Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #176425 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
"Creative writing courses up and down the country are jammed. But everything you need is in this wonderful volume... Stein is a fascinating guide and teacher. This should be required reading for all Booker prize judges and about 90% of published authors." --Daily Mail

"Plenty of how-to books are strong on theory - they explain the theory of writing arresting openings, of creating interesting characters and so forth - but Sol Stein s strength is that he demonstrates these things in highly practical terms." --Writers News

"Having edited such luminaries as Dylan Thomas and James Baldwin and published several novels, veteran Sol Stein has put together a quirkily instructive guide... A companionable guide to what constitutes un/successful writing." --The Times

Synopsis
In ths book, Sol Stein, one of the greatest editors of our time, offers help on the most important recurrent problems novelists encounter when learning their craft. With numerous examples from the work of both established bestselling authors and talented newcomers, combined with detailed analysis, he reveals the secrets that can lift a piece of creative writing and give it that spell-binding quality that holds the reader enthralled. The need to give the reader a unique experience, the necessity for conflict between characters, the importance of instant attraction, what makes a character compelling and a plot gripping; why dialogue should never mimic spoken conversation and how misplaced or unnecessary words can slow down the narrative - all this and more is conveyed in this entertaining yet practical book that provides all the benefits of an individual tutorial.

Customer Reviews

The best advice on writing a good novel I have come across.
Unlike so many other creative writing guides, Solutions for Novelists does not read like a text book. Instead of being lectured on the theory of fiction writing, it is as if you are lucky enough to walk into a bar and get chatting to a man who knows a hell of a lot about good writing. Even better, he is able to convey all this information to you in a chatty, entertaining manner. At the end of it, you feel as if you have been incredibly lucky to have a personal audience with such a knowledgable, entertaining guy, instead of feeling you have just sat through an interminable lecture. A creative writing book that leaves you feeling desperate to get writing. Highly recommended.

Essential reading for serious fiction writers
I'd recommend this book to anyone who wants to take the next step to becoming a competent fiction writer (the step that most amateur writers never take). If you've read one or two titles from the Writer's Digest series, for example, and want to go further and deeper, this is well worth a look. What you'll find here isn't a glib set of checklists and formulae. Instead, you get Sol Stein's philosophy of fiction writing.

The book is divided into three sections. Section 1, "The Responsibilities of the Writer" comprises the vast bulk of the material (about 170 of 200 pages). The section title offers a hint about the nature of Sol Stein's writing philosophy: to give readers the exerience they want. Among the tools Stein offers for this are conflict, character building, writing dialogue that crackles rather than flopping, point-of-view... there are plenty of other books that cover these topics, but not many with this depth of accessible insight (one exception, perhaps, is Orson Scott Card's "Characters and Viewpoint").

It's worth noting that this book was published in the USA as "How to Grow a Novel", and is available under both titles on Amazon -- something that could lead to duplication for Sol Stein completists, but at least it means you can sample the text by going to Amazon's US website and using their "Look Inside" feature on "How to Grow a Novel".

Regardless of the title on the cover, for a single source aimed at the moderately advanced writer who wants to learn (in Stein's word) to be "writerly", I don't think this book can be bettered.

The proof is that this book is, itself, a pageturner
Read any 'How to write a novel' type books and thought, "Hmm... maybe that's good advice, but I'm not totally convinced"? With this book, my reaction was often, "Wow! So THAT'S where I was going wrong!"

Also, Sol Stein has "walked the walk", having written a number of successful novels himself. The litmus test of a book about how to write a pageturner is whether the book itself is a pageturner: this one was.

Some of the advice or observations sound slightly old-fashioned, notably Stein's attitudes towards technology. But the core stuff, namely the stuff about getting (and keeping) your reader gripped, rings true.