How Not to Write a Novel

How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs If You Ever Want to Get Published by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman

I enjoyed this book a lot. I laughed out loud while reading it. Many times. Was it valuable? That's hard to say. Much of the content is aimed, I choose to think, at poorer writers than I. But, boy, was it fun to read.

"How Not" was written by a couple of editors who have seen the same mistakes over and over again. Every tip they give is illustrated with a sample, written atrociously with great wit, which will have you smiling, chuckling, or howling out loud.

Much of the book deals with fairly blatant, glaring mistakes. Don't start the novel with a long, detailed, pointless description of a place or of somebody's childhood. Don't lecture your readers about the evils of whatever it is you dislike. There isn't much real value there to a writer who isn't a hack, except for entertainment value.

Toward the end of the book the tips become more advanced and the tone changes. The early stuff has a "skewer the morons" tone. Later on, there are some serious discussions of writing. Parts of it are actually thought-provoking, instead of laugh-provoking.

Overall I didn't get a huge amount from the book. I'm not making most of those novice mistakes. It is, however, a readable and insightful tome, and I recommend it to beginning and intermediate unpublished novelists.

Novel Voices

I approached "Novel Voices" by Jennifer Levasseur with a lot of enthusiasm. The premise is terrific. The authors interviewed 17 award-winning authors and gathered the collected wisdom and insights into one book.

I was quite disappointed. The problem for me is that the novelists were all literary authors. I hadn't heard of a single writer. I didn't recognize anything they'd written. Their bibliographies listed volumes of poetry and collections of short stories along with a few novels. In short, they wrote the kinds of things I don't read and don't write.

I suppose this book has a lot of value for those who aspire to write literary fiction, but my tastes and interests are quite commercial, and I found the book irrelevant and unhelpful. There is nothing wrong with the book itself; I am simply not the target audience.

I'm afraid I can't offer anything specific. I read the book five or six days ago and I remember almost nothing. It wasn't long before I was skimming, looking for something I could relate to, and failing to find it.