54
I've rewatched the movie Contact, and it's interesting that compared to the book, it really is more focused and appears to reuse the same principles - as the focus in one character and the trimming of things that doesn't work in telling the main character internal journey.

By some funky synchronicity, I also just read this oral history of the making of Contact yesterday, and I was thinking about how some of the character development work they did on Ellie (and particularly the focus on the father-daughter relationship in the movie) really resonates with Story Genius.

Quote from: eri0o on Mon 11/07/2022 13:28:54
I understand what you mean about type - like LotR really doesn't fit this type.

Yeah, or, like, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Or Crash. Or The Lord of the Flies. Or Catch-22. Or most novels by Wodehouse (ignoring callbacks)… I feel like there are a ton of novels that are, in some sense, "present tense": they take their characters as they find them, and follow them through some period of time, without delving into a whole lot of backstory or questions about what made them the people they are. (Not that such details are always omitted completely, but they are a very small part of the work and of the character portraits.)

Even a novel such as Rebecca, which is all about unraveling the past and uncovering the true personalities of the characters involved, doesn't really give us any formative events for our main character, the second Mrs. De Winter. The Left Hand of Darkness is similar. Genly Ai is the main character and the one who undergoes the main character arc, but his background is not particularly interesting, and Le Guin only paints it in broad strokes. Estraven's past and how it brought them to the point of who they are in the book and the choices they make is far more significant, but they are only a secondary protagonist (not like in Sherlock Holmes or The Great Gatsby where the point-of-view character is only an observer while the protagonist is someone else).

Quote from: eri0o on Mon 11/07/2022 13:28:54
The background aspect you mention on the character is referred as the characters ghost in other books on writing. And the misbelief is something to power the change in point of view - to provide character growth.

I think I'm remembering correctly that Cron makes the point that character growth is not universally necessary. As long as the main character is confronted with their misbelief, failing to change is also a valid outcome.

Snarky

Oh, and another thing I thought was interesting was her claim that stories are interesting because humans are wired to try to figure out what other people will do (for our own safety and survival), which necessarily means understanding why they do what they do, so that stories are little brain puzzles of evaluating situations and characters (offering little doses of endorphins by paying off our expectations or by surprising us). That makes a lot of sense to me, and I think that just keeping that in mind can help you zero in on what makes for a compelling story.

eri0o

Snarky! I never answered you! Just wanted to say thank you for sending me that article on Contact, I read it more than once after, and went and watched the movie again! It had a lot of interesting information!

About the story writing, @Ponch, I just now got me Save the cat, haven't read it yet. Had a hectic month moving, getting everything figured out in the new place, hope to catch to it soon!

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