Book Review - Story Design: Storyteller's Handbook for Writers and Dream Merchants by SEAM

Story Design: Storyteller’s Handbook for Writers and Dream Merchants by Shared Experience Art Machine

This is an awesome resource for writers, providing a concentrated source of helpful advice and a thoroughly worked example of how to design stories and produce a good pitch to sell them.

The book is born from the experience of a group of script writers, who recognised that it was better to sell lots of pitches and then write the accompanying scripts than trying to do write the scripts first. After all, if you want to earn your living by writing it is best to be sure you’re going to be paid for it before doing it.

The core of the book is an approach to designing your story before trying to write it. There is a 8 step approach to writing a one page design document. Each of the steps flows in a logical order and what is required is well explained and illustrated with examples. There are also links to the SEAM website with more material on it.

As well as the planning model there is also advice on how to pitch and what sort of stories are more likely to be picked up. So even if you are a pantser and doesn’t plan in advance this could still be of use to you as you could use it to write the pitch for agents and publishers, or even the back cover blurb.

Overall, if you are a writer, or wondered how to write a story, then you should get a copy of this book for yourself.

View all my reviews