Story Structure Architect: A Writer's Guide to Building Dramatic Situations and Compelling Characters

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Customer Reviews:

Poorly written. [Posted on 2006-11-13]
I wish this book were easier to read! I'm interested in Schmidt's plot configurations, but her writing is so flat and repetitive that reading it is the literary equivalent of eating cardboard. Here's a quote: "Obtaining means to acquire or to succeed in gaining possession as the result of planning." Thanks. But why do I need to read that? If I'm not familiar with the word "obtaining" I'm probably not really up to writing a book, or even reading one.

As another reader pointed out, many of her examples are Hollywood bombs. That may simply be a limitation of this type of a guide, but it's even more discouraging, as I slog through the pages trying to get a few structural ideas, to think that the best I might end up with is something like "Striptease." I think I'd forgive the author this if her prose wasn't so stiff. Her editor is also to blame.

First impressions are not always correct [Posted on 2007-01-17]
When I first picked up this book I thought it was a simple little how-to book. I was wrong. This book has a wealth of information. It strips away the flowery prose most how-to-write books use and leaves the meat.

Don't just read this book. Study it, take notes. Write out the information and put it in an order that makes sense to you. If you're like most writers I know, you'll learn more by hand writing notes than simply skimming over the pages.

Superficially Helpful [Posted on 2008-03-04]
I bought this book and returned it back after a few weeks. Here is my take on it. The author breaks down the Plot construction into Throughlines, Conflicts, Structure and Situations (she also adds Genre and Research into the mix as well). If you do a search on the web, many others before her have taken a combination of the above to reflect what constitutes the main plot structures. In this book, she breaks it down into separate entities within itself and treats each as a "step" in constructing a plot. However, there are other elements that are important in driving a plot that are not really mentioned here (i.e. moral premise / theme, as well as Character). I don't care what label you put on her sections, they all equate to conflict, so without enlisting Theme/Premise & character/motivation into the mix, this book only serves as a book on Plot Design at a very superficial level and not construction. Hence the name of her book, and you basically end up with a book that has an overbloated list of sorts that will result in a contrived plotline if used alone. Those are the negatives.

The positives: The section on the 11 structures based on the 3 act story structure is quite illuminating and probably the only section in the book that would validate the purchase of this book. In this section, each structure is offered with a visual to explain how story time / pacing / turning points can be changed around in order to produce a specific type of story structure (i.e. meladrama, jouney...).

At best, this book would be better served with other books that focus on Theme/Moral Premise, Character and the such. Here, the author's intent was probably to offer you a sort of map in plot design, but you still need a compass to navigate through your story from beginning to end. With that said, here are some other books worth looking into for that purpose:

Inside Story by Dara Marks and Moral Premise by Stanley D. Williams

Excellent Content Undermined by Bad Book Design [Posted on 2008-03-14]
A worthy book rather undone by incompetent book design which I must say, is unusual for the publisher, Writer's Digest Books. The designer might as well be a college kid turning in a freshman project.

It was an altogether aggravating read and I only persisted because the information is extremely uuseful

Victoria Lynn Schmidt, Ph.D., had created an amazing blueprint that covers many aspects of story structure in useful detail [about the only thing she didn't do was diagram sentences or provide linguistic diacritical marks for pronunciation].

BUT the book is difficult to read and to handle. To begin with it is small - a bit larger then a paperback [5.5 inches by 8.5 inches]. This is not necessarily the kiss of death BUT the inside paper is a heavy weight variety making the book hefty, the cover is a plasticine paper which doesn't give-way in its perfect bound format. The simple act of holding the book open turns into a wrestling match.

Also, the copy runs to 277 pages. Apparently, in order to squeeze the copy onto half-sized pages, it was necessary to use `mouse' type - I'm guessing 8 point fonts. Also san-serif type alternated with a standard serif font, one supposes as a means of saving space to, again, squeeze everything into the half-sized pages. San-serif fonts tend to reduce readability.

The book design is credited to Lisa Buchanan-Kuhn & Claudean Wheeler. They key off the title word "architect" as almost any designer would do but their creative choices work against readability.

Architects work with "blueprints" which are well know for being difficult to read. So the designer can make the connection with margin art [which they do on every page] but let that be enough.

Where the attempt to carry out the blueprint motif truly fails is the too cute use of the same pale blue ink IN THE TEXT.

The shade of blue is virtually unreadable against a white page. The color is OK to use for bullets that set aside outlines as well as for line graphics surrounded by a lot of white space.

Where the blue ink truly fails is when it is used for blocks of text set aside for emphasis, set in san-serif font of a tiny size.

It fails in the table of contents where it is used for sub-heads, it fails as sub-heads in the text and in the copy that begins each chapter which is [inexplicably] placed over a light blue graphic background.

The designer used numerous fonts for sub-heads and with the wide variety [a bit unusual but not terrible] of fonts, each heading could have done very well in simple black ink.

This designer clearly did not have the reader in mind.

The book deserves to be redesigned in a larger, workbook type format that does away with the effort to win design awards and considers the end point user.

Fantastic Book! Been Looking 20 Years for this!! [Posted on 2008-03-31]
This is a fantastic book! It coalesces all the various competing worlds of story structure. I have been studying novel construction for decades and this book finally gave me a schematic all-encompassing understanding and all the detail that I needed. I wish this book had been written in 1983. This is a godsend. If you are trying to seriously write novels, get this book right away!

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