Book Review

This is a little unprecedented, but I am going to review two books at once, since they are on similar topics.

Books: Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne & Dave King; Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain

Self-Editing was recommended to me by some people in my Writing Popular Fiction program and Techniques was recommended by my fabulous mentor Anne Harris! Both books have been beneficial to my writing, but I definitely got WAY more out of Techniques. And for being written by editors I found it ironic that Self-Editing had quite a few mistakes in the text.

First I'll talk about Self-Editing: This book was probably about 3/4 examples, which is fine except that most of them were not super beneficial. Towards the end I began skipping about every other example, because there were just so many of them! There were also a lot of exercises at the end that were redundant and (I thought) unhelpful. Some of the chapters seemed to cover the same topics too. I wouldn't recommend this book to any other writers to buy, but it would be good to read once--maybe checking it out from the library.

Good parts about Self-Editing: It's very easy to read. Because it's written by editors it gives a different perspective from most writing help books. It gives a lot of good advice about things to focus on before you send it to anyone else to look at. Just by reading it I was able to see certain things that I was doing wrong that I will now be able to notice and fix. Very good to read, but I won't be going back to it again and again like other writing books.

Now for Techniques: I cannot say enough about this book! I'll start with what I didn't like though (the list is shockingly short)--it was pretty expensive for a paperback, but worth every penny. Also I was pretty annoyed by what he said about heroines: "Her main function in a story is to serve as part of the hero's reward for being indomitable." This definitely shows the time period he was writing in, but it still rankled me that women are looked as "reward" for anyone.

Now for the good stuff: I took more notes in the margin than I ever have in any book before. A lot of you know about my Princess Adelaide fairy tale that I have been writing for years now and this book helped me FINALLY figure out my plot problem that had been preventing me from finishing the trilogy! There was so much good advice in here that I've already started re-reading it (using a different color high-lighter) to find what I had missed the first go round. I also really loved the fact that he didn't put in examples, but instead tells you how to use any book you want as an example! I don't even know what else to say without giving paragraph after paragraph of quote from the book. I will say that he helped me find my way to plot and that enabled me to become re-invigorated with the story that I'm writing for my Master's.

In short, if you are a writer or would like to be one you HAVE to read Dwight Swain's, Techniques of the Selling Writer!

Happy reading!