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 It is, however, a readable and insightful tome, and I recommend it to beginning and intermediate unpublished novelists.

Show Don't Tell

This one is for the fiction writers out there. This is one of the most-repeated rules in fiction writing, but it's not an easy rule to understand and follow.

Show, don't tell. Telling is easy and simple. Showing is much harder. Showing takes more work and more words. Showing also works much, much better.

I grew up reading the Hardy Boys, the classic stuff published in the 60s. In pretty much every novel, Frank and Joe would get the same sentence of description. Frank was the serious and thoughtful one, while Joe was more impulsive. How much better it would have been to craft a scene that would demonstrate these traits and give us a chance to get to know the characters on our own.

Imagine if the Sherlock Holmes stories began by telling us that Holmes is brilliant, moody, and eccentric, while Watson is an earnest and not as bright. Anyone who has read a few of the stories knows exactly what Holmes and Watson are like. We don't have to take the author's word for it. We've seen the two men in action.

There are, of course, pitfalls to the rule of showing and not telling. We can indicate an emotion in someone by describing their body language. Someone might stiffen, sneer, or clench their fists. However, sometimes it is better to be succinct. Sometimes it is better just to say that a character is annoyed, rather than running through a list of twitches and clenches.