Brick by Brick: How to Build a Story

Let a multi-award-winning writer teach you how to build a storyMost writing craft books, courses, and workshops focus on the tools for being a writer and how to use them: dialog, setting, pacing, plot, openings, exposition, point-of-view. And so on.And on and on and on.Their aim is to add another tool, or maybe even a set of tools, to your writer's toolbox.The problem with that approach is the vast gulf in knowledge between having your toolbox filled with tools and applying those tools to create a story. Those craft books are the equivalent of telling a rookie construction worker, "Here's how to use a hammer, saw, level, screwdrivers, band saw, power drill, etc. Got that? Great! Now go build a house."In this book, Douglas Smith, a five-time award-winning author described by Library Journal as "one of Canada's most original writers of speculative fiction," takes a different approach. In these pages, Doug will show how to design that house so that you can build it. You'll learn how to create a blueprint for your story idea to take you from inspiration to story structure, a structure you can then build, brick by brick.Or rather, scene by scene. "In his decades as a freelance writer, Doug's learned that the important thing about fiction isn't the mastery of the tools, but how to use them to create a story structure. That's why this book has the construction analogy in its title. He's not teaching you how to write like everyone else; he's teaching you how to use an expected structure to be your very best writerly self." - Kristine Kathryn Rusch, multi-award-winning author and editor