I think Lisa Cron has some really great ideas about storytelling, and especially about finding and maintaining a novel's emotional center. Her scene card framework is valuable and I feel like it's something I will employ in my own writing process.

But oh my God, this book is verbose to the point of redundancy. Cron preaches upon every single point she has to make, and preaches upon it in excess. If she feels she needs to pad the word count more, she might circle back around to it again a few chapters later, just to make sure you really got it through your thick skull.

I feel fortunate that I was an English major and through that, developed the ability to skim through resource materials quickly to find the important nuggets of information. I went through this book with a highlighter and speed-read it. This book really could have been about 75 pages of useful content.

Cron decides to use a friend's brainstorming work to illustrate the steps of her process. We learn all about Ruby the protagonist, Rufus the dog, and hijinks that ensue when Ruby dognaps him to get her shrewish sister Nora off her case. I don't think this was a successful tactic at all, as relevant as Cron tries to make it. I wound up skipping these sections like several other reviewers. Perhaps because of Cron's tendency to beat me over the head with the 'do you get my point yet' stick, I don't feel I missed out on anything critical.

Save yourself the money and don't buy this book. I'm sure someone on Authortube (Youtube) has created a handy resource video covering the key points of this process. The Story Genius scene cards are available as a downloadable template through a quick Google search, and those are the most valuable aspect of Cron's book.