Bill Johnson (6)

Mr. Johnson spends the beginning of the book trying to explain what he means by a "story promise." He admits that his students often have a difficult time grasping it, and it doesn't help that his use of terminology seems fluid. Eventually I figured out that what he refers to as a "story promise" is something most writers would call a theme. To be fair, it's possible that Mr. Johnson would say "no, that isn't it at all." But even if that wasn't what he meant, he could have cut and clarified show more his clunky 45-page explanation drastically by comparing and contrasting the two ideas rather than starting from scratch.

In addition to those 45 convoluted pages, Mr. Johnson has a wordy and often redundant style. However, there's also a lot of good stuff in this book. If you're having trouble making your stories dramatic and attention-grabbing, this book could seriously help you. Johnson's explanation of why the"story promise" is so important to drama makes a lot of sense to me. He believes that "issues of human need" are what pull an audience in and cause readers to invest emotion in a story. He goes into plenty of detail on the how as well as the why.

He uses examples from well-known movies and books; these help to prevent you from using his suggestions to accidentally create formulaic stories. I'm not saying that his system creates formulaic novels. However, there is a type of formula that could serve as an example of what he's trying to teach, and you could easily fall into it out of sheer familiarity without realizing it. The examples help to prevent this because he uses non-formulaic examples. However, the book could really use a section about this trap, how to notice if you're falling into it, and how to avoid it.

This book teaches a valuable enough way of thinking about writing that I feel vaguely guilty pointing out its flaws. But while Mr. Johnson's methods are fabulous, his expository writing can be convoluted and confusing. With some changes in the writing and some extra material on formulaic writing this could easily be a five-star book, but for me it's currently a three-star book. It's well worth your time and energy, but it may cause frustrations along the way.

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