Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders

NEVER SAY YOU CAN’T SURVIVE is a collection of blog posts that Anders wrote for Tor.com during 2020, when the world was falling apart and many writers weren’t writing. Anders wanted to counter the doom and gloom, but while other writers offered only empty cheerleading, Anders offered more. This book is a balm for the soul, a rallying cry, a creative manifesto, and an act of resistance.

There’s a lot to be said for writing despite all the awfulness of the world. In a world rocked by disease, prejudice, war, and political cruelty, stories aren’t luxuries. They’re necessities. Telling the world, “I won’t engage with your bullshit because I have books to write” is a powerful statement. As Anders puts it, escapism is resistance. Stories help us retain our humanity in a world that’s trying to take it away.

But it goes far beyond that. Writers help frame the narrative, to counter the gaslighting from those in power. We dream of things beyond the world we know, and we show those dreams to others. By actively imagining how the world can be different, writers help to create the world they want to live in.

We’re all angry at the state of the world, and Anders encourages us to embrace that anger and use it as fuel. Novels are always, always political. Who has power in our story worlds? How do they use it? What choices do our characters make and how does it change them? Who are we as humans, and who do we want to be? Anders engages with all of this in writing that is fresh and fierce and exactly what we need right now.

There is also writing craft instruction sprinkled throughout NEVER SAY YOU CAN’T SURVIVE, but Anders is on shakier ground here. Some things that are common knowledge to anyone who has read even a single how-to book seem to be revelations to Anders. For example, she’s floored by the idea that every story needs a strong midpoint scene, and is delighted that when she includes one, her stories work better. And she only recently learned that the final word in a sentence is the one that packs a punch.

Anders describes her own writing process, which can best be described as quirky. Very little of what she discusses will be applicable or helpful to the average writer. A writer looking for solid instruction would be better off reading other how-to books.

Where Anders truly shines is in her unique vision, and her ability to share that vision with the rest of us. The most important thing to know when creating is your “why.” Anders knows her why and is therefore unstoppable. NEVER SAY YOU CAN’T SURVIVE is the guide we need to keep writing through the end of the world.

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NEVER SAY YOU CAN’T SURVIVE can be found here

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Rating: 3 stars

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I recommend this book or Take Joy by Jane Yolen or A Writer’s Guide to Persistence by Jordan Rosenfeld

Intuitive Editing by Tiffany Yates Martin

INTUITIVE EDITING is a frustrating book. Yates has extensive experience as an editor, both freelance and working for big publishing houses. And she has excellent advice for authors who want to polish their novels before handing them over to a professional editor. However, everything is over-explained, every point belabored, and it’s all weighed down with so many examples that the good advice gets lost. Ironically, this book on editing could have used an editor.

I liked Yates’ approach a lot. She starts with the biggest issues and works her way to ever smaller ones. This is the way I edit, and when I teach classes on editing, this is what I teach. Start by making sure the characterization, plot, and stakes are all in place. Then come medium-sized issues like point of view consistency, pacing, and voice. The final stage is smaller things, for example, removing crutch words and streamlining descriptions.

However, Yates exhaustively explains even the most simple concepts. For example, she devotes many pages to the difference between first and third person stories. Every writer learned this in middle school, and we don’t need it taught again. Even while addressing more complex topics such as point of view or suspense, Yates throws in example after example until the original point is lost. It feels like someone nudging you in the ribs saying, “Get it? Get it?” Yates is on more solid ground when using examples from real novels rather than hypothetical ones she made up, but each time a point is made, she happily uses three or more examples when one would do.

Even worse, very little of INTUITIVE EDITING will be useful for an author with a completed manuscript. Yates seems to want to teach authors how to write a novel rather than how to revise one. She gives vague handwaving toward the difficult job of finding a novel’s problems. However, very few beginning authors have the objectivity to look at an example, figure out how it applies to her own work, and then go back and edit accordingly. And when an author does have the objectivity to do so, her skills have progressed to the point where she no longer needs this book.

And that’s what makes this book frustrating. There are many valuable lessons here. INTUITIVE EDITING is like a short writing course taught by a good professor. However, the time to apply these lessons is in the planning or first draft stage, because the lessons are too general to apply to a completed manuscript. An author would be better served by taking the very good writing lessons in INTUITIVE EDITING and applying them to her next book.

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INTUITIVE EDITING can be found here

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Rating: 3 stars

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This book is best for: beginning writers

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I recommend this book or The Anatomy of Prose by Sacha Black or Writing for Emotional Impact by Karl Iglesias

Write Your Book in a Flash by Dan Janal

WRITE YOUR BOOK IN A FLASH is a how-to book for nonfiction writers, mainly businesspeople who want to write a book. Janal starts with the assumption that his audience has never written a book before and probably never will again. They aren’t writers, they just need a book as a credential, a calling card, or an add-on to public speaking gigs. Therefore, Janal starts with the very basics of nonfiction book creation, taking a paint-by-numbers approach of starting with the outline and filling it in little by little.

Janal’s approach is solid. To a non-writer, attempting to write forty thousand words of prose is daunting. Organizing all that research can seem impossible. Where do the quotes go? How about the personal stories? What should I leave out? What structure do I use?

Janal also understands that nonfiction books aren’t literature. They are tools to help solve a problem. He wants his readers to get the words on the page in any way possible, let hired editors clean up the mess, and start using the book to help boost their businesses.

To that end, Janal recommends that you start with a 400 word executive summary, research the market to see where your book fits and then make a ten-chapter outline (introduction, eight chapters of content, conclusion). This isn’t new to anyone who has been writing awhile—or has other nonfiction books to use as models—but it’s still useful advice.

Janal also provides ample cheerleading, sensing that this is what his audience wants most, and he includes information on beta readers and what formatting to use once the book is complete. And if it all sounds just too difficult, Janal himself is ready to step in as the ghost writer or book coach you might need.

WRITE YOUR BOOK IN A FLASH is the non-writer’s how-to book. It’s the perfect guide if you’ve never written before, don’t like writing now, and will never write again.

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WRITE YOUR BOOK IN A FLASH can be found here.

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Rating: 3 stars

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This book is best for: beginning writers

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I recommend this book or Help for Writers by Roy Peter Clark 

Write Better, Faster by Monica Leonelle

There are four ways writers can improve their productivity. They can write faster, they can write for more hours per day, they can do less editing, and they can hire ghost writers. Leonelle has done all of these things, but this book is focused on the first one. She greatly increased her writing speed through the use of several productivity hacks, and she’s eager to show others how she did it.

Right away, Leonelle busts the myth that speed and quality have anything to do with each other. She plans ahead and does multiple drafts. In the end, “but is it good?” is the wrong question to ask anyway. It’s not so much about whether the work is any good, it’s about whether it gets worse when writing faster. Leonelle suggests pushing the envelope on writing speed until quality begins to suffer, and then backing off a bit to land in the sweet spot where one is writing at her absolute capacity.

WRITE BETTER, FASTER has many tricks for increasing speed, starting with simply tracking results. Whatever is measured tends to increase, so keeping a spreadsheet to calculate words per hour is a great place to start. Leonelle is also a big fan of dictation, and claims to write up to 3,500 words per hour using Dragon Naturally Speaking. She also explains how to deal with writer’s block, procrastination, scheduling, and even travel, because pure speed won’t help a writer at all if the daily writing habit isn’t there.

It’s important to note that she only achieves this amazing writing speed through the use of extensive outlines. She outlines her complete novel first, then blocks out each scene with the major action, and finally, drafts the actual novel as quickly as she can.

Some writers might love WRITE BETTER, FASTER. Some writers might hate it. It depends on how your brain works. I liked it because Leonelle plans her books the same way I do. It’s a top-down approach that makes sense to me. But I imagine that more organic writers, who like to discover the story as they write, would think her approach was silly at best, and a waste of time at worst.

But if there’s one thing that all writers can agree on, it’s that we want to write more books. We all have more ideas than we’ll ever have time for. Learning to write faster is one way to make sure more of those books get written.

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WRITE BETTER, FASTER is available here.

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Rating: 3 stars

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This book is best for: beginning to intermediate writers

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I recommend this book or 2,000 TO 10,000 by Rachael Aaron or Lifelong Writing Habit by Chris Fox

 

Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo

Sooner or later, most writers will be called on to talk to a group. Whether it’s teaching a class, doing a talk at a bookstore, visiting a school, or being the guest on a podcast, public speaking is a skill writers need. I’ve done a fair amount of it myself, but I’m always trying to improve.

I’ve been watching a lot of TED talks lately, since these eighteen-minute talks are considered the gold standard. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, although the talks can be about nearly anything and each speaker has a different style. All the speeches I’ve seen have been terrific, and I hoped that TALK LIKE TED would give me some insight into how these talks are put together and why they succeed.

However, TALK LIKE TED is an extremely simple overview of public speaking best practices, with a lot of blow-by-blow summaries of TED talks that Gallo likes. The how-to advice isn’t bad for beginners: be passionate about your topic, tell a story, teach new things, add humor, keep slides simple, and practice a lot. However, to be at a TED level, one has to go beyond the basics, and Gallo never does.

The subtitle of TALK LIKE TED is “The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds.” This is somewhat misleading. Gallo isn’t really sharing pubic-speaking tips in general, but simply showing us what all TED talks have in common. It’s more about what a TED talk is rather than how to give one. As such, it’s crammed with anecdotes, with Gallo constantly straying from the main point to share the details of yet another talk.

TALK LIKE TED has some solid advice for someone who has never given a speech before. It’s well-presented, but it does not break any new ground. It seems at once too basic and too specific. It seems geared toward helping you make a single speech, rather than helping you becoming an overall more effective speaker.

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TALK LIKE TED can be found here.

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Rating: 3 stars

 

Voice: The Secret Power of Great Writing by James Scott Bell

It is a writer’s pet peeve. Editors and agents insist they are looking for “a fresh voice” but no one can agree on what that means. Some say it’s a writer’s personality on the page, or a unique style, or a combination of character and setting and word choice. Most people refuse to define it at all, just shoving more and more examples of “a strong voice” at a writer in hopes that she’ll intuit the rest. But without a working definition, how is a writer supposed to develop her voice?

VOICE attempts to bridge the gap between example and knowledge by providing specific exercises. Bell uses acting techniques to help an author truly inhabit the character he’s writing about. By understanding the character on a deep level, sharing the same emotional space as the character, and even assuming the character’s physical gestures, the distinct voice of the character will emerge.

Bell encourages authors to keep a voice journal, jotting down interesting turns of phrase and impressions of people. He also discusses the pros and cons of using a “voiceless voice,” which is a dispassionate narrator telling a story from an emotional distance.

Bell then takes a detour into techniques for writing itself. He talks about ways for writers to write more, more happily, and get more words onto the page. It seemed odd to have several chapters with vague cheerleading plunked into the middle of an otherwise good book full of concrete advice for writing with a more distinct voice.

Bell wraps up with examples from every type of writing including YA and literary fiction as well as the expected genres like mystery and romance. However, here, Bell makes the same mistake he complains about. He piles on the examples without analyzing them to show why they work. He breezes from one to another, barely discussing them. And while the snippets he chooses to highlight are stellar, just showing a writer what’s already been done doesn’t help her do the same.

When I finished VOICE, I turned back to the opening chapters, which are the strongest part of the book, and clearly the part that Bell is the most excited to share with writers. I’m eager to try some of the exercises he recommends, to add my own fresh voice to my prose.

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VOICE can be found here.

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Rating: 3 stars

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This book is best for: intermediate writers

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I recommend this book or Finding Your Voice by Les Edgerton

 

Powerful Premise by William Bernhardt

Most novelists know what they want to write about. Many of us have stories burning inside, just waiting for us to tell them. But Bernhardt urges writers to stop and think before touching the keyboard. Is this premise all it can be? Does it have high stakes, inherent conflict, and emotional appeal? If not, it’s far better to rethink the novel at the planning stages than get bogged down in fruitless revisions later.

POWERFUL PREMISE is short and to the point. Bernhardt advises us to write larger than life characters with high stakes problems in an interesting setting. He goes on to discuss originality, emotional appeal, and believability. Each chapter contains examples (mostly from classic books or movies) and ends with writing exercises.

However, Bernhardt can’t stop talking about his own books. Every few pages, he mentions either his fiction or his other how-to books. He drops them in so often that POWERFUL PREMISE felt less like a how-to and more like a sales pitch. I kept waiting for the introductory material to be over so I could get to the meat of the book. Then I realized that there wasn’t much meat to be had. Bernhardt isn’t giving new information or presenting it in an original way.

There is nothing wrong with “punching up” a premise. It’s something all writers should learn to do. Even writers of quiet literary fiction need to find what’s gripping about their story and bring it to the forefront. POWERFUL PREMISE can help with this, if you can ignore the constant salesmanship, and just focus on the examples and exercises.

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POWERFUL PREMISE can be found here.

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Rating: 3 stars

 

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This book is best for: intermediate writers

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I recommend this book or Save the Cat by Blake Snyder or Story Stakes by H.R. D’Costa.

Gotta Read It by Libbie Hawker

“So, what is your novel about?” is the sentence that strikes fear into the hearts of many a writer. Whether sending query letters to agents or talking to a friend at a party, many writers become tongue-tied, or worse, babble on and on. We may know our characters and their stories inside and out, but summarizing three hundred pages in just a few short paragraphs can seem impossible.

Of course every book is unique, but when pitching, Hawker wants us to keep it simple. She recommends starting with the five universal elements that every novel has: character, goal, obstacle, struggle, stakes. She shows writers how to put these elements together into a succinct summary, and how to choose the details that will help flesh out the setting and the story in the reader’s mind.

GOTTA READ IT includes a useful list of “do’s” and “don’ts” that will be helpful to a beginning writer, including not using too many proper nouns and keeping the tone of the pitch consistent with the tone of the story.

However, Hawker only gives two examples of what she considers successful pitches, and they are both from her own books. This doesn’t really prove her point. It only shows that she’s found a formula that works for her. Without examples from other books (or even hypothetical examples) there is no way of knowing how to apply her advice more broadly.

GOTTA READ IT is a good introduction to the idea of pitching your book, but it doesn’t go deep into the mechanics of pitches, nor does it give enough examples to help writers build successful pitches of their own.

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GOTTA READ IT can be found here.

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Rating: 3 stars

 

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This book is best for: beginning writers

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I recommend this book or Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds by Michael Hague or Rock Your Query by Cathly Yardley

How to Write Dazzling Dialogue by James Scott Bell

 

You know it when you hear it—dialogue that sparkles on the page and practically begs to be read out loud. Dialogue by people like Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block, and Richard A. Thompson. I love clever dialogue and eagerly read anything that can tell me how to write it better.

HOW TO WRITE DAZZLING DIALOGUE points out the numerous ways that dialogue can go wrong and gives a brief explanation about why it’s a problem. Bell also gives examples of good dialogue, so we can see the difference. The examples are from well-known books, plays, and movies, and he is great at picking out excerpts that illustrate his points. Bell shows why characters in agreement make for boring dialogue (and boring books), how to handle exposition in dialogue, and how to handle tricky dialect.

Bell offers exercises to try, some of them quite unexpected. For example, try having a character say the exact opposite of what he should say, or insert a random line of dialogue from another book and see where it goes. Not all of these exercises will end up in the final draft, but some of them might.

However, Bell doesn’t discuss any of the techniques in depth and only gives a single example for each. Although he uses first-rate examples, he doesn’t really explain why they work. He’s very good at pointing out beginner mistakes, but misses some of the more subtle problems that can creep into dialogue. HOW TO WRITE DAZZLING DIALOGUE will teach you how to write competent dialogue—good enough to keep you out of the slush pile—but probably won’t teach you how to write the sparkling dialogue readers love.

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HOW TO WRITE DAZZLING DIALOGUE can be found here.

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rating: 3 stars

 

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This book is best for: beginning writers

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I recommend this book or Writing Vivid Dialogue by Rayne Hall

Creative Cursing by Sarah Royal and Jillian Panarese

 

Research is important for writers. I’m a nice midwestern suburban lady who writes about tough urban cops, hackers and PIs. How do I get everything in my books authentic, including the swear words? It’s important for me to research how…

…Oh, who am I kidding? I love this book because I have the sense of humor of a twelve year old, and profanity amuses me. I admire people who swear creatively. Good cursing is like poetry. It says a lot in a short space, and when done well, packs an emotional punch.

CREATIVE CURSING is a spiral bound book with two words per page. It’s split down the middle so you can flip back and forth, making endless combinations of words that don’t usually go together. Most of the left side is body parts and fluids. The right side is words like jammer, muncher, biter, with a few wild cards like waffle and monkey.

This book is not for everyone. Writers of sweet romance or cozy mysteries or books for young people don’t need this book. (Although those writers might appreciate some fresh expletives for when the printer jams or the tenth rejection letter comes.) Even the most jaded writer might balk at some of the word combinations. But hey, if it gets too raw, you can always flip the page back to “fart waffle” or “poop splash.”

I recently moved and got rid of most of my hardcopy books. This is one of the few that made the move with me. Nobody needs a book like CREATIVE CURSING. But some of us really, really want it.

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CREATIVE CURSING can be found here.

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Rating: 3 stars

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I recommend this book.