You: The Story
A Writer's Guide to Craft Through Memory
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The nonfiction debut by #1 New York Times bestselling and Carnegie Medal-winning author Ruta Sepetys. Perfect for fans of Burn After Writing and Bird by Bird.
Life is story in motion. Each day, you add to your story, revise it, and view it from a different angle. You erase things. Tear pages out. And sometimes, in hindsight, wish you could put them back. A day is a story. A year is a story. A life is a story.
You are a story.
Ruta Sepetys is known for creating vivid characters and harrowing plots. After five award-winning works of historical fiction and countless hours of meticulous research, she can affirm that the secret to strong writing is embedded within your life experience.
You: The Story is a powerful how-to book for aspiring writers that encourages you to look inward and excavate your own memories in order to discover the authentic voices and compelling details that are waiting to be put on the page. Masterfully weaving in humorous and heartfelt stories from her own life that illustrate an aspect of the craft of writing (such as plot, character development, or dialogue), Sepetys then inspires readers with a series of writing prompts and exercises.
Perfect for fans of Burn After Writing and Bird by Bird, You: The Story awakens the emerging writer and reveals that with some reflection, curiosity, and courage, you have a story to tell.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Sepetys (I Must Betray You) makes her nonfiction debut with a proficient guide on how to write better stories that are informed by one's life. Sepetys discusses the principles that underlie good fiction and recounts details from her own life to illustrate how personal anecdotes can fuel literary creativity. "The reality of life is so ludicrous" that it provides fertile material for fiction, she contends, encouraging readers to look through old photos of themselves and "invent an entirely new story around the image." She recounts receiving a backhanded compliment at a Hollywood red-carpet event to illustrate that "dialogue is not only what someone is saying, but how they're saying it." The advice largely follows prevailing wisdom, such as the exhortations to show a character's personality rather than tell readers about it and to "avoid general descriptions and drill into the details." Still, novice writers will appreciate the bounty of writing prompts, which include contemplating how a vivid childhood memory might inform the backstory of a character and composing first- and third-person accounts of a time when "you might have misjudged a situation." Sepetys's suggestions are solid, though there's not much here that other programs haven't said before. This is most likely to appeal to amateur writers and fans of Sepetys's fiction.
