Thank you, Robert Kernan. You're a master. Your guidance in the use of archetypes (and your plot arc) greatly inform my start on the second novel of a quartet I am writing. The first book, which comes out in harcover by a royalty-paying house next month, took five years to write in a non-structured fashion. Following your excellent model for structuring, I'm betting my second book will be far better than my first and will be ready to print in less than four months.
Does he know what he is saying?:
I was impressed with this book, but I came to a dead stop on page 72, when I read:
"For a more direct approach to limiting the audience's frame of knowledge, try putting your story into first person.... First-person narrative has been used to great effect in many novels, particularly in the classic detective novels of the 1940's. Readers were thrilled by the adventures of Sam Spade, who spun hid detective yarns in the first-person. The reader travelled on the journey along with the character (rather... more info
Very specific and useful:
The reviewers of my screenplays keep commenting that my dialog and characters are great, but my plot is weak. I made a pact with myself that I would absolutely follow every direction in this book to really give it a shot. I found the book to very readable and imminently "doable," there were no busy exercises. The definitions of important events in screenplays "raising the stakes," "point of no return" are more clearly defined than in other screen writing books. This book is only about plot building: it ends... more info
Building Better Plots = Building Better Stories:
Robert Kernan's experience as an Emmy award-winning scriptwriter for film and television certainly qualifies him to write this book. It also explains a good deal of his theory as well as his outlook on writing fiction. That outlook is heavily influenced by Syd Field's classic theories of story development and script writing. At the moment, Kernan is developing projects for Web TV networks. It's always a pleasure to review a book by an author who clearly states his goals, then sets about methodically... more info
Privacy policy: we don't collect information
about visitors except for the standard technical server logs. We don't send unsolicited emails. We don't
sell the information that we don't collect about you to anyone. When you follow
links to other sites, their privacy policies apply. Thanks for visiting!
