I can't think how many years I have had this book and only read up to the first chapter. I have several writerly books that tell you how to do it. This is just one, and the credentials of the author are not as great as some others on the craft.

That being said (written) does this book add to my path in becoming a better writer and working on my craft? Frey does give some solid guidelines that should not be ignored but he as so many want to do is tell a writer the formula that has been working for them and that their path is the way.

Read three books on the craft by three authors and you will find three paths. And should you meticulously follow the path of the best selling amongst them, you will not find your way to emulating that success necessarily.

So take in context that Frey can add to the journey. Work on character, work on premise. Work on what else Frey has provided. He fails in that he describes some useful tools, such as his stepsheet, but does not give a visual representation of one, where he easily could. Or when working on characters, a list of examples to get one started when you wish to 'interview' your character would have added to the work.

It is a slim piece, at 170 pages and then he followed this up with a second book, and then some genre specific work as well. It leads me to believe that he knew he had more to write, but cut it. A couple evenings reading and what he shares is added to the melting pot.

For those who are honing their craft it is a good addition. Not the be all and end all of what you need. You do need more than Frey has, but it would be a good first book, or third, or tenth book to add to your own lesson plan on becoming a better writer.

I see a lot of folks who have never written a damn good novel saying this is a damn bad book. If you are Michael Malone or Dorothy Sayers or T. R. Pearson or Olive Ann Burns, then okay--you can say that. Otherwise? Physician, heal thyself.

NOTING THAT: Amazon and the internet have made the advice on submitting for publication obsolete. I know folks who sell 50,000 novels a year on Amazon and turn publishers down.

This book was recommended to me by a public speaker who I respect. I asked a clarifying question regarding this book. He stated that even though it is written for would-be novelists, speakers will gain much from this. He described it as a book that transformed his speaking. Given he won the World Championship, I took him up on it.

Yeah, it didn't work out so well. I couldn't shake two things with this book:
1. The book covered far too much quoting far more from other books than adding original text. I best the book was at least one-quarter quoted.

2. At the end of the book, I don't think I could recite how to write a novel, let alone a damn good one.

Many topics were covered. There was some decent advice from time to time. But most of it appeared superficial. How to revise the book was just a few pages. As one who teaches this subject, I know a few pages does not address the issue well at all.

I am inclined to rate this one star. I do not plan to read another book by this author. At the same time, I found myself agreeing with a passage here or there. I suppose that removes it from the basement of writing.

It would be surprising to learn that anyone read this book and then successfully wrote a novel that was published. Then again, a world champion speaker gained much from this. Perhaps I am not the target audience. :)

Maybe I'm being unfair, because writing is frustratingly difficult, but at this point, all the "how to write a book" books are beginning to sound the same. This is not to say that i have any acumen, but the effort of actually trying to apply all this advice is getting to me. There's no substitute for talent though, so to be honest, it is talent that i seem to lack. Even so, working with a book on writing can help you learn where you are failing and what some strategies to work through failure you can use. At the very least, you become a more critical , competent reader, and you gain clarity on many facets of storytelling. I would say this book is up there with "It was the best of sentences, it was the worst of sentences", and "How to write like Tolstoy" , and while both are very good, elucidating things I'd noticed, but not quite consciously understood, at some point no book on writing can condense the "thing" that is wrong with your story in particular, let alone how to "fix" it; but it's a step in the right direction.

I loved this book and bring it out every so often as a refresher. Really enjoy his style of writing.

Definitely worth a read if you're an aspiring novelist. Probably worthwhile to students of literature as well, as this might help you appreciate and critique others' novels.

Warning: this book includes spoilers. Frey uses several novels as models of how to deal with specific problems, but seven novels in particular are treated as faits accompli. He assumes you've read the following, and provides sometimes rather expansive quotes, as well as notes on their endings (including the fates of the protagonists); when you see bullet lists mentioning these novels, you might want to skip ahead to the next paragraph to avoid picking up TMI on those you haven't yet read:

The Godfather by Mario Puzo
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John LeCarre
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

One day soon, say in a year's time, I hope to be on the other side of this screen, having a novel that my Goodreads friends can comment on and recommend. The section (admittedly quite short) on dealing with writer's block, the guidelines on scheduling and time management, and the rules for crafting scenes (with respect to dramatic tension) should come in very handy.

Now comes the hard part: putting the lessons to use.

Can't get into it, so moving on.

This is a really good nuts and bolts book about writing.

This book covers a lot of excellent ground in a short amount of reading time. I’ve read a lot of books about writing, but I’ll come back to this one.

In my opinion, this book has a few good ideas about writing, and a whole lot of outdated and frankly bad ideas. One such bad idea: Frey’s contention that every dramatic work has one (and only one) “premise” which the author needs to “prove.” For example, the one true premise of the Godfather is “family loyalty leads to a life of crime.” Frey proclaims that Puzo “proves it well.”

In discussing premises and how to prove them, Frey says, “Say you wished to write a nonfiction book which argues that “white-collar crime pays.”You would not have a chapter detailing the lengthy prison sentences of famous white-collar criminals. You couldn’t. That would be counter to your premise.” Excuse me, James, but that’s called a counterargument, and while you don’t have to have them in an essay, you certainly could have them.

He goes on to talk about “fictive arguments” and how every part of your novel needs to be proving your premise or it should be cut.

This entire line of thinking makes me physically ill. I don’t want to write fictive arguments and have my characters twist themselves into knots to prove something as stupid as “family loyalty leads to a life of crime.” If that was the goal, novel writing would be absurdly easy. In fact, I just read a book—the Alchemist—that did this exact thing. Characters twisted themselves up to prove the writer’s premise. I didn’t care for that book, and I don’t care for this style of writing.

There are some good bits—like parts about finding a “destructive” writers group to give you ego-shattering but actually helpful feedback.

There’s also a lot of mechanicality in Frey’s method, by which i mean, he advises writing a book the way you’d build a deck. First, make a detailed plan. Be sure you understand all the pieces and how they fit together. Then construct it at a steady pace. Frey’s pace for novel writing is two rough draft pages per hour, so you should be able to write 172 pages a month just by cutting out TV.

I just have a hard time believing any book written under these methods would be worth reading.

I enjoyed reading this book. Some chapters did read more like a textbook and it is older but still holds some good advice.

A bit outdated, but worth reading.

..neregulāri lasīju, bet piebeidzu, jo laba. daudz noderīgā :)