This is the book for writers who want to turn rejection slips into cashable checks.
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This is the book for writers who want to turn rejection slips into cashable checks.
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The book has 10 chapters. The first, Fiction and You, tells what the writer needs to know and gives common traps writers fall into. Then he discusses things like rules and the creative act of writing. His style is terse and sentences are short. That makes it easy to find specific information when you go back later to look for it.
In the second chapter he gets down to serious business -- words. How to find them, how to use them and make them clear and concise. The third chapter is all about feelings and how to use them. In the fourth he goes into the necessity for conflict, what to do and not to do in building it. Chapter Five presents the strategies of fiction. "Fiction..." he writes, "creates an especially vivid vicarious tension...Your job as a writer is to control and manipulate this tension." He also delineates the source of story satisfaction and describes how to produce it.
Chapter 6 is all about getting a story started, lining up story elements, developing the middle of the story and winding it up. Story people and the importance of characters and character development are covered in Chapter 7. Planning the story, recognizing good story material, preparing to write, and what you need in order to succeed as a writer wind up the last few chapters. He devotes one page to marketing advice and that simply directs the reader to study the markets.
This is, without a doubt, one of the most useful and easiest to use books on the craft of writing that has ever been published. Its advice is timeless. This book should be in every writer's collection.
This is a hefty read -- best digested in smaller portions, but well worth the effort. Swain takes separate looks on all aspects of story building -- characterization, plot, scene structure, etc., and pulls them apart to get to the basic elements. The approach is somewhat scholarly, but for those wrters who do study it, this book will definitely increase understanding of the interlocking components of great fiction.
Readers should remember that this book was first published decades ago. The markets -- especially book and short story markets - have changed quite a bit since then. Thus, the reader should take care to separate the craft advice - which is timeless -- from the advice related to selling, which may not be so timeless. Also, Swain does not give many examples, but the few that are given are, at times, somewhat obscure.
With only that caveat in mind, this book is one I'd expect to see on a serious writer's bookshelf.