Review: A competent short book on outlining plots and scenes
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 12, 2013
This is a competent little book on how to structure and outline your plot and scenes. It has three main parts, as far as I could tell: Plot structure and plot points, outlining your book, and outlining your scenes.I thought the best two parts were the parts on outlining the book and the scenes.The author starts with a word count (such as 100K words), effectively divides by a words-per-scene estimate, and comes up with an initial guess/guide scene count of 60 scenes for her 90-100K word count book. Very good. Then she shows you how to fill in the sixty scenes with plot point scenes, "pinch point" (key opposition scenes), and other scenes so you can see how to flesh out the scene slots.Then she shows how to outline each scene with POV, goal, motivation, conflict, and so on. I got the feeling that this was a nice smooth process for creating a good premise, plot outline, scene outlines, and eventually-the writing itself.My biggest gripe about the ebook was the poor formatting. For some reason the author chose to use a block-paragraph (no indent) style, with ragged right margins. This was definitely not a good choice, in my opinion, since it made the book much more difficult to read than if normal indented paragraphs with right justification had been used.The whole bad formatting effect was made worse by using minimal-sized 1/3 size blank lines between the block paragraphs (blanks are required between paragraphs so you can see where they start). The gap is too small, so it was easy to miss the start of the next paragraph. It was also made worse by the number of short sentences. If you imagine a short sentence with a couple of big words that won't fit on the ragged right, maybe you can picture a series of short paragraphs whose words go 3/4 across the screen, then a huge right side gap, then a couple of more words, then a 1/3 size blank between paragraphs, another short line with a big word, a huge ragged right gap, and so on. Ugh. I think the author should fix the formatting and try to reduce the use of long words if they screw up the reading experience.Other than the formatting issues, I liked the book. It did a competent job for its purpose, was fairly priced, and did a really nice job on the outlining examples. I would recommend this book to writers.