Hello fellow writers, and the full, 12 minute version of this book review, has just been added at Lesson 45 of The Complete Freelance Writing Course.

This is a book for psychology lovers, written by Ben Ambridge, Professor of Psychology at Liverpool University. It’s a most interesting experiment in using the idea of masterplots ( a limited number of story types in the culture we consume), real-life examples of these plots and psychological analysis and research.

Unlike what we might expect in a text book, with these three aspects given fairly equal coverage, the writer takes off in some instances, like his example of Leicester City Football Club unexpectly winning the Premier League Championship in 2016. I quite like this – it adds some unpredictability to each chapter, and shows what rocks the author’s boat.

In the lesson, I take a close look at two types of masterplots described in the book: The Underdog and The Hole. Ben Ambridge describes how these narratives get used in political messaging, specifically in these instances the messaging of Donald Trump. It’s a fascinating read and highly pertinent to the times we live in.

I spotted this book in Chapter One Bookshop, where I help out and where we’ve just launched some Local Writing For Wellbeing workhops, where we’ll be testing out some of the themes in this book for real. Literature Wales have kindly supported here, and if you, or someone you know is in West Wales and would be interested, then we’d love to meet you.

Here’s a flavour: