Customer Reviews

A Manual of Writer's Tricks: Essential Advice for Fiction and Nonfiction Writers

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This one's for everyone - fiction and non-fiction. You pick up this slim paperback, rifle the pages and bang! A Manual of Writer's Tricks gives you ammunition to instantly liven your writing. My copy is well-highlighted. The foreword is written by literary agent Sheree Bykofsky who once sent me a delightful rejection letter. Some examples (I just gave you one - irony); Show don't tell - instead of "the ship was heavily weighted," say "Excess cargo made her tilt slightly to port." Use words that evoke images - instead of "my back is sore all over," say "I ache along every nerve ending and vertebra of my spine." You get the picture, now go get the book.

Like the other reviewers of this book I was amazed by this collection of writing tips.

The book is loaded with two to four paragraph recommendations on topics including style, structure, colorful writing, revision, writing exercises, word choice.

Ample exercises are given where appropriate. This book is easy to read and you feel that the author is right there sitting next to you as you read the book. He's gently giving you tips on improving your writing, unlike the tough commands of Strunk and White.

I would like to list all of the items that I found interesting and useful, but there would be too many. So, here's one that I just turned to:

"Always include some type of conflict... It's a not-so-well-kept secret among writers that the principle of conflict and resolution, so dear to the novelist's heart, applies just as successfuly to exposition and non-ficton as it does to fiction, even the most theoretical and academic kinds." He then goes on to list eleven ways to include conflict in your non-fiction. He also describes some examples using conflict.

I highly recommend this book, it is one of my favorites on writing.

John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX

This book is page after page of distilled advice on writing. No amusing anecdotes. No inspirational thoughts. These suggestions could be found in more verbose books, but as a quick reference this one is hard to beat.

In A Manual Of Writer's Tricks: Essential Advice For Fiction And Nonfiction Writers, David Carroll (Emmy Award- winning television writer and author of twenty-five books, including How To Prepare Your Manuscript For A Publisher) successfully collaborates with Sheree Bykofsky (literary agent and co-executive editor of the New York Public Library Desk Reference) to provide essential tips, tricks and techniques for aspiring fiction and nonfiction writers seeking to save time, improve their style, and avoid common pitfalls associated with the act of writing. This compendium of stratagems and literary shortcuts offer invaluable advice for writing with expression, improving structure, correcting and rewriting with greater efficiency, developing "writer's logic", avoiding the hazards of burnout or boredom, dealing with a lack of motivation or writer's block, and reworking scholarly prose for greater clarity and reader engagement. A Manual Of Writer's Tricks is a "must read" for novice authors just starting out, and has a great deal of value and insight for even the more experienced and seasoned writer.

I have just finished reading, for the first time, one of the best books on writing craft I have read to date: "A Manual of Writer's Tricks" by David L. Carroll. I was already recommending it to others when I had not read more than ten pages. This is the craft of writing reduced to the simplicity of useful principle. Those principles are accompanied by sufficient relevant analysis and precision example to illuminate those very same principles; and thus they are useful "tricks" indeed. The author has rendered a great service to the craft and writers. I highly recommend this book.

I've used the conflict section many times to jump-start my writing and work myself out of jams. I've yet to find a type of writing it doesn't apply to - maybe haiku. Really solid advice presented in an easy to absorb format. I keep it on my writer's desk bookshelf for easy reference when I'm stuck.

A Manual of Writer's Tricks stands apart from most books in the writing genre and is one I recommend reading early in your writing career. Focused on improving ability, structure, and expressiveness, the book also contains many exercises to improve your skills. Grab a highlighter and bring your thirst for improvement and you will instantly notice improvement in your writing. This book is filled with compelling advice from start to finish.