This is a Great Courses video series on crafting sentences. It walks its audience through different sentence types and goes into the rhythm of a sentence, discussing the value of longer and shorter sentences and why. There are a lot of examples, it wanders into ideas from antiquity and touches on the bad ideas and why they are bad.
Overall, it provides a wealth of information and will enhance the audience appreciation of a well-written sentence.
This book walks a writer through the process of participating in the National Novel Writing Month each November. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel during the month.
The book does deliver on its promise. It discusses the process of getting started, strategies and psychology of each week, and a winding-down process when done. Each chapter includes a key take-away recap.
The book has a lot of good points and uses her style of humor to help drive them home. She uses stories of several past participants to illustrate her points, and adds inspirational quotes from a number of participants in the key chapters. However, the humor is used to excess, even getting a bit old at times, and the points are few. With fewer than 200 pages, there isn’t a lot of content in the book.
The book is an easy read, it is enjoyable and the points it makes are good. I believe it should make more points and fewer jokes.
This book categorizes fiction plots into twenty categories, then systematically goes through to discuss each of them.
Each plot is divided into three parts, the author discusses each part and uses well-known examples from literature to help characterize them. They are easy to understand and to follow and provide a basic outline for any basic fiction plot.
My only complaint would be that the analysis is overly broad, but that’s what the author promised. I enjoyed the book and will probably use it for reference in the future.
This book teaches the reader about the basics of poetry and does a good job of it. It describes many different forms with examples, and goes to explain things like meter and variation, different rhyming forms, scansion, rhythm and other without being boring or too technical. It goes into discovering purpose and symbols, identifies metaphors and all that stuff they pretend everyone gets in high school classes.
I found the book enjoyable and interesting.
In this book, Jesse provides clear steps and ideas to build structure and characters into a story. The book is well-written with clear goals and organization. She goes through different stages of writing discussing topics such as point of view, opening statements, building characters. She also compares the complexities and requirements of a book, short story and novella among others.
I found it easy to read and informative. She touches on ideas other books haven’t covered without going into great details.
This book is mostly a supportive book written in a self-help style, and almost a spiritual style. It has a lot of anecdotes detailing her experiences dealing with all the roadblocks that we encounter or put up in our own path. She has a neurotic sense of humor that makes the book entertaining at the same time.
In this book, she writes a lot about the publishing process, adding a hearty dose of reality to want-to-be writers.
This book came recommended to me, although I can’t remember the source. I felt the book got off to a slow start. The first few chapters leaned more toward the spiritual style which didn’t appeal to me, but later chapters had more useful information. Overall, I found the book an enjoyable read, even if it didn’t give me all I was expecting.
This lecture series provides a guide for writing critiques. It is one of the Great Courses lectures series presented by Prof. Dorsey Armstrong of Purdue University.
The lectures focus primarily on organizing your thoughts and getting them on paper in a well-structured and readable form. She also encourages reading in as broad a spectrum as you can manage. Then a lesser emphasis on analysis, which, for me, felt like it came more from making your own thoughts clear and concise, then getting them in written form.
She speaks clearly and is well-organized. This makes it easy for her to get her points across. Her thoughts are reflected in the accompanying booklet. Although I felt it was too close, as it is often verbatim. Having read the book first, I felt like large portions of the lecture were redundant.
The material does a good job of covering the subject, and it felt adequately in-depth. In 24 lectures, each just shy of a half-hour, she covers a lot of ground. Although most of the lectures either discuss the subject matter abstractly, she does draw good examples from several works including fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction. One lecture is devoted to grammar, which I felt was more of a sore point for her and, for me, felt like it should have been outside the scope of this lecture series.
I felt the lectures were good and well worth the time. I listed to several of them multiple times.
I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, it has good information and is presented well. It is easy to read and has good examples from common short stories.
On the other hand, I don’t feel it delivers what it promises, guidance for writing a short story. Almost all of the book discusses material that is generic to fiction writing. Little focuses on the short story, it often felt like an afterthought.
I would have liked, and expected the book to assume a moderate knowledge of writing and to focus on the distinctions unique to writing a short story.
Overall, it is a very good writing reference, but not a good one for short stories.
The author, N. M. Kelby, has experience both as a publisher and an author, she is providing her insights and experience to the novice author. This book give the reader a solid foundation of, what I presume are, all the steps toward publishing and selling a book.
The book starts with developing discipline, good writing habits and finding support. It continues through writing, editing, finding an agent, finding a publisher or self-publishing, selling, touring, and even estate planning. If you haven’t actually published a book, this will help you work through steps you haven’t even considered.
The book is an easy read and well-organized. It takes you though the steps pretty much in order of how you will encounter them with lots of advice and tips on the way. She provides lots of URLs for online support, both in writing and editing groups, to authors’ anecdotes of bad experiences.
Even for the non-author, it is interesting and will give you a real appreciation for what these guys go through.
This book is aimed at writers, although I found it helpful for recognizing techniques and style in writing as well. Its focus is on characterization, developing characters, their actions and emotions, expressing feelings, and making it consistent. It looks at different genres and how characters can fit in, and it explores characterization and different narrator viewpoints.
Through it all, Nancy includes good examples and has exercises at the end of each chapter to help the reader explore what she has been explaining.
The book works very well for writers and writer want-to-bes, but readers will find a lot of value as well.
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