I initially didn’t set out to read this book, but seeing Sepetys talk at the National Book Festival, I not only acquired a copy, but also ended up reading it within a day!

This guidebook is engaging, and the author’s voice - excited, ready to challenge you try new things, and overall encouraging and warm - is easy to find, and it maintains throughout the book.

The structure of the book is chapters, with focus on different elements of a story: plot, character development, dialogue, etc… Sepetys provides many writing examples and anecdotes to highlight her main points, and also summarizes each chapter takeaways as bullets for reference.

Many of her tips on how to create or uncover a story, though geared towards writers, can also be applied to other situations. As she briefly mentions in the end, uncovering stories and reasoning can help people connect, and I think her guide is also structured well to help give non-writers good ideas on how to do this (question prompts and examples, plus general reasoning as to why things should be asked or explored).

I definitely think that this book will need a reread, as there’s a lot of content that my brain didn’t fully absorb the first read. However, I feel it’s a book that’s easy to skip around chapters in, so approachable as a guide and troubleshooting text.


Coming in, I was influenced by both her voice from the talk and my background with some of her other books (though it’s been years since the last read). Ruta Sepetys’ novel “Between Shades of Gray” was my first read of hers, and even now, a decade after reading the book, I recall the novel was beautifully written, and as one of the first refugee/displacement stories I had read, it showed me the hardships of people forced to flee in an intimate way.

This book is very different from the historical works, but because of this it gives a nice guide to the how the writer’s thoughts work while she writes her art.