Recommended books on writing/storytelling?

[Threevenge]

I recently bought a book entitled Characters & Viewpoint written by Orson Scott Card and I've found it pretty useful in helping me think about creating characters in a different way. A while back I bought First Draft In 30 Days: A Novel Writer's System for Building a Complete and Cohesive Manuscript by Karen Wiesner, which I plan on using after my current project.

So, I'd like to find out what books other writers have found useful in improving and expanding their abilities so I could check them out.

[lordcloudx]

I dunno. Maybe it's just me, but I find it more useful to read actual novels than how-to books.

[Jake]

I dunno. Maybe it's just me, but I find it more useful to read actual novels than how-to books.

Reading a lot of novels is always going to be an important part of learning to write novels - and watching a lot of screenplays is going to be an important part of learning to write screenplays - but it's not the only part. Learning to write a novel by doing nothing but reading a lot of novels would be like trying to learn to paint by visiting the Louvre.

Practice is another thing which is very important, and it's entirely possible to learn to do something just by practicing it - but again, like with painting, there are shortcuts you can take and things you can do to avoid repeating old mistakes that lots of people have made before. If nobody had told you how to mix colours and you were sat with a tubes of red, blue, yellow, black and white paint trying to paint grass, it would take you a lot longer to work it out than if someone had explained the colour wheel and additive and subtractive mixing and so on first, right?

The one text that I've had recommended consistently is Robert McKee's Story - and really, it's a good book on structure and device and so on. It says it's about writing screenplays, but really there's very little in there which couldn't be applied to more or less any kind of prose writing if you understand it.
It's not a perfect book, or a be-all-and-end-all solution, but it does a good job of covering the fundamentals, IMO.

[chronoluminaire]

Yeah, my first thought on reading your first post was to recommend McKee's Story. It's not something to take as 100% gospel all the way through, but it's very, very good. And very little is screenplay-specific - it's almost all applicable to all kinds of fiction writing.

[sake-bento]

The only writing book I've really read was Beginnings, Middles, and Ends which was pretty helpful for me since I write strong openings and good endings (at least, I like to think so) but my middles are terribly weak. It was definitely a good book for me to read. It's part of a series of books on writing fiction, so there are other topics that you might find more useful.

On occasion I use books on writing mystery and crime, but that's for all the reference information like how police work, or different types of guns.

[mikey]

I don't disagree that that such books have their place - but actually, I am quite clearly on lordcloudx's side of the fence on this - writing isn't an exact science, and it's very subjective - establishing rules is sure fun and for ageing writers it may bring an extra dollar or two, but to me this is much like books on love and relationships - it's all jolly lovely and makes sense (and it's a fun read), but in the end it's you and a piece of paper, much like in a relationship it's you and the person you love. Such advice is at best a supporting element, and normally it's only informative - kind of like going through the definitive 10 laws of good marriage and seeing oh well, I think point 5 and 8 fit, and point 4 I don't really know... So, similarly to the fact that aven after thousands of well-meant tips from your friends you still need to decide on your love yourself, the bulk of the writing comes from the heart, as unlinke mixing colors the techniques of writing cannot really be quantified.

[PyTom]

Yeah, my first thought on reading your first post was to recommend McKee's Story. It's not something to take as 100% gospel all the way through, but it's very, very good. And very little is screenplay-specific - it's almost all applicable to all kinds of fiction writing.

I actually when out and ordered this book the first time you recommended it. It's quite good. One of the take-home things I got was the necessity of characters having highs and lows as the story moves on.

[chronoluminaire]

writing isn't an exact science, and it's very subjective - establishing rules is sure fun and for ageing writers it may bring an extra dollar or two, but to me this is much like books on love and relationships...
the bulk of the writing comes from the heart, as unlinke mixing colors the techniques of writing cannot really be quantified.

That's certainly true to an extent. But there are certain concepts that really wind me up when I read them, and I'm not alone. Things like:
* Loose threads left unresolved. Something is introduced as significant in an early scene, but then isn't mentioned again. Not that there's a plot twist and a dramatic revelation that actually it's not important at all - that'd be fine - but when the characters seem to forget all about something that was meant to be really important to them.
* Deus ex machina. When the solution to some tense and dramatic problem just drops into the characters' laps, in an incredibly implausible way, that hadn't been hinted at or mentioned before, or that breaks suspension of disbelief: it drives me up the wall. It completely wrecks a piece of fiction to have it end with a deus ex machina, and yet people still write them, seemingly without realising.
* Other things that break suspension of disbelief, like characters doing things that are necessary to the plot but implausible to the character (acting OOC).
* Magic or science without strict rules. Magic or "magic"-science that just works like a get-out-of-trouble-free card for whatever situation the characters find themselves in.
Now, this is of course all subjective, as you say, mikey. Not everyone objects to these things; and it's good to feel free to write whatever you want. But if it does one of these things, an awful lot of people will find it just unsatisfying. It's not about "bringing in an extra dollar or two", but about writing that resonates with more people.

And books like Story help point out to you the fundamental reasons why things like I mention above are unsatistfying to most readers.

It's like the old saying: "feel free to break the rules, but know the rules first."

[Jake]

unlinke mixing colors the techniques of writing cannot really be quantified.

But equally, painting is subjective, and what is rendered on the canvas is quite frequently not an exact photo-realistic representation of real life. The painter has still learned about light and shadow and colour and all that, even if he's chosen to be selective about which parts of photorealism to keep. One can't quantify the 'best' or 'right' colour to paint the skin in a surrealist portrait, any more that one can quantify the 'right' sentence structure or the 'best' plot flow. Mixing paint for a painter is more like spelling words and conjugating verbs for a writer.

I can only really agree with Chronoluminaire, in silghtly different words: it's not so much that there are rules to writing good fiction, but there are conventions. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end; it typically revolves around resolving a conflict. It's possible to write a story within those conventions entirely instinctively, and many people do, because that's how strong they are - people can read a story and tell that it's unsatisfying (they'll often, amusingly, call it "wrong") if things are too out-of-line with these conventions, and this will often prompt the author to adjust things.

Also, an anecdote. I'm a big fan of Haruki Murakami's books; he does have a habit of playing around a bit with the conventions of story structure - I don't know whether he ever read a how-to-write-a-novel book or went on a writer's workshop course - and most of the time this works pretty well. His books still tend to have beginnings, middles and ends, and still tend to resolve around some kind of contention, even if not an obvious one... but there are bits left out, he's not afraid of leaving loose ends, or of including deus-ex-machina, sometimes karma totally fails to work for important characters, that kind of thing. IIRC Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World arguably pulls the "and then he woke up and it had all been a dream" thing right at the end, and it's a beautiful and satisfying book. And yet, one of his more recent, After Dark, falls flat on its face for me. I can't specifically point at anything he does wrong in that book which isn't a writing convention he's successfully broken before, but added up it just doesn't work. As it is, it reads like a novel someone wrote two-thirds of and then got bored and wandered off.

[mikey]

I can't disagree, really - it's just a different viewpoint, one where I feel more comfortable. An example - I agree with chronoluminaire's point 2 and 3, but as for 1 and 4 - I don't mind that at all. And I'm sure I could agree on some convertions that make a good story if they are kept (much like those happy 10 marriage rules) - the point I was trying to make is that no single one of those conventions is really essential - if you have 10 hypothetical ones, any 5 an be disregarded, but as long as you keep the other 5, it will be a good story - as a lot of the conventions are specific to a certain time and culture, it will be a good story for this time and environment (mainstream Europe 2008).

Maybe it's the "storytelling" part that often irritates me - it's often presented as the only way to write (construct a plot, create characters etc.), but that just can't be true. You can write a good book without telling a story. Like a diary, or more philosophical, more symbolic, I don't know.. there is a lot more to writing than the classic beg-mid-end thing, and crucially it's really nothing without something that the author brings to it that is unique to him. Incidentally, this part about the conventions being merely the beginning is almost always stated at the end of such books...

[Threevenge]

Wow...quite a different route than I thought this topic would take . I think I'll have a look at this Story.

[PyTom]

Incidentally, this part about the conventions being merely the beginning is almost always stated at the end of such books...

I think that's what makes Story such a good book.

The first point made in the introduction is, "Story is about principles, not rules." The first paragraph goes on to emphasize this point. I'll quote it verbatim:

A rule says, "You must do it this way." A principle says... "This works, and has through all remembered time." The difference is crucial. Your work needn't be modeled after the "well-made" play; rather, it must be well made within the principals that shape our art. Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

Another good point of the book is that he doesn't bother dealing with how to put things in the proper screenplay format, on the grounds that nobody ever rejected a movie script because the margins were wrong.

[Nafai]

Here's something that looks interesting, although the price is killer @_@:

http://kotaku.com/360077/quests-design- ... -narrative

While the art of story-telling is, I think, hard to teach, one thing I think even the best writers need is a good editor. In lieu of one, there are certain self-editing books out there that can help, as I think editing is a more 'learnable' skill than writing, although they aren't a replacement for another person's intelligent viewpoint.