Day 311: Making Shapely Fiction

This book was exactly what I expected and more. It's more of a reference manual than anything else, and the way its structured creates a reading experience where one concise chapter references another, references another, references another, and suddenly you've gone straight down into the rabbit hole. If you're not into getting completely swamped by information, the book can of course be read in order, but personally I enjoyed treating this manual more like Wikipedia, where following links one after the other leads to interesting conclusions. Author Jerome Stern is able to put names to many of the techniques that come naturally when writing, as well as the ones that don't, offering more of that one thing that all writers want: control. By literally giving shape to the countless writing tricks that every author uses (whether they know it or not), Stern creates a sense that all the fuzzy parts of writing fiction can come within your grasp if you just keep reading. So many of the things I've done without really thinking about it are named, probed, catalogued, and dissected within these pages, as if it were written by a biologist poking around cadavers rather than a novelist. His ability to capture the essence of a technique and codify that knowledge into useful advice and examples is really something else. I'm sure I will come back to this book time and time again as I need to, and this is one that I may even purchase again just to get a copy in better shape. I highly recommend you pick this up if ever you've struggled to transition between action and thought, wondered how on Earth a plot could ever retain focus for hundreds of pages, or how someone could possibly wrap up a life in just a few words. As far as technical writing advice, I'm convinced this book is just about peerless.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley