This book was full of incredibly useful information regarding novel writing. The book explains what stories are, their purposes and the many different ways that you can go about creating your own. The most important parts that a story needs, according to Lisa Cron, is a plot, a protagonist, a “goal” or story question and what the story itself is actually about. Something that even myself have been guilty of forgetting is that “plot is not synonymous with story” (31). Cron enjoyably delivers the hard truth throughout the book. One of the things I found most compelling was that Cron has a deep understanding of the things novels do that are so subtle that the reader doesn’t notice unless he or she is specifically looking for it. She also explains how the author also has to deliver these subtleties. For example, Cron explains how “tone belongs to the author; mood to the reader” (35), which is something I don’t think many people realize consciously.
Something I also hadn’t realized when it comes to writing stories was how to exactly convey emotions and point of views that could be taken. I knew of the normal first, second and third-person views as most do but I had no idea about the different types of third-person views until this book. Third-person objective, limited and omniscient opened my eyes to an entirely new way of writing that I hadn’t really put much thought into before. On this topic, I also hadn’t really noticed that some third-person stories contained “no italics, no quotation marks. No tags” (53) when it came to expressing a characters’ thoughts to the reader. My subconscious mind as always said that thoughts typically need to be italicized but I clearly understood the reading examples given throughout this chapter despite there being no italics.
A final thing that I enjoyed about the book was Lisa Cron clearly debunking myths such as the “write what you know” (62) myth and clearly stating “secrets” when it comes to writing such as “story is about change, which results only from unavoidable conflict” (124). This book has a lot of helpful tips when it comes to writing your own story and it really makes me want to start (re)writing my book idea. By allowing ourselves to realize that there is always places to grow and learn from, we can become better people and in this case better writers. I think this book is going to help me grow in the writing aspect.
Ink and Crystals 