Paul Whybrow
Full Member
I've been acquiring writing advice handbooks online in the last few months, which feels a bit like putting the cart before the horse, but I'm still getting potent tips from them. So far, I've read four of them, as well as the excellent articles in the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook.
* HRF Keating - Writing Crime Fiction - 1986. Less than 100 pages, but a useful, gentle consideration of detective novels dating back to the 1920s, as well as more modern stories. Good for pointing out that even the goriest of tales still needs to be a story that captivates the reader by creating empathy with the characters.
* Stephen King - On Writing - 2000. Written at a time when King almost lost his life, from being struck by a truck while walking along a road near his home. Part memoir of his life as a young writer and the struggle to recover from the accident, there's also plenty of great advice in there, with some delightfully bitchy asides about writers that he doesn't like.
* David Armstrong - How Not To Write A Novel (Confessions Of A Midlist Author)- 2003. As the title suggests, this British writer of hardboiled detective novels has been published, but is not a household name. In fact, at the time of writing, he had never earned enough from his writing to pay income tax on it, despite being well-reviewed. This is a brutally honest portrayal of what it's like to be struggling writer, in which he humorously tries to discourage the reader from ever becoming an author themselves.
* Lawrence Block - Telling Lies For Fun & Profit. A Manual For Fiction Writers - 1994. Lawrence Block was a big influence on me in quitting booze, as his fictional alcoholic detective Matt Scudder did, who was probably a fictional representation of the author himself. I loved this book, and have just bought the follow-up volume Spider Spin Me A Web, which is also based on the advice columns he penned for Writers' Digest in the seventies and eighties.
These books are rather dated, but the essence of what they have to say about how to go about writing holds true. It's striking how less crowded the market was forty years ago, and I'd love to find some figures showing how many writers were submitting manuscripts then compared to now. There has to be millions more these days - which almost makes me understand the reclusive, stand-offish and dismissive attitudes of literary agents and publishers.
What advice books on writing do my fellow Colonists recommend, and which ones aren't so good?
* HRF Keating - Writing Crime Fiction - 1986. Less than 100 pages, but a useful, gentle consideration of detective novels dating back to the 1920s, as well as more modern stories. Good for pointing out that even the goriest of tales still needs to be a story that captivates the reader by creating empathy with the characters.
* Stephen King - On Writing - 2000. Written at a time when King almost lost his life, from being struck by a truck while walking along a road near his home. Part memoir of his life as a young writer and the struggle to recover from the accident, there's also plenty of great advice in there, with some delightfully bitchy asides about writers that he doesn't like.
* David Armstrong - How Not To Write A Novel (Confessions Of A Midlist Author)- 2003. As the title suggests, this British writer of hardboiled detective novels has been published, but is not a household name. In fact, at the time of writing, he had never earned enough from his writing to pay income tax on it, despite being well-reviewed. This is a brutally honest portrayal of what it's like to be struggling writer, in which he humorously tries to discourage the reader from ever becoming an author themselves.
* Lawrence Block - Telling Lies For Fun & Profit. A Manual For Fiction Writers - 1994. Lawrence Block was a big influence on me in quitting booze, as his fictional alcoholic detective Matt Scudder did, who was probably a fictional representation of the author himself. I loved this book, and have just bought the follow-up volume Spider Spin Me A Web, which is also based on the advice columns he penned for Writers' Digest in the seventies and eighties.
These books are rather dated, but the essence of what they have to say about how to go about writing holds true. It's striking how less crowded the market was forty years ago, and I'd love to find some figures showing how many writers were submitting manuscripts then compared to now. There has to be millions more these days - which almost makes me understand the reclusive, stand-offish and dismissive attitudes of literary agents and publishers.
What advice books on writing do my fellow Colonists recommend, and which ones aren't so good?