HOW TO BUILD A STORY…OR, THE BIG WHAT IF

Advice on plotting stories for those who love to write and those who hate it but have to do it anyway.

Middle-grade novelist Dowell speaks directly to her typical audience in this breezy, lighthearted guide. First, she assures readers that if they’ve ever written anything, they are, in fact, writers. Acknowledging that it’s much easier to write the beginning of a novel than to follow it all the way through, she focuses most of her attention on how to move a story along. Start with the “Big What If” of the subtitle: “What if you woke up one morning and realized you could fly?” Create an action-packed opening scene and then throw obstacles—she calls them sticks, stones, and monsters—into the protagonist’s way. Solve the problems, and bang! You’ve got a story! Except that now it’s time to find an editor and revise. Dowell follows several what-if scenarios through to possible conclusions to show young writers how it might be done—but leaves plenty of mental room for them to take their stories in any direction at all. Both encouraging and realistic (“Writing is like a sport: it takes practice to get good”), she confines standard writing advice (“show don’t tell,” etc.) to an appendix and instead confronts the real monster that devours many an aspiring writer: quitting before the end.

Fresh, interesting, and unique—likely to be very useful in many settings.