These two authors, under the slightly altered names of 'Sean M Platt' and 'Johnny Truant', wrote "The Fiction Formula" a seemingly paradoxically non-fiction audiobook which claims to teach a reader "All you need to know to be a full-time storyteller" but I have say I have grave doubts about such books.
Have you noticed how these books are nearly always written by people you never heard of, much less saw their names on any best seller list? It seems clear to me that such people make their money not from selling fiction, but from selling books and/or running courses that offer to make a person into a best-selling author. My problem with this is that, to begin with, it's not possible, and secondly, I have to wonder how they propose to do that for others when they haven't done it for themselves.
I've heard it said that everyone has a story to tell, but even if it were true, it doesn't mean that the story is interesting, or that a person can write their story and have it sell no matter how much coaching and encouragement they get. That's why we have ghost writers!
The two authors in question here started up the "Sterling & Stone Story Studio" which for all I know could be an author mill or it could be legit. I honestly don't know, because from their website it's impossible to tell just what it is they do or how they do it. Naturally, if they're charging for their 'tuition' or whatever it is they offer, they're not going to give you everything up front for free, but for a website like this to not give so much as an outline of what their expectations of you are, and what their requirements are in return, will always make me suspicious.
They claim they have put out about a hundred novels since 2011, but to me, for multiple writers that's not very impressive. Counting my children's books, I've put out over well over fifty all by myself since 2013, yet I don't consider that any great achievement. The thing is I don't know how they work there: whether it's a tutoring arrangement or whether they have people write stuff like in "James Frey's Fiction Factory" or whether it's some other system.
Their website offers no help. None of the author's names on the website meant anything to me. None were familiar. Not that I've heard of every writer and not that a writer needs a best-seller to make a living from their craft, but you'd think, if this method was so spectacularly successful, there'd be one or two names that that your average reader might have heard of. I hadn't, and I've read a heck of a lot of books in all genres.
This, to cut a long story off, is how I came to read this novel. When I read about their audiobook I looked them up on Barnes and Noble to see what they'd written, and recognized none of it, but the first four books they had on offer there were all free - probably as loss leaders for series, which I will have little to no truck with. I ahve ot say here I ahve doubts abotut he vlaue of an audiobook in that genre to begin with, but the ultility of that format for this kind of a book is a separate issue.
Anyways, I picked one of their novels at random and started in on it to see how well these people - who claim to teach others how to write - write themselves. Maybe I was wrong in my take on their offer. Maybe I'd missed something. The best way would be to read something they've written and see how it compares to other things I've read, and I have to say: I was not impressed with their trope effort.
I've often wished I had a co-writer - someone to talk over my stories with and maybe share some writing, but I've never had that. Of course, on the other side of that coin is how well a pair of writers will fare. How do they work? Who writes what? How do they resolve conflicts? Maybe it's better to write alone! The thing is that when I launched into this novel, I found nothing new, or startlingly original, or particularly inventive. It was just your boilerplate writing about alien invaders have arriving around Earth and failing to communicate with the locals.
In this particular regard it was just an Independence Day redux. The thing is that there was zero backstory. Admittedly, I skimmed a lot of this, and I DNF'd it, because it was boring as all hell to me, but in what I read, I came across nothing which explained what had happened from day one here. I didn't want a flashback or an info dump, gods forbid, but you'd think the writers might have put some effort into filling out the story a bit, with a word or two here and there. No. They had other plans.
Instead what we got was a soap opera, and the conversations these jackass characters had were unreal and unlike things they would likely say to each other if this were a true story. Worse than this though were the clichés: women doing the screaming, ridiculous and unnecessarily gory alien robots (or wildlife whichever it was - I didn't stay to find out), inexplicable violence, the alien vehicle they interacted with being cold as ice, advanced aliens who were improbably and brutally violent, and so dumb they evidently couldn't communicate with the locals, and it went boringly on and on. There was nothing to see here: nothing new or surprising, or remotely interesting. This a formulaic encounter of the worst kind. it was a flimsy sci-fi veneer over a daytime TV show.
So we got into the story with no idea how the aliens had become so dominant, why the world's militaries could not fight them off, and so on. The problem for me was that instead of a story about alien invasion, we got that as a backdrop for a soap opera among the enforced residents of a Las Vegas casino, and there's nothing more boring than that - the switch and bait of offering an alien invasion story, but making it all about these uninteresting people - none of whom I liked at all - is not going to make me read it. Normally I would not have picked up a book like this where a 'ragtag band of people' is involved. There's nothing worse.
The idea is that these people encounter a dying alien, How they determined that is a mystery. This is where I quit reading, so maybe I missed that, but according to the blurb they have to (warning: 5-alarm cliché ahead) transport the sick alien to area 51 - and no doubt save the world by curing him, her, or it. Yep! This was the alien motive. They thought Earth was an ER! I'm sorry but this is really bad writing and based on what I read of it, I sure wouldn't pay - or even get for free - any tutoring these authors have to offer. I can't commend this novel at all based on my experience of it, and I'm done with these writers and anyone else in their stable.
