What do you think?
Rate this book
Action Story: The Primal Genre
Action Stories speak to ancient human desires. Readers want to experience heart-stopping fear and excitement and learn lessons of survival.
How can you write a story that satisfies those desires? In Action The Primal Genre, Story Grid founder Shawn Coyne takes you on a journey deep into the meaning of the genre. Coyne boils down insights gained through more than 25 years as an editor and writer to teach you Action Story's fundamental constraints and patterns. He explores subgenres and setting, and proposes a new way of understanding the traditional cast of characters to reveal their power as agents of light and darkness. In keeping with Story Grid Publishing's goal of helping all writers level up their craft, Coyne provides a practical twenty-point game plan, showing how action stories move forward from beginning to end. Action stories are part of our DNA, fundamental to our humanity. Let's learn to write them together.
How can you write a story that satisfies those desires? In Action The Primal Genre, Story Grid founder Shawn Coyne takes you on a journey deep into the meaning of the genre. Coyne boils down insights gained through more than 25 years as an editor and writer to teach you Action Story's fundamental constraints and patterns. He explores subgenres and setting, and proposes a new way of understanding the traditional cast of characters to reveal their power as agents of light and darkness. In keeping with Story Grid Publishing's goal of helping all writers level up their craft, Coyne provides a practical twenty-point game plan, showing how action stories move forward from beginning to end. Action stories are part of our DNA, fundamental to our humanity. Let's learn to write them together.
- GenresWriting
71 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 8, 2020
14 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 1, 2022
Get all the Story Grid Beats. Read all the Story Grid Beats.
If you want to level up your craft as a writer, this is the way to go.
Also, these then become a great source of reference when you are stuck with your writing (or doing your weekly Story Grid Guild worksheet).
I'd recommend bookmarking the pages that have concepts, or tools that you'd likely revisit to make it easier to consult these books.
Flow: 5/5
Actionability: 5/5
Mindset: 5/5
Some of My Highlights:
"The action genre is one of the nine external genres."
"We might come away from the trauma with the realization that we're not living up to our potential."
"On the other hand, we might come face-to-face with death and conclude that we are not fully living, enjoying the everyday wonders of the world."
"Narrative was the critical psychotechnology - a tool that came from our conscious minds - that allowed knowledge to spread between individuals and to carry forward from generation to generation."
"Stories - in the form of cave paintings, songs, sculptures, and eventually formal language - made humans more formidable together than alone."
"Stories are collective knowledge storage tanks, and what's more, there is no limit to their size."
"A quick glance at any cave painting will reveal that the first shared stories were about how to hunt or gather food."
"As writers, we all wish to cause effects, and the science of story can help us."
"An action story is a tool to help us survive unexpected external changes in our environment."
If you want to level up your craft as a writer, this is the way to go.
Also, these then become a great source of reference when you are stuck with your writing (or doing your weekly Story Grid Guild worksheet).
I'd recommend bookmarking the pages that have concepts, or tools that you'd likely revisit to make it easier to consult these books.
Flow: 5/5
Actionability: 5/5
Mindset: 5/5
Some of My Highlights:
"The action genre is one of the nine external genres."
"We might come away from the trauma with the realization that we're not living up to our potential."
"On the other hand, we might come face-to-face with death and conclude that we are not fully living, enjoying the everyday wonders of the world."
"Narrative was the critical psychotechnology - a tool that came from our conscious minds - that allowed knowledge to spread between individuals and to carry forward from generation to generation."
"Stories - in the form of cave paintings, songs, sculptures, and eventually formal language - made humans more formidable together than alone."
"Stories are collective knowledge storage tanks, and what's more, there is no limit to their size."
"A quick glance at any cave painting will reveal that the first shared stories were about how to hunt or gather food."
"As writers, we all wish to cause effects, and the science of story can help us."
"An action story is a tool to help us survive unexpected external changes in our environment."
May 23, 2020
Short but chock full of content, this little volume distills everything you need to know about the Action Genre within the Story Grid methodology.
If there's one thing that frustrated me about The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know, which I adore and continue to mine for insight, it's that it did not contain many genre specifics.
This book satisfies that lack. Shawn Coyne provides all the sub-genres, the conventions, the necessary scenes--and so forth. I also greatly appreciated the opening examination of Story as psychotechnology.
I'll be coming back to this book time and time again, I'm sure. An essential addition to my fiction writing toolbox.
If there's one thing that frustrated me about The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know, which I adore and continue to mine for insight, it's that it did not contain many genre specifics.
This book satisfies that lack. Shawn Coyne provides all the sub-genres, the conventions, the necessary scenes--and so forth. I also greatly appreciated the opening examination of Story as psychotechnology.
I'll be coming back to this book time and time again, I'm sure. An essential addition to my fiction writing toolbox.
May 27, 2020
Not much new material here. Most of the practical info in this book can more easily be gleaned from the Secrets of the Action Genre article by Rachelle Ramirez on the Story Grid site. But if you're a hard core Story Grid fan, you might enjoy some of the additional abstraction that Shawn Coyne has added in this book. There's quite a bit of discussion of Coyne's philosophy of story and how it fits with cognitive science.
July 25, 2020
As a regular follower of Story Grid, much of this book's content I had digested in other forms, either via podcast or articles on the Story Grid website.
For me, the value of the book is mostly in Chapter 8, with a breakdown of the 20 key scenes of an Action Story, which will help me edit my current WIP and has already helped me sketch out the next book I will write.
For me, the value of the book is mostly in Chapter 8, with a breakdown of the 20 key scenes of an Action Story, which will help me edit my current WIP and has already helped me sketch out the next book I will write.
June 20, 2021
I always pooh-pooed the Action Story
… until I read this book. I am now embarking in a quest to find what MY take on an Action Story might look like.
… until I read this book. I am now embarking in a quest to find what MY take on an Action Story might look like.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews