Writing the Novel They Can't Put Down

With novel writing, as with any art form, there are certain time-honored, widely accepted principles that are worth learning if you’re really serious about doing it well, if only so you don’t waste a lot of time and effort making mistakes that will brand your work as amateurish—and that will take yet more time and effort to unlearn. Those principles are what this book is about. Once you have a working knowledge of the fundamental building blocks of good fiction,...
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With novel writing, as with any art form, there are certain time-honored, widely accepted principles that are worth learning if you’re really serious about doing it well, if only so you don’t waste a lot of time and effort making mistakes that will brand your work as amateurish—and that will take yet more time and effort to unlearn. Those principles are what this book is about. Once you have a working knowledge of the fundamental building blocks of good fiction, you’ll have a foundation on which you can expand, or from which you can depart, or maybe a little bit of both. The goal of this book is to teach the basics of story structure, characterization, viewpoint, and so forth in as objective and straightforward a way as possible. These basics are like tools in a toolbox. You can pick and choose which ones you use for any given project, but knowing they’re all there, and knowing how to use them effectively, is priceless.