A Story is a Promise offers a fresh new model for mastering the elusive art of writing dramatic and engaging stories. In order to illustrate its major principles, the book includes reviews and analyses of over a dozen popular films, novels, and plays. Complete with prompts and questions at the end of each chapter, A Story is a Promise can be used as a workbook to help writers internalize the principle that underlies all well-told stories: that a story should be a promise and that a promise should be kept. The inclusion of familiar examples makes this book accessible and useful to all writers of fiction, plays, and screenplays.
Bill Johnson has been using the manuscript of A Story is a Promise in his workshops for years. Many editors also use the workbook to teach blossoming writers the craft of storytelling.
In A Story Is a Promise, Bill Johnson posits that a well-designed story "promises dramatic fulfillment of our needs." Too often, says Johnson, writers embark on projects without first identifying the dramatic issue that is at the heart of their story. These writers--novelists, playwrights, and, clearly closest to Johnson's heart, screenwriters--would do much better, and save a lot of time otherwise spent writing in circles, by first identifying their key dramatic issue, Johnson says. Once they have identified a premise, which can be easily summed up (for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Johnson offers "overcoming a shared catastrophe leads to renewal"), they can measure every word they write against it. Ask yourself, says Johnson, whether you can determine if "every character issue, event, line of dialogue, and scene description serves to dramatically advance the story." If the answer is "no," that event, dialogue, or description doesn't belong. If you find the concept unclear, don't worry--apparently, a lot of Johnson's students do, too. But once you understand what's at stake in your story, you will be better equipped to make all the decisions you need to make along the way concerning characterization, plot development, dialogue, conflict, and the like. With workshoplike questions at the end of each chapter aimed at the writer-in-process. --Jane Steinberg
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Story is a Promise:
Bill is an excellent instructor and this book is a testimony of his many years of quality teaching and writing. If you want to fly through this book, you won't. It's not a quick read. It's laid out like a college textbook,(which isn't bad.) This is a guide for the person who wants to learn the nuts and bolts of writing screenplays and fiction, and is well-worth the read. After finishing this book, and applying it's advice to my own writing, my second screenplay was immediately accepted by a Hollywood agent... more info
Uninspired:
Perhaps Bill Johnson was enthused about the writing process at one time, but this book doesn't reflect that. He may have taught too many courses over the years to the point he couldn't generate enough interest in his own manuscript. The promise is nothing new. It is clearly dicussed in Nancy Kress's beginnings, middles and Ends: a very good book by a published writer, not just a teacher of writing.
A story is a promise: Good things to know before you write .:
I'm not feeling it! Rather than take the book back to the bookstore and request a refund, I decided to write this review. A story is a promise is an idea that I buy, and probably still do, but the book itself was written in a style so dull and boring that I couldn't focus on it, or finish it. The book's promise to me was broken. It doesn't deliver.
For instance, the "naming" concept is about as clear as mud. Do we name a story's promise, or merely suggest a dramatic purpose to make it less obvious?... more info
The promise of drama... but it could use a better delivery:
Mr. Johnson spends the beginning of the book trying to explain what he means by a "story promise." He admits himself that his students often have a difficult time grasping it, and it doesn't help that his use of terminology seems somewhat fluid. Eventually I figured out that what he refers to as a "story promise" is something most writers would call a theme. To be fair, it's possible that Mr. Johnson would say "no, that isn't it at all." But even if that wasn't what he meant, he could have cut and clarified... more info
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