A Story Is a Promise: Good Things to Know Before You Write That Screenplay, Novel, or Play

A Story is a Promise offers a fresh new model for mastering the elusive art of writing dramatic and engaging stories. In order to illustrate its major principles, the book includes reviews and analyses of over a dozen popular films, novels, and plays. Complete with prompts and questions at the end of each chapter, A Story is a Promise can be used as a workbook to help writers internalize the principle that underlies all welltold stories: that a story should be a promise and that a promise should be kept. The inclusion of familiar examples makes this book accessible and useful to all writers of fiction, plays, and screenplays.Bill Johnson has been using the manuscript of A Story is a Promise in his workshops for years. Many editors also use the workbook to teach blossoming writers the craft of storytelling.