Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Valuable Guidance for Writers, Story Tellers and Critics, August 25, 2004
This is the best "how to" book I have read on writing screenplays, novels, and plays. The advice comes alive through extensive analysis of well-known stories, using a disciplined outline of story elements. The application of these points is greatly aided by questions directed at helping you write your story. Although intended for fiction writers, this book is equally applicable to nonfiction writers and can add great balance to critical reviews of literary works.
If you are like me, you learned to write by doing small exercises . . . such as short stories, scenes, and descriptions. That's all fine, and it does improve one's writing, but somehow something is left out when you sit down to the first blank sheet of paper and begin writing a longer work. It is for just that moment that this book is wonderful.
The purpose of the book is to help you create the kind of gripping stories that vividly fulfill peoples' unmet needs. The method is to give you a way to create a structure (and fill that structure) that serves that purpose. This structure features creating a promise to your readers in the first scene, creating a story (separate from the plot) that fulfills the promise, a story line to flesh out the story, a plot to support the story, a plot line to flesh out the plot, developing conflict, and employing thrusts and counterthrusts to create and sustain dramatic tension. Using this structure, you ruthlessly weed out what is extraneous, even if it is terrific writing.
You are probably nodding your head agreeably at this point. But what you haven't seen yet is Mr. Johnson's wonderful analysis of Romeo and Juliet, The Hunt for Red October, Rocky, The Usual Suspects, Moby Dick, Die Hard, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Reservoir Dogs, The Exorcist, Pride and Prejudice, and other powerful stories to examplify these points. These examples are incredibly effective in bringing the structure to life. They also make it clearer what critics and book reviewers should be on the look-out for in reading fiction.
Section one of the book develops the key theme, a story is a promise. Section two works on helping you design the elements of your story. Section three looks at the distinctions between story line and plot line, and introduces a structured analysis to help you. Section four focuses on that dreaded moment of getting started with the writing. Section five contains detailed reviews of several popular stories to help ingrain the lessons outlined here.
One of my favorite sections deals with the mistakes most often made by new fiction writers and how to overcome them. This section is worth the price of the book alone!
Each chapter also has extensive questions and assignments, which can turn this into a workshop-like experience. The author also suggests ways for you to take your answers and assignments and get feedback on them. If you live by yourself in an isolated area with no telephone, he even gives you ideas for trying to help yourself to improve the writing as your own alter-ego.
Highly recommended for aspiring writers!
After you have finished thinking through this wonderful book, I suggest you move on to one question that Mr. Johnson did not raise. What should be the need that your story fulfills? Most stories today deal with wounds, like not having enough love, feeling low self-esteem, or being helpless. How can you pick needs that will make people stronger and start a chain-reaction of good results? For example, rather than showing people how love can conquer death (the Romeo and Juliet theme), how about showing people how giving love will help them acquire love? I suspect that we can create a much more wonderful society if we pay a bit more attention to the promises we make in our stories. We need to balance building capability with healing wounds if we are to reach our full potential as people.
Write a great story!
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
helped me get published, May 30, 2005
There's lots of books out there about writing and the writer's life, and while inspring, their advice is usually along the lines of "write so many number of words a day." Few books explain the mechanics of writing, what makes a plot speed along, what gives a story its soul. The first truly useful book I ever read about writing was McKee's "Story." But when my novel was returned from the first publisher I sent it to, the editor commented that it lacked plot. Lacked plot?! What was I missing? I'd tried so hard . . . a friend recommended "A Story is a Promise," and when I read it, suddenly everything became much clearer. Johnson's "Promise" is more concise than McKee's "Story," technical but not overdone. I used his book almost like a workbook, rewrote my novel, and when I resubmitted it to the same publisher a year later, they bought it. I recommend this book to everyone who writes. It's essential.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A profound and practical guide to writing powerful stories., September 15, 1999
By A Customer
Numerous books have been written analysing the dramatic structure of stories: many are good; some are great. Here's another great one! What Bill Johnson offers, in "A Story is a Promise", is an exciting new perspective on the ancient craft of story-telling. Exciting because not only does he explore our deep-rooted yearning for stories, but he explicates techniques to engage, sustain and fulfill the audience's emotional needs and expectations. Every story, be it a short story, screenplay, novel or play, makes an implicit promise to the audience: 'Lend me your attention for ten minutes, two hours, or a week of your life and I promise you a satisfying vicarious experience of...adventure, romance, redemption...whatever. Johnson helps writers identify and design story elements that make good on this promise, that "concretely and visibly manifest the resolution of the story's promise" and allow the audience to share in the experience. His approach addresses story-telling from the broadest thematic level, or premise, down to individual word choice. Bill Johnson 'promises' to help "unlock the mystery of creating compelling, engaging stories." He delivers!
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by Tami D. Cowden
