Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #319093 in Books
• Published on: 1974-04-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Synopsis
In 1957 John Braine was a Yorkshire librarian with an impressive collection of publishers' rejection slips. But then his first published novel was an instant best seller and ROOM AT THE TOP launched him on a career as one of Britain's most successful novelists. Experiences like his are what keep Britain's 500,000 spare-time writers plugging away, hoping for publication and perhaps even a moment of fame. Few people understand as well as John Braine the torments of the hopeful unknown. For everyone who, as he did, faces spare-time writing and the indifference of publishers, he wrote this book. It is not a treatise on the art of fiction. Braine calls it 'a tour of his workshop' - a practical manual which tells the aspiring writer everything about writing a publishable first novel. With a wealth of quotations and advice, know-how and technique, this is a book which really works - and which can be applied successfully by anyone with the basic urge to write.

Customer Reviews

One of the important ones
I have read lots of How-to-Write-books. This is one of the important ones. Many books will tell you how to structure your scenes, how to write dialog etc, but very few tell you how the process of writing actually works. I know that everybody works differently, but I followed the technique in this book and it works amazingly well: (in short, you'll need to read to book to get the details) Frist, write the whole book from start to finish, without worrying about editing or inconsistencies ar actually anything. Then, write a 2000 word synopsis, until you are satisfied with the story. Then rewrite from start. The reason this works for me is that I have a tendency to wory too long over a certain scene or even a word. This technique allows me to just not care if the writing is lousy, just get on with the story. You'll have a novel written in about 3 months, BUT it's only the first draft and it's bound to be embarrasinly poor. But now you have the story, and you start again, and now when you now what you are doing you can agonize over the words and scenes until they work. If you do it the other way round, you spend a lot of time writing scenes that never make it to the final draft.
You'll need other books on writing, too, this is not the bible of writing, but certainly one of the best.

Top drawer
The Finnish reviewer has written an intelligent and accurate appraisal. I teach writing and always recommend Braine's book but thought it was long out of print. He has some odd, idiosyncratic, ideas (e.g., that a novel 'must have' at least twenty chapters) but overall this is an enlightening and practical book. As the other reviewer mentions, the book contains an exact method for getting the job done. This is unusual. Perhaps I can recommend also the following writers-on-writing: Dorothea Brande, Damon Knight, and Dwight V Swain.

One of the good ones
This and Stephen King's 'On Writing' are the two most useful books I have read about the writing process. I kept starting a novel then going back to re-write and never getting very far. Once I read this book, I sat down and wrote the whole thing out without stopping. It was incoherent, but I had enough (more than enough to work with). Best kickstart I have ever had.