The Last Book On Writing You’ll Ever Have To Read

I met Bestselling Author, Larry in October 2009 through his blog, StoryFix.com. I was a year into my novel writing journey, I had a shitty first draft, a revised shitty first draft and was about to get started on a third shitty draft… ’til I found Larry’s 11-part series on story structure.

It changed my entire life–my writing and my career.

So when Larry announced (back in 2010) that Writer’s Digest was publishing his book, Story Engineering: Mastering the 6 Core Competencies of Successful Writing, I was beyond thrilled.

I have read a lot of books about writing, but this book takes top prize. I consider it to be the novel-writing bible. (That’s why I’ve built all my coaching programs around the knowledge I gained from Larry, and why I give a copy to every client, and recommend it to every fiction writer I meet.)

It’s like Larry has handed you the keys to the writing and publishing kingdom through reading this book. You will finally feel like you know everything you need to know in order to write a successful and sellable novel. And that’s worth everything.

Story Engineering is like getting an MFA in Creative Writing, only it’s even better because it doesn’t cost you two-plus years of your life and upwards of $100,000.

The book is broken down into eight parts:

• Part One—What Are The Six Core Competencies, and Why Should I Care?
• Part Two—The First Core Competency: Concept
• Part Three—The Second Core Competency: Character
• Part Four—The Third Core Competency: Theme
• Part Five—The Fourth Core Competency: Story Structure
• Part Six—The Fifth Core Competency: Scene Execution
• Part Seven—The Sixth Core Competency: Writing Voice
• Part Eight—The Story Development Process

How To Read Story Engineering

With so much information to take in, here’s how I recommend you read this book:

1. First read it all the way through from cover-to-cover, taking in as much information as you can.
2. Next, use the Table Of Contents (TOC) to jump around and read for clarification. Every page of this book is packed with great information, but that can make it difficult to remember everything. Using the TOC reading method you can refresh yourself on the parts that were unclear or that you just needed to spend additional time taking in.
3. Keep Story Engineering by your writing area and pull it out whenever you need a refresher or just a confidence boost (as this book will surely make you feel like you know everything it takes to write a novel that works).
4. Read it all the way through once a year, as a refresher

This book fills in all the holes and gaps the classes, workshops and other books you’ve read left behind.

If you don’t already own Story Engineering, you need to own it pronto! Think of it as an investment in your future success as a writer. And for the price of $15 (on Amazon) it’s a bargain.

And if you want to hear even more about Story Engineering, check out this video interview blogger Joanna Penn did with Larry on his new book.

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