I lied. This post is not about books about writing. The books I would like to talk about will not tell you how to conjugate a verb, where a noun goes, or what onomatopoeia is all about. They assume you know how to muck around with the English language in the most basic sense. What they will teach you is about story telling. It's something your high school English teacher maybe didn't touch on. I'm sure you got the basics, that a story has a beginning, middle, and end. That a story has one or more plots and arcs, etc. But what really makes the story compelling and will keep the reader's attention through twenty pages or a thousand. The first one I'd like to touch on is Damn Fine Story, by Chuck Wendig. If manuals and text books often bore you, this will be the book for you to read. It will tell you the concepts of writing a good story and how to work on becoming a better story teller. Wendig has quite a history with this, and is a very talented and accomplished writer to learn from. He does this brilliantly with giving you entertaining and complex examples. Warning time though, if you haven't watched any of the Star Wars movies or Die Hard, you may want to put that time in prior to reading this book. Along with Wendig's own stories about himself and his stubborn tough-as-nails father, he uses examples from these and other pop culture based movies. I loved having the use cases being drawn from these movies though, because it did give me a solid reference to call on when he's talking about dialog, rising actions, beats, etc. The toolkit he helps to introduce you to is simple, but malleable to your own process. Chuck introduces you to ways to work through creation, writing and editing, while understanding that there will be some things to keep and some things to cut to make a Damn Fine Story. It's definitely worth the money, and it's a relatively short read with a quick pace. Just remember what it is trying to do for you, teach you how to hone your skill to be a story teller. The Fantasy Fiction Formula is by another great SFF writer, Deborah Chester. The edition I bought had a forward from Jim Butcher, author of the Dresden Files series. The gist of his introduction is that he had Chester when in college and while seeking to prove her wrong about how to write a fantasy novel, he ended up proving her right and Harry Dresden was the result. I will level with you that this book is longer and not as entertaining as Chuck's Damn Fine Story. It is more like a textbook, and readers that can grok with textbooks will be happy to have this resource. Chester goes through how to develop your characters and what to do with your story lines. It is helpful in directing you on what works in fantasy. The tools she helps you to add to your kit are very helpful. She provides a very robust list of over 75 questions that you can use to form your characters. She also notes that while she would encourage you to answer all of those questions for main characters, tertiary characters beyond your repeating and frequent supporting characters can bypass a large amount of those questions. This process does help answer a lot of unknowns about your mains before starting your story and helps to provide some fodder for asides and stories to provide as you're writing your primary story to help add depth to those characters. She offers great exercises for helping you deal with outlining, slugging through the middle of the stories, and creating a memorable ending. I really took a lot of this book to heart while writing and editing my first novel, Over a God's Dead Body. I do have one criticism for Chester's book. At multiple points she supports the idea that you should write fantasy from a single point of view. Such as in the Dresden novels, everything is told from Harry's perspective. I understand where she's coming from, it is hard as a reader to follow floating perspectives. I find it a bit limiting in some storytelling aspects though. I intend to follow this advice with my next novel and try to consolidate that viewpoint, but I didn't in my first. Reason being, my first book followed the storytelling method I like to call "the clusterfuck". Think of stories like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, or any Guy Richie film. There were multiple story threads that wound together to become a knot of intersections at the climax. That's the case where changing viewpoints works, but you have to be careful to help the reader make that shift. In my case, it was usually only having one or two view changes per chapter, with a heading letting the reader know who was being followed for that section (Loki, Esmy, Seth, Kyle, etc.). As far as wanting to have a formula to help you tell your stories well and be able to actually get them out quickly though, I can easily see how following her advice will get you to being able to crank out a novel every month or two writing full time. As it was, writing Over a God's Dead Body took me the better part of 16 months between research, writing and editing. Though that was writing part time, averaging about 10-15 hours a week