When I first made the decision to commit to writing a novel, I looked for web sites or blogs created by other authors.  I found several good ones.  Those blogs led me to other blogs created by agents, editors, and even sales people from publishing houses.  What surprised me was how helpful and genuinely nice these people were.  I don’t know why that should surprise me.  I suppose when I hear the title “agent,” I think of people like Scott Boras, Drew Rosenhaus, and Ari Gold from Entourage.  Reading these blogs made my desire to write a novel grow—I want to work with these people!

Every day in Google Reader and Twitter I find dozens of articles or blog posts with priceless information for an aspiring writer.  I find myself wondering, what did people do before the Internet? I guess they must have bought books and taken classes.  But how did they know which books or classes were the good ones?  They didn’t have the Internet to find reviews and ratings.

In the first few first posts I read was a list of books every writer should own.  At the top of the list was Stein on Writing by Sol Stein.  What an incredible book!  If you are a writer and have not read this book you are guilty of malpractice.  Stein divulges the secrets and techniques he has developed over decades of writing and editing best sellers.

Photo by SapphireblueOne of the things every writer has been told is, “Show don’t tell.”  Most of the time the person telling you that stops there.  Great!  Thanks for the help!  In one of my favorite chapters in the book, Stein explains what this statement means and gives some outstanding examples.  My favorite is a quote from a John Updike story.  A hack writer like me would write, “Polly loved to dive in her swimming pool.”  But a brilliant writer like Updike writes:

With clumsy jubilance, Polly hurtled her body from the rattling board and surfaced grinning through the kelp of her own hair.

Amazing.

Throughout the book Stein states his preference for literary fiction as opposed to what he calls “transient fiction.”  Read this book and he will come close to convincing you that literary fiction is the only form of fiction worthy of your efforts.  Sadly, I just read a post at Pimp My Novel stating that things are not looking good for literary fiction.  The public’s preferences being what they are, big publishing houses aren’t buying much literary fiction.  And for the books they are publishing sales are usually dominated by a few titles in the genre.   One of the dominating literary fiction books mentioned is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  I read it a few years ago and I would recommend it highly.

Stein has written many other books, both fiction and non-fiction.  I’ve got How to Grow a Novel sitting on the table next to me ready to be read in the next few days.  I’ve also purchased one of his novels, The Best Revenge.  Reading excerpts from it throughout Stein on Writing whetted my appetite for it.  I’m betting his fiction is as excellent as his non-fiction.

Ciao.

Tags: blogs, books, Writing