#lisa cron

[wordshaveteeth]

It seems ironic that the very things we give a wide berth to in real life are exactly what we crave in stories. But it’s not ironic at all. It’s a big part of why story evolved in the first place: so we can vicariously experience the cost, and reap the benefit, of the changes we so studiously avoid in real life.

- Lisa Cron, Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere)

[the960writers]

Wired for story: Lisa Cron at TEDxFurmanU

Lisa works with writers, nonprofits, educators, and organizations, helping them master the unparalleled power of story so they can move people to action -- whether that action is turning the pages of a compelling novel, trying a new product, or talking to the streets to change the world for the better. She is the author of the book "Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence."

[writingonesdreams]

The most inspirational encouraging thing I ever heard about writing:

You have all the tools you need to write a riveting novel capable of triggering a dopamine rush in your reader’s brain that will make her forget everything else: the series she was about to binge watch, the big meeting tomorrow at work, and even better, all those nattering doubts about, well, everything, that seem to descend like a swarm of mosquitoes the later it gets.

Instead, she’ll get a mini-vacation, a moment of solace, of sanctuary as she takes refuge in your novel, all the while picking up inside intel into what really makes people tick.

And when she finally turns that last page, she will emerge changed, because whether she knows it or not, her view of the world will have shifted. It might shift in a small way, or it might be a really dramatic change that impacts everyone and everything around her. After all, riveting novels have been known to change the world itself.

Like Kill the Mockingbird, that changed how people think. How? By changing how they felt.

Because the only way to change how someone thinks about something, is to first change how they feel about it.

You have the power. Now go use it.

- from Story Genius by Lisa Cron

[youthbookreview]

An effective story is, literally, an offer your brain can't refuse.

Lisa Cron, Story Genius

[assorteddoodles]

Little Allison from Fun Home meets Jason from Falsettos. I just felt like they had some stuff in common, being around the same age and having similar father situations. I don't know that they'd actually get along very well especially considering Jason's lack of social skills but it was fun to draw.

[beckytext]

Craft book review: Story Genius by Lisa Cron

As promised last weekend, here’s a slightly more full review of  Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere) by Lisa Cron. But to sum up, the very short version:

1) The tone of this book is kind of insufferable;

2) The approach this book suggests is actually pretty useful.

I often find craft books a little difficult to get into because most of them are either a) written for a total beginner (which I am not), or b) focused primarily on literary stuff (which is super not my jam and often unhelpful for genre writers), or c) focused on an approach that is total anathema to me. I am at a point as a writer where yes, I very much want to level up and improve, but I also have a writing process that works pretty well and has to be a foundation for any improvements I try. Basically: telling me to just craft characters and let them have conversations until a story forms isn’t going to work for me (sorry, Bird by Bird) and neither will writing without any idea of where I’m going and unearthing a story by magic, I guess? (Sorry, On Writing.) I am open to suggestions but those things are just unhelpful for me. So I was leery of Cron’s approach, which is focused on using character to discover a story, and really turned off by how much of the book was Cron explaining why Everything You Know Is Wrong (it isn’t) and why her method is the One True Way (it’s not).

But.

The book won me over a bit when it finally got around to actual practical matters: start with your initial glimmer of an idea and identify what it is about that idea that interests you. Use that to flesh out your premise and a protagonist will come with it -- and then focus on the protagonist to figure out the story.

I actually appreciated this method a lot more than I expected to. I’m someone who has always discovered my character through writing the story -- pre-planning doesn’t tend to work for me. But the pre-planning methods I’ve seen before have been things like character sheets, which don’t work because they’re so arbitrary. Deciding, say, what the character’s biggest fear is ahead of time might be useful, if it serves the story, but it also might be completely random and useless. Cron’s method, however, is to flesh out the character based on the premise and conflict built into it. 

Per Story Genius, fleshing out the character goes back to what would make for the best possible character to fit the premise you’re interested in. You aren’t pulling together arbitrary details, you’re crafting pivotal moments in the character’s backstory that will lead to the highest possible tension level when you get to the frontstory.

All of that was actually very useful for me. But where it gets less so is as it gets from backstory into outlining (sorry, “blueprinting”) the story itself. That’s where I think Cron’s method might be useful for writers who are at that 101 level and not quite sure how to get started -- but again, that’s not me. And her disdain of any kind of external story structure grated on me, because structure is a huge part of my process. So no, I’m not going to write out an outline card for each potential scene (and then not use a lot of them) and I’m not going to start writing until I know what the overall story is. Because that’s a huge part of how I write. But using some of her character approach has actually been very helpful for me regardless, as I’m preparing to outline a novel, in helping me figure out my protagonist and conflict, and other characters from my protag’s life who have to be involved (and what they do). It’s a slight shift in my thinking, even without using the “blueprint” method Cron suggests, and I’m glad I gave it a try.

With all that said, the idea that any of this is based on “brain science” is laughably nonsensical. There are basically no citations except, like, this one study that one time?  And it feels very much like the claim that you should write this way because SCIENCE!!! is supposed to make this book authoritative. But like I said: it’s not (no writing advice can be), and instead left me rolling my eyes at those claims. (Like I said: the tone is insufferable.)

Overall, three and a half stars. It’s worth reading through and mining for ideas that work for you, but it’s not the life changing, revelatory method it claims to be.

[danbensen]

Here’s how I got rid of my writer’s block today.

I was having trouble with The Centuries Unlimited because I realized there was a plot hole in my outline. I came up with a fix, but that introduced new plot holes, and fixing them created more. So I stopped before the book dissolved in front of me. I slept on the problem, which didn’t suggest any solutions, but at least blunted my sense of panic. Then I picked up Story Genius and read this:

Asking “Why?” is what burns through the fog, allowing you to envision your story’s cause-and-effect trajectory—clear, precise, and waiting for you to bring it to life.

And I said. “Okay, I’ll do the exercise. I know how the scene is supposed to begin and end: the good guy and the bad guy want to capture and interrogate each other > they each escape from each other.”

Here’s what I wrote:

bad guy escapes alone why does he escape? – he wants to

And BAM! I didn’t finish writing the sentence because it all hit me right then. I won’t tell you how I solved the problem, but it all came to me at once, linking up everything in a much more satisfying way than the dull garbage that was in my outline before.

Thanks, Story Genius!

[elidoowrites]

At its most basic, a story is about how someone grapples with a problem they can't avoid, and how they change in the process.

Story Genius by Lisa Cron