Book Review: Nail Your Story: Add Tension, Build Emotion, and Keep Your Readers Addicted

posted in: Blog, Reviews, Writing/Authorship | 7

Nail Your Story: Add Tension, Build Emotion, and Keep Your Readers AddictedNail Your Story: Add Tension, Build Emotion, and Keep Your Readers Addicted by Monica Leonelle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There are so many books on writing, and plotting specifically, and while they’re helpful in their own respects, Nail Your Story filled in a lot of the missing puzzle pieces for me. The author calls it deep alignment, which is basically pulling the theme through the entire makeup of the book to create resonance with the reader.

The thing that helped me the most was talking about the relationship between theme and goals/motivations and the fatal flaw of the character. By digging deep in this area, it’s easy to begin creating an outline, since you know what message you want to get across and how to chip away at the fatal flaw in the protagonist.

Before this book, I always had what the author calls a “murky middle” – I knew where I wanted to begin and where I wanted to end, and I may even have that centerpiece moment, but tying the ends together still felt blank to me. This book took everything one step further to create a much clearer path.

Paired with Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding Story and a post I recently read about Ring Composition (which I can’t find now – argh! – but the theory is simple – mirror elements in ABCABC or ABCCBA format), and I’ve got a load of tools that can help me weave a plot worth writing.

Another enjoyable aspect was the writing itself, which came across as almost conversational, a wonderful feature for people like me who want information but don’t particularly enjoy reading nonfiction.

If You’re An Author…

I’m adding this to my personal list of favorite plotting books. Here are the others:

So much happy in my brain right now. :)

View all my reviews

7 Responses

  1. Glennroump

    cool web site.

  2. hi!

  3. […] Nail Your Story: Add Tension, Build Emotion, and Keep Your Readers Addicted (see my review here) or K.M. Weiland‘s Structuring Your Novel: Essential Keys for Writing an Outstanding […]

  4. This is a topic that’s near to my heart… Thank you!
    Exactly where are your contact details though? http://yahoo.net

    • Hey Jane! You can click on any of the links to go to Amazon’s listing of the book. Thanks for the read, and I hope you enjoy!

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