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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good exercises to get to the pulse of your plot, May 15, 2009
This review is from: Novel Shortcuts: Ten Techniques that Ensure a Great First Draft (Paperback)
I really enjoyed this book. This book is for those of you who like to plan your book before you sit down and start writing it. I am a planner. I outline the whole book and then outline, chapter by chapter, so this book was right up my alley. I have a completed manuscript that I am editing/rewriting. One thing I had struggled with up to this point was being able to boil my main theme/plot down to one sentence. This book helped me do it with the "writing jacket copy as revelation excercise." I enjoyed the personal examples that the author used as well as examples from other works. Whether you are just starting a novel or you have finished it and are doing revisions, this is a great book to have around. It really helps you strip away the fluff and get down to the core of your novel, from which you can work back up to ensure the fluff is necessary and purposeful. She provides techniques to get your ideas down in order to move ahead with a scene or book as a whole and helps troubleshoot and fix common problems, such as plot and characterization. I especially loved the "shortcut to a scene" chapter and the "finding the core of your novel" chapter. Also she has exercises and recommended reading throughout the book. It's really well organized and written with humour and compassion. The only thing this book could have used more of, was talking about writing your hook. Other than that, I don't feel it's missing anything, if you look at it as a book that provides possible techniques to get your plots and characters written faster. Not every technique is going to work for every writer, that's important to remember.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Writer's Warning!, June 6, 2009
This review is from: Novel Shortcuts: Ten Techniques that Ensure a Great First Draft (Paperback)
Do not begin to read this book unless you have a pen and paper handy! If you don't, you'll find you've marked up the book with notes, and you're going to want to keep this book pristine to refresh your memory with all the terrific tips to help you everytime you create something new. And long after you've put it down, your brain will be working overtime on how to improve your own manuscript. This one of the best self-help books on writing to come out in a long time. Don't pass it up.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not Just for Novel Writers, October 23, 2009
This review is from: Novel Shortcuts: Ten Techniques that Ensure a Great First Draft (Paperback)
I should say from the outset, that I have no novel writing aspirations for the near future. I am strictly a short story (and poetry!) writer at this point in my life, so some of what this book covers was not as relevant to me as it would be to its targeted audience, which as near as I can tell is fiction novelists actively working on drafts of their novel. That being said, there were many helpful tidbits of information that I was able to glean from this book and apply to my own writing. Chapter One: Finding the Core of Your Novel covers discovering the heart of your story, and factors to consider in choosing the main character, setting, and story problem for your novel. Chapter Two: Deciding How to Tell Your Story presents some of the mechanics of telling a story, including voice, tone, storytelling devices, and point of view. This was all equally applicable to the short story. Chapter Five: Balancing Scene, Summary, and Reflection has a good discussion of how to control the pace of a story through the judicious use of summary and reflection to tie action scenes together. Chapter Seven: Stealing Tricks From the Best corroborated my belief that the best way to learn about the craft of writing is to line up books by your favorite authors, and read, read, read. The only section of the book I found somewhat troubling was Chapter Ten: Goals and Miracles, which seemed to imply that the end goal of writing a novel is to become rich and famous. Considering how few authors will ever achieve that elite status, I would say by all means write as if you will be picked up by a big-named publisher someday if it makes you feel good, but if your primary motivation isn't the joy of the writing process itself, you'd be well advised to just hang onto that day job!
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