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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Rating the Elements of Fiction Writing series,
By A Customer
This review is from: Voice & Style (Elements of Fiction Writing) (Hardcover)
I've read all the books in the Elements of Fiction Writing series and this is how I'd rank them."Scene & Structure" "Characters & Viewpoint" "Beginnings, Middles & Ends" The above three books are invaluable -- must reads. They are the best of the series, in my opinion, and are packed with good information on every page. Well-done. "Conflict, Action & Suspense" "Description" "Plot" "Manuscript Submission" "Setting" The above five books are good, solid reads. Again, they contain good information and cover the subject decently. "Voice & Style" "Dialogue" To me, the last two books need to be rewritten. They are by far the weakest of the series. Both suffer from an annoying style, particularly Dialogue, and both are very skimpy on real information. Neither one is very helpful. This is the order in which I'd recommend reading them.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Misses its audience,
By
This review is from: Voice & Style (Elements of Fiction Writing) (Hardcover)
I tried to read this book with an open mind, and it's clearly a book only an English lit teacher could love.Given the book's target audience - beginning writers - it falls far short of being helpful to them. What the book SHOULD do and doesn't is present the broad concepts and principles, and then if the author chooses to "instruct by example" as Payne does, then provide examples that support and illustrate those concepts and principles. Instead each chapter jumps into a seemingly endless stream of analysis of fiction works, attempting to instruct by way of example with no real "how-to's." The overwhelming problems - besides a tendency toward pedantic wordiness - are that the snippets used are too short and the analyses too specific to be useful to the target audience of this book: beginning writers looking for the broader principles to apply to their own writing. Each chapter is followed by exercises. However, the exercises are not presented with the goals for each ("WHY am I doing this") or any way of analyzing or learning from the results after doing them ("WHAT worked when I did this"). Beginning writers could finish this book feeling as I did - somewhat confused and very much like I wasted my time. I would highly recommend "Finding Your Writer's Voice" by Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall instead.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Payne doesn't know how to write a book that can teach.,
By Hopeful Book Review (Colorado) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Voice & Style (Elements of Fiction Writing) (Hardcover)
In my humble opinion, this is the poorest in the series of Writer's Digest Books. The author's style is rambling and cryptic. It is often hard to understand his point. He delivers endless analysis of other author's works, but completely fails to either describe his subject matter well, or to teach a new author how to learn voice and style techniqiues. He may be a good teacher in the classroom, but he certainly does not know how to write a book that can teach. Compare this book with PLOT or CONFLICT, ACTION & SUSPENSE and you will see the difference. For the most part, the Writer's Digest Book series is excellent, but I give two thumbs down to Payne's book.
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