I set myself the goal of reading and reviewing 52 writing guides over the year. Here is book 4.
How to Write Fiction – a Guardian masterclass is similar to the 60-minute masterclass books in that it takes around 60 minutes to read it from cover to cover. There, however, is where any similarities end.
The book comprises a number of contributions from different “experts”, interspersed with writing exercises lifted from The Writing Book: a practical guide by Kate Grenville. And if you already have this particular writers’ guide, I’d suggest sticking with that (I may review it in the future, if I decide to buy a copy).
The introduction by Geoff Dwyer spends most of the time telling you to forget whatever you read in the introduction … Then the “expert” contributors include the likes of Jill Dawson, Andrew Miller, Rachel Cusk and various others that aren’t familiar to me. Two who are, however, in my opinion, provided the two best chapters, both in “Plot”: Kate Mosse and Mark Billingham. Apart from these two sections, the rest of the book was quite verbose. I often found myself drifting off thinking of something else, glazing over or quite simply skipping great tracts to get the the next point.
Personally, I am often happy to see writing exercises in a book, and this one has borrowed plenty. But once again they’re exercises for exercise sake. I mean, what is the point, really, in writing an entire paragraph omitting the letter “e”? Or describing myself in first person, second person or third person? Exercises like this may exercise the writing muscle and there are plenty of people out there who are happy to do exercises that don’t lead to anything. But I prefer something more practical.
Because there is a different person providing the material for each chapter, and sometimes two people per chapter in some cases, this book felt a little disjointed and a bit waffley. And, as other reviewers have pointed out, there are a lot of unnecessarily long and wordy sentences and paragraphs that simply encourage skipping.
Buy this book only if reading writers’ guides is a hobby. If you want to know how to write fiction, choose another book.
Only available on Kindle for £1.99 (or $2.49), How to Write Fiction – a Guardian masterclass is one of a series from The Guardian.
