One of the Best Writing Books, Ever
My friend Chris recommended a book to me which I eventually got around to reading. I’ve been grateful to him ever since. The book is called, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Brown and Dave King.
To paraphrase Chris, this book “teaches you the basics that you must have before submitting a work for publication”. He’s absolutely right. I strongly recommend it to anyone who is not receiving intelligent critiques. Until recently, I’ve had tremendous difficulty improving my writing. Part of the reason was finding people to critique my stories. Those that have read them have either liked or hated the stories. (I’ve also been accused of being derivative of writers I’ve never read!) But no one has critiqued the stories with the eye of an editor. Writing in isolation, the best I could do was practice my writing and improve merely by intuition. A sentence ’seemed’ better when written a certain way. And, although the bookstores sold a lot of books on writing characters, plots, etc, they didn’t sell books on improving the writing itself.
This book does that. It tells you much of what you need to know. Here are some chapter titles:
Show and Tell, Characterization and Exposition, Point of View, Proportion, Dialogue Mechanics and much much more.
So go buy it. Right now. Learn what they tell you. Your writing will improve drastically. It will appear professional.
