Product Description

There are many ways prospective authors routinely sabotage their own work. But why leave it to guesswork? Misstep by misstep, How Not to Write a Novel shows how you can ensure that your manuscript never rises above the level of unpublishable drivel; that your characters are unpleasant, dimensionless versions of yourself; that your plot is digressive, tedious and unconvincing; and that your style is reliant on mangled clichés and sesquipedalian malapropisms. Alternatively, you can use it to identify the most common mistakes, avoid them and actually write a book that works. Guardian Award shortlisted novelist Sandra Newman and veteran editor Howard Mittelmark have distilled 30 years of teaching, editing, writing and reviewing fiction into a hilarious and liberating guide that is the perfect read for anyone who’s ever laughed at a badly written piece of prose and for anyone who’s ever penned one – and doesn’t want to do it again.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2206 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
A great resource and a fun read with a lot of solid advice for would-be novelists. (Publishers Weekly )

This writing how-to should carry a warning: it's the kind of book one reads at the expense of all other responsibilities. (Library Journal )

Review
'[a] hilarious, wickedly observed and deeply useful guide'

Review
'For anyone who is writing a novel, even if they shouldn't ... Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark have produced an invaluable guide'

Customer Reviews

Funny and helpful
This isn't a writing course -- it won't help you generate characters, overcome writer's block or find the inspiration to unleash the artist within. But it does contain some very good pointers towards the kinds of fault that will send your manuscript into the waste basket, and it's written by people who know.

I found it intermittently very funny, and usually helpful; some of the recommendations will be familiar to anyone who's read anything similar before, but it's mostly fresh and zippy enough. You'll get through it in a single sitting, but it would make a useful pre-flight checklist for any fiction manuscript.

Certain Amazon reviewers seem to have found this book personally offensive, and the examples of mistakes insulting to unpublished writers. On the other hand, one of those reviewers doesn't know that a 'straw man' is a deliberate misrepresentation of an opponent's position, designed to be easily refuted, and not a deliberate exaggeration designed to make a salient point clearer, which is what the parodic examples in this book are. I'd say they're made so comically awful partly in order to *avoid* offending or discouraging unpublished writers.

The implicit 201st piece of advice here is probably: if you're dreadful enough to find the examples insulting, and you can't see how bad you are even after it's pointed out to you, give up.

Funny, sarcastic and useful
This brief little guide to how not to write is two things in one. Firstly, it is a self help book intending to help budding novelists avoid mistakes that get most novels rejected by publishers. Secondly however, this is also a funny book in its own right and could be read and found to be entertaining even if you didn't want to write a novel.

I bought this book as a writing guide and in this respect found it quite useful. In the first few pages I managed to spot some of the areas where I had been going wrong in my own writing. The book as a whole contains a mixture of tips, some that you may think are obvious and others not, but all of them are insightful in some way.

The book is very, very sarcastic which certainly appeals to my sense of humour. At a few places I did laugh out loud and one particular part did cause a few minutes of chuckling. There is also a distinct dislike for the author Ayn Rand running through these pages which I can but applaud loudly.

If there is a downside to the book it is that now I am reading fiction through the lens of Mittlemark and Newman. I've started seeing some really obvious mistakes in the work of famous and respected authors, and I have to try not to make this prevent me from enjoying their work. Oh well, I suppose if published authors aren't perfect then there is hope for us all.

Ideal handbook for failed novelists
This book probably should be on every fiction writer's bookshelf. Perhaps it was a bit smug in places and very sarcastic though in my opinion only the smugness is a fault. It describes particular faults and then provides specially written paragraphs to illustrate each point.

The only reason I did not give it five stars was because of the gratuitous bad language which did not help illustrate anything and the persistent Americansims.

I found it helped me see where I'm going wrong with my own writing. It's a interesting book to dip into as well and it can be read by anyone who's interested in fiction. The trouble is you are likely to study anything you read with a much more critical eye when you have read it.