Book Review: Book Architecture: How to Plot and Outline Without Using a Formula

For the longest time, I have been thinking about writing fiction, but I couldn’t find a strategy that I liked. Over the past month, I not only read Stuart Horwitz’s book called Book Architecture: How to Plot and Outline Without Using a Formula but I also picked up his other two books. I think I found a strategy that I can use to both improve my nonfiction writing and expand into fictional writing. Because of Book Architecture, I am seeing the world of literature and film in an entirely different way. If you are stuck in your writing process, I would certainly recommend Book Architecture.

This book is the second book of an informative series. I am reading them out of order. The first book is called Blueprint Your Bestseller: Organize and Revise Any Manuscript with the Book Architecture Method. All of the books focus on the power of the series. Series are individual threads that are weaved together into a colorful fabric.

Horwitz defined a series as “The repetition and variation of a narrative element so that the repetition and variation creates meaning.” (p.3).

Once I understood the idea of a series as explained by Horwitz through his examples, I started to see them everywhere. The challenge is to create a meaningful series that interrelate.

A series can be about a character, object, place, concept, phrase, etc. The keys to a good series are iteration and change. The interaction of the series happens in the scenes. Key scenes are where a lot of meaningful interaction takes place.

Book Architecture is 149 pages long. Horwitz has arranged this book into seven chapters. In each chapter, Horwitz peeled back the onion more and more as he explained what a series was and how to use it for writing. He did this by showing how different series were used in short stories, novels, and screenplays. Here are the works reviewed:

• “Corduroy”
• The Great Gatsby
• Slumdog Millionaire
• The Social Network
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Catch-22
• The Metamorphosis

For each example, Horwitz highlighted the series by identifying the scene number, page number, iteration number, series type, and series details. As he plotted the series in a matrix or grid, it was fascinating to see how each series related to other series. You could see how a story could be told.

Horwitz also plotted the series on a series arc. This series arc showed if the item in the series deteriorated or improved over time. One could understand quite a bit about the storyline when you see all the arcs on the same graph.

The most satisfying part of the book was when I got to see examples of the series grid that other authors created. Horwitz shared the series grid for J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Here is an example from Heller:

Perhaps the most useful piece for me was to see how the series could be used for nonfiction. Horwitz shared the series grid for the Book Architecture. This example helped to show me how to make the book I am currently working on more interesting and more cohesive.

If you are a writer or are thinking of writing a book, I would definitely recommend Book Architecture and the rest of this collection. I promise you that you will never watch a movie or read a book the same way again.

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