Customer Reviews

Story Engineering

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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For approximately 3 years I have struggled with an unplanned book. I have struggled with the ideas, relationships and the structure. In Larry Brooks book, he shows you how to get started, organize and finish your book using the 6 competencies.Once you get through the blah, blah, blah at the begining of the book the concepts he explains excite and motivate you to re-start your book. Good show Larry, please write more books like this on other aspects of writing.

Story Engineering is one of the best books on writing that I've read. Larry Brooks provides the writer with a clear picture of what they need to do in order to complete their novels. While discussing topics writers may already be familiar with (such as character arc or interior and exterior conflict), he pulls all of these topics together into a bigger picture look at how they form a great novel. Using concrete examples from screenplays and novels, especially The DaVinci Code, Brooks shows the reader why the concepts that he talks about work. The biggest section--and the most helpful one for me--is on structure, where Brooks demonstrates how certain elements must be in place for the reader to want to keep reading. Brooks also provides handy checklists that condense all the information discussed into a list the reader can quickly consult. This is a book I'll be leaving by my computer to use as a reference when working on my novel.

Larry Brooks has written a classic guide for novelists, short story writers, and screenwriters. If you are a writer looking for more information on story and structure, this book should be at the top of your reading list.

Booksneeze is a wonderful program. As a blogger-reviewer, I can request books that interest me (or in this case, other members of my family) and just for reading and telling the world what I think of it, I get to keep the book and add it to my ever-growing collection.

In the case of Story Engineering, it wasn't for me so much that I requested this book, but for my 17 year old son, Everett. Remember that name, folks... one day he'll be on the best seller lists! Ev's been telling and writing stories down since he could talk and write. It's his passion, his gift, his life. He is truly an artist, and as an artist, he is always looking for tools to help him perfect his "craft."

Story Engineering seemed like just the right book. After all, it is written by the acclaimed author of six published psychological thrillers, Mr. Larry Brooks (okay, Larry's writing genre is not exactly my taste, nor Ev's ... but hey, he's published, that's good, right?) It is designed to walk a budding author through the basics of writing a novel.

Using six core competencies (four elemental and two are executional), which are:

concept
character
theme
story structure
scene execution
and writing voice

a writer should be on their way to making their dreams of becoming a published writer come true. Seems simple enough, right?However, I think those same concepts have been taught at least a hundred times over in a hundred other "how to write fiction" books. I know, because I've spent probably HUNDREDS of dollars buying books that teach this very same thing over the years to add to Ev's collection.

I'm not saying it's a bad book. IF you are just starting out and are looking for a first book on the art of writing fiction, this would definitely be a worthwhile book to add to your collection. It is written in an easy, sometimes humorous conversational style. It's laid out in an simple organized and intuitive way. It's not going to set the angels singing in your head, but it's sturdy and a moderately good value for it's price.

Mr. Brooks states at the start of the book that he asked himself "if the world really needs another book about writing" - and well, sorry, but maybe after penning that query he should have stopped, poured a nice big cuppa tea and pondered whether or not that 128,000,001st book really was necessary. Though I think the world would have kept on spinning without it, as a self-proclaimed book junkie with a son who writes... I'd probably still buy it.

I guess Larry and I are what keeps the world a-spinnin'!