Techniques and Exercises for Crafting a Plot That Grips Readers from Start to Finish

If you are a young writer looking for quick, solid advice on how to develop your craft then this book is an excellent place to start. If you are an experienced writer with a couple professional publications under your belt but you still have your doubts about your ability to make money at the craft of fiction, then this book will add greatly to your toolbox. However, if you've taken a few college level creative writing classes, or if you've already got a novel on store shelves and are working on your second, it would better to keep on writing and leave this book for someone else.

An informative read for a new or still unpublished writer. An interesting perspective for an experienced writer.

This book is a must read for any aspiring writer. It is especially helpful in October, as many folks prepare for the challenge of NANOWRIMO IN November. Mr. Bell offers valuable tips to help writer s pub through a stubborn first draft and even presents numerous techniques for revision. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a resource on plotting.

I purchased his book after attending a class Mr. Bell gave at a writer's conference.

The book is invaluable, it will save countless hours of re-writing, and make the entire effort easier. Plot is perhaps the most important element of a book.

Just as a house has a kitchen, bedroom, front door, etc, a well-crafted book should contain certain elements as well.

There are time-tested techniques and pointers, this book lists them and makes their application much easier.

We all have at least a dozen books on the craft of writing, this should be one of them. It is worth the investment and the time it will take to digest it.

Dan Elliott Jr.

Anyone who is an aspiring writer needs this book and other James Scott Bell books. I'm at the point where writing advice books don't contain much more helpful information, but these books still had little pieces of information that I found helpful.

Plot and Structure is a Writers Digest Book by James Scott Bell. While he touches on many topics, the focus of the book is how to structure your novel to hook your readers and how you can create a riveting plot by giving it structure. Bell peppers this book with examples from literary greats Stephen King and Dean Koontz and many other popular authors.

As with most writing books, this book won't teach you everything and some things you'll find helpful and some things you won't. Some of the lessons I took away were how to structure your book in three acts, how each scene must contain suspense, and of course how you should show, not tell. Also, your hero and villian must have adhesive, ie, there must be a reason the hero can't just walk away from the villain. Bell also emphasizes the importance of constantly looking for ideas to make your plot original and to not be afraid to let your mind wander and fill your story with some crazy, outrageous ideas. You can always cut them out later.

Bell is a strong advocate that you can learn to write well. While some people are born great writers and some aren't, even the best writers have to hone their craft and develop their potential. So, if through trial and error or rejection slips has caused you to think you weren't born to be a great writer, you may be wrong. This book will help you evolve into the great writer you were born to be, or at least improve upon your current meandering novel.

This is fun book to read and Bell is a great teacher.

Excellent!! This book really got me organized. It walks you through the big picture of crafting stories, long and short. Thank you!! Must read for anyone who is starting out writing, before you put your work out in the world and bore your readers, and embarrass yourself.

I read Immediate Fiction by Jerry Cleaver, then I read this. Immediate Fiction boils writing down to it's essentials, then this book gives you the framework to work your plot out in. If you have to pick only two books to read on writing fiction, this and Immediate Fiction are the best. Highly recommended.

This is excellent! I took a webinar from Mr. Bell and he is fabulous. The book is very logical, well laid out and interesting to boot. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to write but who has trouble with plot and pacing.

I cannot speak highly enough of this book.

I struggled in my journey to become a writer for more than 20 years. I had come to believe what James Scott Bell calls "The Big Lie", that if I wasn't born a writer, I would never be one. The knowledge Mr. Bell shares in this book is directly responsible for pointing my writing career in the right direction. The result: my debut fantasy novel has been on the bestseller lists for more than a month.

I own several of Mr. Bell's craft-related books now, and I will not hesitate to purchase future works.

Thank you, Mr. Bell, for exposing "The Big Lie", and for giving me the tools I needed to complete my work.

A friend suggested this. The advice is some of the most succinct and solid advice I've ever received. I've had a blast doing the exercises, and it's helped me figure out a lot about how to solidify my current story. It really focuses on the flow of a story and the loose formula that nearly every story follows. He also goes into how to create literary fiction compared to commercial fiction, how the two differ, as well as how to make both salable. It's the first how to write book since college that I've felt truly taught me and aided my writing, and it did so from cover to cover.

I plan on using this to help me with the planning stage of each of my novels for the foreseeable future. Also looking into picking up the other books of the series to help as well.

This book did not receive five stars because the writer has NO sense of style. Couldn't write a beautiful sentence to save their lives and one would assume this is essential to being a good, if not great, writer. However, as a mechanical instruction manual about how to plot and structure your novel this is a very, very practical guide. Highly recommended on that level.

The writer's ambiguous relationship to the distinction between literary and genre fiction is not helpful. There are, in my opinion, a great many distinctions between the two and these differences should have been listed, mapped, analyzed and offered up as coherent models. This, unfortunately, is not done...effectively.

Plot and Structure does not, effectively, deal with the terminology used to represent the techniques of the profession as well...but that is more quibble than a criticism.

In the end, if you cannot plot your novel after going over this book, thoroughly, then give it up...because you never will be able to.

Summing up, I would say this is a very good book...but not a great one. Still, as a nuts and bolts approach this writer brushes aside eloquence in favour of producing a basic 'how to' guide. On this level the book works brilliantly.

As an already published author, I still find my books wanting and have gone on an adventure to improve my writing and noveling skills as a result. I would have to say that this book, featured in Writers Digest, is absolutely awesome for learning to properly work up a good plot and structure to your books. It has quite a few things I already knew but it also had some fresh new approaches that I found incredibly helpful. I do not usually do book reviews but this book deserved one.

Pretty much anything from James Scott Bell is going to be easy to read and understand. The exercises in the book make developing characters fun instead of laborious. I would suggest any of his books.

Very informative. I am always so much more interested in characters and mood and setting a scene; with me plot is secondary. But with the average reader it is apparently the other way around, so I am trying to take in the logical points of this book. It's a good one for sure! Recommended.

Very informative. I am always so much more interested in characters and mood and setting a scene; with me plot is secondary. But with the average reader it is apparently the other way around, so I am trying to take in the logical points of this book. It's a good one for sure! Recommended.

I learned some things I guess. And the writing was interesting for the most part, but the author used far too many examples, most of which I’d never even heard of. Whenever the author could choose between actually explaining his point and giving an example he gave an example leaving me with zero idea what he was even talking about.

And I don’t know if the printing company even knows how to print books because the book was literally falling apart on me on my very first read through. Like huge chunks of pages falling off the spine. That is inexcusable it really is. I bought it new, and it’s falling apart like it’s been read a thousand times.

This book did absolute wonders for me. When it comes to writing, I am what the author calls and OP (outlining person), but I was drowning in a sea of index cards. Bell helped me find direction for my ramblings and shed light on the gaps and potholes that were making my progress shaky.