Book: The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers by Matt Bird. Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.

A great book on how to write books. 4.5 stars.

The book goes through many problems and misconceptions behind writing a fiction book. In the book blog, you can find a big checklist with many questions your book has to answer: http://www.secretsofstory.com/2014/09/the-ultimate-story-checklist-raising.html

There are many examples around each of these topics throughout the book. Here are some notes:

  • When you’re telling a story, you are that guy in the airplane that tries to talk to you before you plug your earbuds. Nobody wants to hear you, you have to prove your value.
  • The reader will choose just one character of your story to be his/her hero
  • The audience will put their emotions into your “hero” and with that comes a lot of expectation. Don’t disappoint your readers. You feel betrayed when you trust someone and he doesn’t meet your expectations.
  • The audience doesn’t have to sympathize with your hero, but they have to emphasize.
  • Make your hero misunderstood to create identification with your readers.
  • Your story is not about your hero’s life it’s about your hero’s problem. Everything you’re describing must be related to the problem, not just the character. So, don’t start with the protagonist waking up in the morning. Start with his problem.
  • People don’t like to break expectation, they like to be right on their hypothesis
  • Break expectation too much makes people to not connect with the characters
  • Create a backstory for your character but do not use it to show who your character is, you have to build his story throughout the front story
  • People prefer stories about transformation. Your hero has to transform itself and evolve
  • You can’t say that your hero is doing what he’s doing for self-realization, you have to show it. (yes, that old rule: show, don’t tell)
  • When an important conversation will take place put objects in the hands of your character. Cafés are bad places for conversation, you don’t have many objects to interact with and it’s difficult to show emotions
  • If an action will affect different things, you have to connect these things to your audience. A nuclear bomb will kill a lot of people, but your audience doesn’t know these people, you have to connect them. If one character has a child out there, the audience will connect to it.
  • Don’t force your characters to follow the plot by doing stupid things. Trap your characters into dramatic situations and then let them fight the way out of it.
  • Remove what is behind the coma: Did you know that? Yes, I’m so sorry. To: Did you know that? I’m so sorry.
  • Answer the dramatic question at the end of your story. Which is your dramatic question?
  • A good way to end a story without killing the villain is to make the village turns into a greater evil. (Darth Vader and the Emperor)
  • If one people complain about something in a review, it may be just a personal opinion. If two people comment on the same thing, it may be a general opinion and you must consider changing it.
  • Don’t just revise, rewrite. It’s part of the job. The second and third drafts must be an almost complete rewrite of the first one, and then you can start tweaking it
  • Be ok with teleportation. Your character doesn’t need to follow the space-time rules, just the concept. Move them easily through places, just let the reader know what is happening
  • That’s it. I recommend you to look to the checklist, if you know how to answer most of those questions the book may not be good for you. But if you don’t know how to answer them, I highly recommend you to read the books to see the examples the author mentions for each of those topics.

That’s it. I recommend you to look to the checklist, if you know how to answer most of those questions the book may not be good for you. But if you don’t know how to answer them, I highly recommend you to read the books to see the examples the author mention for each of those topics.