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Benjamin Sobieck

The Writer's Guide to Weapons: A Practical Reference for Using Firearms and Knives in Fiction Paperback – July 9, 2015

by Benjamin Sobieck (Author), David Morrell (Foreword)

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When it comes to writing weapons, most authors shoot from the hip--and miss. The Writer's Guide to Weapons will help you hit your target every time.

Firearms and knives have starring roles in a wide range of genres--crime, thriller, war, mystery, Western, and more. Unfortunately, many depictions of weapons in novels and film are pure fiction. Knowing the difference between a shotshell and a slug, a pistol and a revolver, or a switchblade and a butterfly knife is essential for imbuing your story with authenticity--and gaining popularity with discerning readers.

Inside you'll find:

   • An in-depth look at the basics of firearms and knives: how they work, why they work, what they look like, and how to depict them accurately in your stories.
   • The biggest weapons myths in fiction, TV, and film.
   • A surefire guide for choosing the correct weapon for your characters, no matter their skill level, strength, or background.
   • A review of major gun and knife laws, weapons safety tips,and common police tactics.
   • "The Hit List," showcasing the most popular weapons for spies, detectives, gunslingers, gangsters, military characters, and more.
   • Examples highlighting inaccurate vs. accurate weapons depictions.
   • An insightful foreword by David Morrell, the award-winning creator of Rambo.
Equal parts accessible, humorous, and practical, The Writer's Guide to Weapons is the one resource you need to incorporate firearms and knives into your fiction like a seasoned professional.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Writer's Digest Books
Publication date

July 9, 2015
Dimensions

7.05 x 0.75 x 9.1 inches
ISBN-10

1599638150
ISBN-13

978-1599638157
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Benjamin Sobieck's The Writer's Guide to Weapons is a "must-have" for fiction and fantasy writers, from novelists to screenwriters, comic writers, video game storyboarders, and more. The Writer's Guide to Weapons debunks common weapon myths in popular media and walks readers through authentic details about the possession and usage of an immense variety of weapons; the result is an extremely fascinating, accurate, and practical resource." --Midwest Book Review

About the Author

Benjamin Sobieck is an online editor and product manager for a number of weapons and outdoors magazines, such as Gun Digest, BLADE, Living Ready, and Modern Shooter. A crime and thriller author, he has appeared in such anthologies and journals as Burning Bridges: A Renegade Fiction Anthology, Exiles: An Outsider Anthology, Black Heart Magazine presents Noir, and Out of the Gutter. He has also worked as a newspaper crime reporter. For more about Sobieck and his crime-fighting creation, detective Maynard Soloman, visit www.CrimeFictionBook.com.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Writer's Digest Books; Illustrated edition (July 9, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1599638150
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1599638157
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.05 x 0.75 x 9.1 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #434,703 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #133 in Mystery Writing Reference
- #457 in Words, Language & Grammar Reference
- #1,059 in Writing Skill Reference (Books)

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Benjamin Sobieck is best known as the author of The Writer's Guide to Weapons: A Practical Reference for Writing Firearms and Knives in Fiction (Writer's Digest Books). He also writes crime and thriller fiction, in addition to blogging about weapons in fiction on his popular website, CrimeFictionBook.com.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

119 global ratings

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invisible

Good basic guide.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 6, 2018

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This is the best (and only) writer's guide to the use of weapons in fiction I've found. He finds good middle ground between the sort of ignorant pap you see on TV and in slick news magazines and the sort of tech material which would drive readers to narcolepsy. This happy medium is important as the average writer is a bright person who is neither a passive couch potato nor a techie.

Here are some pluses and minuses.

There are many pages to familiarize the reader with common weapons in use by police, civilians and bad guys in the US. There are pictures and general principles of the anatomy of and use of the weapons which are most common in this country.

There is significant information about how to spot hokum: It has a number of pages of snippets of formula fiction samples to compare correct and incorrect description of weapons usage. This is helpful so that the reader can learn to spot improbable usage versus realistic usage of weapons. There are numerous examples of correct and incorrect terminology. Most easily explainable here is the difference between a magazine and a clip. (I'll give you a spoiler here. He explains why a clip is the little steel steel cartridge holder that goes 'ping' and flies off into the sky when an M1 Garand runs out of ammunition, the little metal pieces that hold together cartridges to make them easier to load into a revolver and not a whole lot else. I don't think he mentioned they can be used to load ammo into an old Enfield, but unless one's story is set in Australia I don't know that would matter.)

Negatives?

Well first, if you are are writing about the human aspects of the processes of designing and making weapons there isn't much of a knowledge base in this book. And the knowledge out there is distributed along weapon specific lines so there are books on gunmaking, knifemaking, knapping, bowmaking, et cetera. For instance with my story about the post-apocalypse family of blacksmiths and traders I've had to fall back on Foxfire 5: Ironmaking, Blacksmithing, Flintlock Rifles, Bear Hunting, and Other Affairs of Plain Living (Foxfire (Paperback)) and other old gunsmithing, archery and tech books. I'm particularly fond of the Foxfire series because they also discuss many other frontier skills.

Second, this book appears to be purely for US writers and there is not much even for Brits much less the rest of the world. The lack of info about leftover WW II British weapons I've already mentioned. But there is more prominent lack not just of many foreign weapons but anything about the sociology of foreign weapons usage. For instance in several countries silencers are commonly used for sporting purposes in many others the citizens are either in the class where they can keep machine guns at home or the class where they resort to using home made weapons or ancient leftovers. (I'm glad here that I have never wanted to set a story in the Philippines, the Mideast, Africa, the former Soviet Union, the British Empire or other place where this is common.)

8 people found this helpful

Helpful

Dana King

An Invaluable Resource

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 19, 2015

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This is a true guide: more than a primer, not a textbook. Sobieck breaks things into useful sections, including the Ten Golden Tips For Writing About Weapons. (Number 3: YouTube is your friend.) Even more fun are the 25 Top Weapons Myths (Number 22: “Being shot with a gun is like getting hit by a train loaded with concrete and circus animals;” Number 24: “Handguns go click-click-click when they’re empty.”) There’s also a brief section on half-myths, and a run-down of which weapons may be mots practical for a specific character, taking into consideration, gender, size, age, physical condition, and bad-assedness.

Those are great for learning what not to do, and how to handle certain thigs, but the meat of this book lies in the two core sections. Part One (Firearms) has sections titled, Firearm Safety; entry-level courses on shotguns, handguns, and rifles (including advantages and disadvantages of each); ammunition; suppressors and silencers; ballistics; and how to kill a character with a firearm, among others. The Knives section covers all the similar, applicable general topics, as well as worthwhile information on sharpening and sheaths. (I had no idea why knives are stropped to keen the edge, and I’m not going to tell you here. Buy the book, cheapskate.) There is also contans an excellent list of references and external resources, as well as a comprehensive glossary.

This material could be dry as a desert road in a sand storm in less skilled—and compassionate—hands, but Sobieck keeps things moving, with some help from his ongoing series character, “gal-damned” detective Maynard Soloman. Maynard and a couple of assistants provide examples of what not to do, then show how to do it better; Sobieck describes what was wrong. His tongue remains firmly in cheek during these anecdotes, but the points are valid, and well made. (Maynard does take a beating, though. So it goes. Spoiler alert: he lives.)
It’s not like Sobieck has to depend too much on Maynard to keep things moving. His writing style naturally lends itself to page turning. (He’s a fiction author, as well. His first book, Cleansing Eden, might be my favorite take on serial killers; his newest is Glass Eye, which currently holds a high position on my To-Be Read List.) His descriptions and warnings are entertaining without losing all gravitas. (These are items of death we’re talking about here.) It’s fun to read, not at all like a chore. I found myself pausing often to read aloud a passage to The Beloved Spouse, who cares not nearly as much about accurate firearm descriptions as I do, but does love her some good writing.
No writer without a solid weapons background should write weapons without having this book handy. I have a decent layman’s knowledge, and have an honest-to-God firearms expert on call for any questions, and I ate this book up, learning things I would never have thought to ask. (It also saved me from an embarrassing oversight in the work-in-progress.) Studiously researched, engagingly delivered, The Writer’s Guide to Weapons should be on the short list of most valuable writer’s aids for the crime fiction community.

22 people found this helpful

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Tony Ross

Useful book for writers

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 17, 2022

Verified Purchase

Plenty of good information on a variety of weapons here, and how they should and should not be written. Good resource.

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pbweill

Expensive and repetitive but useful

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 5, 2022

Verified Purchase

Hello! I liked it and I am going to go back to my own book and fix a few weapons-related things. Plus I've got plenty of notes for reference. But 15 USD was high compared to most ebooks at 4 or 5 dollars, and there is plenty of repetition that would have brought down the page count at least 50 pages. More than 100 if you count the incorrect/correct writing samples which I found unnecessary. The firearms section was short compared to the rest of the book, on knives and the long reference section. Finally the book could benefit from a second pair of eyes. A few typos and then several issues that may be due to formatting, as they occur at the page breaks on my kindle.

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The JBP

Outstandingly good resource for writers and readers alike

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 29, 2015

Verified Purchase

This is an amazing book. A brilliant book. BUY THIS BOOK!

Really, I could leave this review just there; those three sentences sum up all you need to know. But that wouldn’t really be a review now, would it? The Writer’s Guide to Weapons does what it says on the tin. You know all those action films where people do improbable things with guns? You don’t need to be a master gunsmith to know that firearm’s occasionally need reloading, or that cars don’t just blow up as soon as they’re zinged by a stray bullet. But wait, do you know the difference between a bullet, a shell, it’s casing? Why do character’s pump their shotguns in that badass way to scare the baddies/goodies? Should they even be doing that?

Then there are the practicalities. When writing a scene, just how should your character handle a firearm? Do they pull the hammer back? Rack the slide? Should they tilt their gun on its side like some gangbanger? And what gun or knife should I give to my hero or villain?

If you’re a writer and have ever grappled with these or a myriad other problems, or if you’re just a reader who’s darn well interested to know what is real and what is b*******, then never fear, for Ben Sobieck is here! Along with a few friends he’s brought along for the ride, notably Maynard Soloman and Bill Robber (more on them in a sec.) Ben, an editor on various US firearms magazines, has penned a manual for those who know nothing about knives and gun, a bolts and all account that takes the reader from the basics and on through the mechanics of guns and knives. Along the way he slays myths – no don’t pump the shotgun in that badass way, you’re just ejecting a perfectly good shell – and helps you choose the best weapon for the characters of your story.

You might fear that this is some dry technical manual, but no. Everything is explained in no nonsense and plain English. And just so you get it, hapless P.I. Maynard Soloman and his arch-nemesis Bill Robber are on hand to show you how NOT to do it. These sections are often hilariously funny and go to show just how wrong many writers of fiction can get it. Afterwards Ben reiterates just Soloman & Robber got it so wrong and just what they should have done instead, so there’s no real excuse for us writers to ever write it wrong again (Hollywood action movie script writers, take note).

But that’s just the book, there’s also an associated website which Ben updates regularly. And if all that isn’t enough there’s Ben himself. Like D.P. Lyle MD for writer’s forensics needs, Ben Sobieck is there for any writer’s queries about weapons. Example: in my novel I have a scene where the hero uses dead bodies from an earlier firefight as a physical barricade against a military SWAT team. So I emailed Ben and I asked him how long my character could survive when assailed by trained guys with military grade firearms. And Ben asks what type of body armour the corpses are wearing – military grade like the new attackers –goes away and crunches the numbers, consults colleagues. The he comes back and answers me and posts the whole thing on his blog. In other words he takes my crazy scenario seriously and the website continues to grow, a resource for all us writers. How cool is that?

So in conclusion you can see why I say this book is awesome; why I suggest writers and readers alike purchase a copy.

3 people found this helpful

Bruce Crowther

Excellent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 29, 2019

Verified Purchase

As a crime writer, I need to know a lot about guns. This exceptional book has it all. Excellent in every way. And it's not just for writers, the style makes the subject matter always interesting.

Kemberlee Lugo Shortland

A great tutorial on weapons for writers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 11, 2019

Verified Purchase

This is a great book about weapons for writers. It needs updating or would have got higher marks, but this is a great tutorial for writers when choosing weapons for their characters.

P D Given

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 27, 2018

Verified Purchase

Great for the budding crime writer!

Miguel Angel Alonso Pulido

Excelente y útil guía

Reviewed in Spain 🇪🇸 on April 13, 2018

Verified Purchase

Un excelente manual de referencia para escritores sobre armas de fuego y armas de filo. Si no eres capaz de distinguir una pistola de un revólver o desconoces la diferencia entre armas de repetición, automáticas y semiautomáticas, este es tu libro. Nada sustituye la experiencia real con armas, pero si no está a tu alcance, esta guía es el mejor sustituto.

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