Theme and Strategy: How to Build a Strong, Narrative Structure to Help Your Fiction Stand Tall, Run Fast, Hit Hard, and Soar to Success (Elements of Fiction Writing)
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Theme and Strategy: How to Build a Strong, Narrative Structure to Help Your Fiction Stand Tall, Run Fast, Hit Hard, and Soar to Success (Elements of Fiction Writing) - Customer Reviews, Information, Ratings, and Prices
Theme and Strategy: How to Build a Strong, Narrative Structure to Help Your Fiction Stand Tall, Run Fast, Hit Hard, and Soar to Success (Elements of Fiction Writing)
This book is written for the writer who has solid writing skills (description, dialog, tone, etc.) and a solid idea or set of ideas but can't decide how to convey those ideas. In other words, you have a solid feel for the characters, and you know at least your major plot turns, but you have specific, underlying ideas you want to convey, and you're not sure how to effectively express them. Essentially, it's for the author who's trying to write more than a basic thriller or other escapist novel (and he gives... more info
Don't say I didn't warn you:
This book is subtitled how to build a strong narrative structure. In fact, the book is not about structure at all. It is about pattern-a different thing. And even the discussion of pattern is a mishmash: "Pattern in Strategy, Pattern of Audience, Pattern in Structure, Pattern in Plot, Pattern in Action, Pattern in Character, Pattern in Thought, Pattern in Place, Patterns in Style." (This is the table of contents.) The statements in each chapter are equally vague: "Strategy is both map and journey." You... more info
Quality overview of narrative structure:
I have to take exception with the two previous reviewers who claim "Theme and Strategy" is merely okay. Although the book is geared to beginners (like most in this series), it nonetheless unfolds the critical aspects of structure, which will help any aspiring writer take their work to a new level. The mastery of narrative structure is perhaps the most crucial element to any work of narrative fiction, therefore the better a writer understands it the better prepared that writer will be to turn out a quality... more info
His other book is better...:
This book is ok. It talks from a top-down viewpoint instead of getting into the nitty-gritty of plotting. A very large portion of the book is in Tobias sharing pieces of literature as examples to support his ideas/story analysis. This was good and bad. Good because it seemed to give credibility to what he was saying but Bad because if you remove the examples he could have presented all his points on two or three pages.
He touches briefly (even with an appendix in the back) on the 36 different plot... more info
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