William NobleReseñas

This book was ok. I found myself disagreeing with some of it though. I think it would be good for people who have no idea how to write dialogue, but if you're been doing it for a while with success, this book doesn't offer anything new.

There is some useful material in this book, but it takes a lot of digging around to find it. I'm not sure who this book is aimed at. It seems to be 70% analysis of literature with examples, combined with a general theme of how many different ways show and tell can appear in fiction. The focus seems to wander around. A more concise and specific book would have been better for me, but maybe I'm not the target market.

A very bad book offering the most appalling advice to budding writers. One gets the impression that the author has summarized every cliche about writing ever uttered without really knowing how to write a halfway decent book. One will not learn how to be a good writer from reading this book. Most of the pitfalls that it warms of are the very things that give writing color and make it interesting.½

If you are a writer, this is a book worth having. It is clear, concise, and it helps that there’s a large amount of humor throughout the text. I’ve read a few books on the writing/editing process recently, and this one is by far the best of the lot. I got the book from my local Library, so I’ve gone to the extreme measure of typing out the Table of Contents to refer back to until I am find a copy in a used bookstore. As it was published in 1992, I doubt that I’ll find it in any ‘big box’ store. I could relate to the examples the author gave, and am ever so grateful that they were short – unlike another book I reviewed recently, where an illustration went on for 12 pages and lost its relevance to the point the author was trying to make. Mr. Noble didn’t do that. He provided everything in clear prose, and did it all in 116 pages. What more could one ask for?

There are only two kinds of writing: lively, warm personal prose that readers devour; and the rest. Should you sacrifice style on the altar of grammar? Are you chained to canon and convention? Are you bound to commit any of the blunders that strangle stories? In this book, William Noble shows you that some of the worst mistakes you can make involve sticking too strictly to "rules".

Noble's book covers the basic concepts of drama, confrontation, pulling on the reader's emotions, escalation, and immediacy. He also deals with elements that keep your story moving: appropriate grammar, charged images, shifts in point of view, and contrast. He does a good job of telling us the how and why of things, rather than simply telling us what to do.

He touches on suspense's relationship with all sorts of basic writing issues such as dialogue, openings, cliffhangers, mood and atmosphere, character development, point of view, pacing, endings, and so on. Noble does a good job of focusing on specific techniques relevant to suspense for the most part.

It isn't a perfect book. It isn't as dry as most textbooks, but it could certainly be better than it is. Some of the examples that Mr. Noble makes up to use in the book are a bit on the overblown side, which kind of undercuts some of his points. He might have been better off using more examples from published fiction. Also, some of Mr. Noble's assertions regarding his topics have since been proven to be wrong. For example, when talking about the logic of settings: "...And a horror-suspense story would have problems if it was set in the unfolding of a miracle." I've seen this done quite well, actually.

This book was originally copyrighted in 1994, and this may be part of the problem. Since then some of the techniques that he lauds as strong and effective have become over-used and trite. (Overused techniques became that way precisely because they're so effective.) Some of the things he says can't be done have been done. As it is, this book serves as a very good example of why you need to do a lot of reading in the fiction field you want to write in. Otherwise, how will you know which of his techniques have been over-used, which can be seen as trite if you aren't careful how you use them, and which are still seen as solid, useful methods?

Full review at ErrantDreams

Currently reading. So far, so good.

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