Customer Reviews

The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing

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If you're even thinking about writing a book, you need "The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing." This comprehensive guide contains over 400 pages of everything you need to know about writing, publishing and marketing your work.

Each section of this book covers vital aspects of the craft every writer should follow:

Part I: The Craft
Get started by understanding plot, story flow, point of view, characters and dialogue.

Part II: The Art
Understand the rules of fiction, turn true life to fiction, connect emotion and get in tune with your reader's senses.

Part III: The Process
Find out how to get started on your novel, jumpstart your creativity, revise your novel and deal with criticism.

Part IV: The Genres
Get to know your audience, create realistic characters and keep the suspense going throughout your novel. Plus, tips on writing horror, fantasy, romance and Christian fiction.

Part V: The Marketplace
Use these insider tips for finding agents and editors. Study the debate of fee-charging agents. Learn the ins and outs of the market. Tools for book proposals, a novel synopsis, getting your work published and help with the electronic publishing world.

Part VI: The Interviews
Read interviews with the hottest, most accomplished authors, including Margaret Atwood, Maeve Binchy, Tom Clancy, Joyce Carol Oates, James Patterson, Kurt Vonnegut and more.

You could easily read this book from cover-to-cover or flip through it as a reference as your writing progresses. This is, by far, one of the strongest writing how-to books on the market.

If you only purchase one writing book this year, make it "The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing." Head to the bookstore, run through the pages and you'll instantly be hooked.

Any aspiring writer should be grateful for this anthology to study. Although the considerable diversity here does not a completely unified voice make, each article (previously published in Writer's Digest) has tips and inspirations for the aspiring novelist. From Richard Russo's exploration of place and character to mystery novelist Sue Grafton's use of a journal to get her right brain going-from Jeanne Cavelos's observation that horror is a genre uniquely dependent upon emotion-and what scares you is the secret source of fear-this book is a diverse gold mine of writing technique nuggets. Here you will find James Patrick Kelly talking about the need to "murder your darlings"-the phrase that Stephen King borrows in his On Writing book. Helpful boxes of related books, how to write proposals and Evan Marshall's chapter on novel synopses (which I didn't even know existed!) for agents; personal anecdotes and articulate easy-to-read tips from authors either great or best-selling or both make this a useful, inspiring, and exciting book-perhaps the best overall I have read on the craft of fiction. How does screenwriting relate to novel writing? How do you create a believable character? How do you integrate exposition? How do you create suspense? How do you revise or deal with criticism? What means emotion and motivation? These are the kinds of core questions addressed in this fun technique book.

Complete Handbook of Novel Writing is a collection of articles and interviews with successful novelists. Notable authors include Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, John Updike, and James Patterson. The individual chapters are pithy yet comprehensive. I particularly liked the chapters on using specific details and what makes them work, point of view, editing tips, and helpful hints on specific genres: fantasy, mystery, horror, suspense, romance, and Christian fiction. Much valuable information here that writers can return to for reminders as their writing skills mature.

This book will get you writing and keep your writing at a higher level.

~review by Joan Mazza, author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self and Exploring Your Sexual Self.

Since I have yet to write "the great American novel," I probably cannot critique a book such as THE COMPLETE HANDBOOK OF NOVEL WRITING, since I have yet to have a book published. I do want to write a novel one day, and I have been doing quite a bit of writing and rewriting. I have also been doing quite a bit of reading of novels and books on writing theory and have taken part in writing workshops. All of these things have been helpful, particularly the writing workshops. Yet as I write, I do have questions about what I am doing, and like to read practical advice from writers who have been published. THE COMPLETE HANDBOOK OF NOVEL WRITING is such a resource. It contains articles about writing theory and craft, information about genres, and the various markets. The articles have been published in WRITER'S DIGEST magazine and most are penned by well known writers. I am finding the book to be a great reference tool. I have found the book particularly helpful when I have a question about some aspect of writing or need advice and inspiration to keep writing.

In the past year I have found that nothing is as helpful as being in a workshop atmosphere, but at those times when I need the advice of an expert, quite often the answer is at my fingertips in this book.

The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing from Writer's Digest Books is an anthology of essays and interviews intended to be a one-stop shop for writing novels. It is organized into six broad sections: The Craft (technical explanations of plot, point-of-view, character development), The Art (broad advice on what to write about and approaches to making your writing more appealing), The Process (a lot of advice about editing and revising in this section), The Genres, The Marketplace, and finally The Interviews (brief interviews with a number of well-know authors).

Because it is an anthology, the quality of the individual essays varies quite a bit. Ideally, the anthology format would allow each contributor to write about their special area of interest or mastery, and this seems to hold true, more or less, especially in the first few sections of the book. There were several essays that didn't really tell me anything new, but I picked up enough valuable pointers to make the book a worthwhile purchase and to justify the time taken to read it.

Things get a little murkier as we move toward the end of the book, though. In the genre section, there is no essay on science fiction, but two on fantasy. The first, by Terry Brooks, seemed almost entirely devoid of content, at least to me. The second, by J. V. Jones, on creating fantasy characters, was more helpful, but still did not go very far. It certainly will not replace books devoted specifically to the topic of writing fantasy or sf.

Most disappointing were the interviews (fourteen of them). The problem here is that most of the interviews are only a few pages long, and use much of that space with the interviewer relating the writer's bio. Many of the writers do not offer advice on writing. There are certainly some gems here (the Terry McMillan and Kurt Vonnegut interviews were winners), but mostly the interviews seem like morsels for readers rather than something for a writer's handbook.

Bottom line: This book does a good job of pulling together writing advice on several different levels, from the mechanics of crafting and editing, through broader issues of theme and style, and an overview of how the publishing business works. If you don't want to get more than one book on writing, this book is a good candidate for that spot on your bookshelf, despite the unevenness.

Very practical and very readable. Not at all pedantic. Chapters are generally short, but packed with information. Book is being used as a text in a Writer's Digest class. Section breakdown by number of chapters: The craft (9), The art (8), The process (8), The genres (9), The marketplace (7), plus 14 interviews with current writers. The book is great, but surprisingly, it contains more than a few typos and grammatical errors!

Good thing: It is an anthology.

Bad thing: It is an anthology, so the quality varies. It is hard for the authors of the different articles to no do some selfpromotion. Some resists and focus of being a teacher, some can't but it doesn't matter since it is relevant but in a few cases it really stands out.

Best thing. You will read this book back to back because although it isn't complete it does give a nice overview what writing and being a writer is all about. This is a book you start with.

Biggest disappointment: Genres; I wanted much more. Dean R. Koontz book from 1972 "Writing Popular Fiction" covered genres better, not a great but better.

I highly doubt there is possible to write a complete book about writing because the approach to writing varies so wildly from author to author:
Dean R. Koontz is about writing as much as possible, but his stories tend resemble each other eventually (please no more Golden Retrievers in your stories thanks!)
Elizabeth George is about planning and research, her books tend to be very thick.
Stephen King is about "uncovering the dinosaur skeleton" but he has problem with endings.
Edgar Allan Poe had a habit, typical of his time, of going back to old works and write new versions of them, but usually his first drafts were the best ones.
Ernest Hemingways wrote and rewrote chapters a dozen times and the endchapter twice that to get his perfected hard boiled style right.
HP Lovecrafts stories would have been completly destroyed if he had been forced to avoid purple prose and respect the "show don't tell" rule.

In conclusion, one person can't write THE book about novel writing, you need the input from several to even come close. This book doesn't succed but it is a try worth reading.

Keeping this very brief: I have a BFA in Creative Writing and an MA in Professional Writing, yet this book has taught me more about writing a novel than any class I have ever taken. A must-have for ALL writers, no matter what the subject matter or skill level of the writer.

I'm not sure where to start when describing this book. This book is awesome- I think that I'll be a Pulitzer prize winner before I know it. (A man can dream........) This book offers everything from the idea of writing to the publication of what you write. I'll have it faithfully beside me during every step of my writing process; all the way to that Pulitzer. Unbelievable buy-

I have several excellent books on screenwriting, which is a topic of strong interest. I happened to see this at a library, checked it out, and decided I had to own it. Unlike "Story" by Robert McKee, which is a wonderful book, this book has the viewpoints of several different writers. I find the pages very exciting, because you see the world better and differently as you proceed. Another book that did that for me was "The Stanislavski System" by Sonia Moore. Or earlier in my life, "Gestalt Therapy Verbatim" by F.Perls. Whereas some books are like a river that flows gently, this book delivers a series of aha moments. I am not a beginning writer, but beginning in fiction.