Product Description

From a master novelist and teacher, this guide diagnoses and treats 38 of the most common problems writers create and offers hundreds of tips, tricks and techniques to fix them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5484 in Books
• Published on: 1998-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Customer Reviews

Useful advice for budding novelists
This is not a 'how to write' book - rather, it's one that points out where you're going wrong (or where you may go wrong if you haven't yet started writing). I came to it halfway through a rubbish first draft and found it great as it helped me see exactly where I was going wrong, and why - embarrassing mistakes at which any publisher or agent would surely laugh. It's been a crucial part of the learning process for me.
The short chapters are easy to dip into into and they get the point across in an easy-to-understand way but, as well as being instructional, it's also inspirational - if I'm ever stuck with my writing, just reading a few chapters of this book is enough to get me back on track.

If you know nothing about writing...
...then this is the book for you. It does give a comprehensive overview of a lot of the pitfalls in writing and warrants the two starts for being clear about what they are and how to avoid them. However, if you've got a decent idea of what good writing is, then there's nothing new here.

If you feel relatively competent, then there are better books out there.

There are far better books on writing out there...
Whilst by no means a complete waste of time, Bickman's book doesn't have the general application that some better guides offer. It's probably quite useful if you write romance, or pulp westerns and espionage thrillers as Mr Bickman himself apparently did - anything with a single protagonist battling against the odds - but for most other genres his limited (and limiting) advice is less than helpful. Personally I write fantasy, horror and science-fiction, and the model he puts forward as mandatory for any good fiction would exlude many of the great works in those genres (as well as the majority of literary classics, for that matter). As proof of this there's the fact that Bickman offers almost no examples to cooborate his arguments, and a couple of the few there are are from his own works! On the plus side, it's a very readable and stirring book, and even if like me you disagree with much of what's said, it at least pushes you to question your own style and decisions. Personally I would recommend Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King, as a much more generally applicable and less personal and occassionally bizzare guide than this.