Review: How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them--A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide

How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them--A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide by Howard Mittelmark

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Considering how bad some of the books are that HarperCollins publishes, publishing this one is an act of bare-faced chutzpah. I'm not saying, though, that it isn't a good idea.

Although the book isn't consistent in whether it is giving good advice (how to avoid writing an unpublishable novel) or tongue-in-cheek bad advice (how to write a novel that nobody will publish), if you keep your wits about you the advice is well worthwhile. Of course, if your wits are about you to that degree, you probably don't need this book. It then becomes more an extended in-joke shared with other superior intellects about those idiots who write all the bad books. (There's a Chekhov's Gun joke early on in which the phrase Chekhov's Gun, and in fact the name Chekhov, is never mentioned. You have to have studied writing theory, and be at least passingly familiar with Russian literature, to get it.)

The book is full of jokes, actually, and at its best is probably almost as witty as the authors think it is. Many of them are pseudoexamples, made-up bits of bad manuscript that demonstrate the point being made. I think my favourite is this one: '“Call my patent attorney!” cried Thomas Edison. “I have invented the telephone!”'

The advice itself is direct, vivid and also amusing. "Giving a reader a sex scene that is only half right is like giving her half of a kitten. It is not half as cute as a whole kitten; it is a bloody, godawful mess."

I got it on sale for $1.99, and at that price it's a bargain. If you're a beginning writer, it's packed with warning signs against hundreds of mistakes that beginning writers make, and if you're not, it's entertaining. It goes on perhaps a touch too long, has a smug journalistic air of being too clever by half and certainly cleverer than you, and makes a few too many in-jokes, but I think it achieves what it sets out to achieve.

One thing, though: I read the ebook version, and the formatting is a bit of a mess at the end. Attempting to page forward to the second page of "About the Author" kept taking me first to the "You've finished this book" page and then back to the first page of "About the Author" again. I managed to get past that, and hit the footnotes from several chapters back, of which I'd of course forgotten the context.

If you read only one book about writing, you're probably not reading enough books about writing. But I suggest that it's worth making this one of the ones that you read.



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