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Crafting Beautiful Stories

24th September, 2021 Share on Twitter

This is a quick post to let you know I’ve re-released one of my writing craft books with major updates.

I unpublished it earlier in the year because I felt it wasn’t good enough, and these major updates are an effort to make the book a lot more useful.

Beauty: Awe, Wonder, and the Sublime for Passionate Writers is being re-released as Crafting Beautiful Stories: How to Fill Your Writing with Awe and Wonder.

What can you find in this new and improved writing craft book? Here is a list of the new learning outcomes. I hope you see that it makes for a much more practical book than before!

• Harness the power of the “oceanic feeling” to fulfil the deep human need to contemplate something transcendent—something we sense to be far, far bigger than ourselves.
• Use “emotion pillars” to design your story around its most emotionally resonant moments. Your character must feel something for your readers to feel anything.
• Pose questions about the lore of your story’s world. Hint at clues throughout the story. Then, right at the moment of peak crisis and tension, answer the question with boldness.
• Don’t be afraid to make your story long, so long as it is well structured and filled with drama and conflict. There are many readers who love the level of detail enabled by large word counts.
• Open up the possibility of an exciting new world rich with opportunities, and make your readers feel that they have agency in this world.
• Draft your story with anger and righteous indignation. It’ll give your writing a sublime edge, and you can always edit later with a sober perspective.
• Use the “slow slow, quick quick” technique to seduce your readers into bold, surprising traps. Aim for one surprise every 20-50 pages for fast-paced novels, or 90-110 pages for slower-paced novels.

If you want to fill your writing with moments that really grab your readers, then I recommend Crafting Beautiful Stories: How to Fill Your Writing with Awe and Wonder with my whole heart.

Please check out The 24 Laws of Storytelling, my book that explores the principles that make some books and movies great and explains why others fail. By reading my book, you’ll gain the same strategies used by master storytellers such as Stephen King, Christopher Nolan, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and many more. Pick up your copy today.