Jeff Lyons

This may be the single most useful book about writing that I've read, despite its flaws.

While the author is very inflexible in describing and defining terms, and as such may be off-putting to many readers, adopting a very flexible approach to interpreting the text of this book can yield significant benefits to many aspiring and working writers. While the author clearly aims to make this book suitable to both screenwriters and novelists (other than the section explicitly about the screenplay show more production business itself), success is mixed in terms of how things get presented, as the author seems to regularly forget this book is supposed to be for novelists as well.

There are definitely flaws in presentation, and I had independently discovered a lot of what this book has to say, but it presents a systematic approach to pre-prose story development that could prove enlightening and very hepful for many. In contrast to the author's very "my way or the highway" tone, in fact, the book clearly states that nobody should just do exactly what this book says, unquestioningly, and that we should all take from it what will best help us and make it our own -- as long as we do it consciously, rather than simply because we don't know any better. (It may just be difficult for the occasional mildly-offended reader to get to that point.)

It has flaws, as you might discern from the above, but it also offers significant value, and it helped me work through a novel outline much more quickly than I feared it would take this month. If you don't have thin skin, I recommend giving it a whirl. If you do, I'm not sure it's a good idea for you to let strangers read your writing. show less

While authors, including myself, are meticulously looking to make sure our writings are totally void of having any spelling and grammatical errors, are making sure our dialogues and narrative are decent; we in most cases have neglected in making sure that the spacing of our manuscripts are likewise prefect.

There’s no better description of what this book is about in helping all authors regardless of their level of proficiency than what the author himself has given his potential readers show more vis-à-vis his own description.

“Narrative pace can make or break the reading experience, but few people describe what real pace is or how you can achieve it. Most just discuss writing, style, and sentence structure, but pacing in any story is so much more than that. This e-book gives a clear explanation of pacing and then shows you how to achieve a solid commercial pace for any story, thus assuring reader engagement and more book sales: engaged readers buy more books.”

Even if you’re already feel quite adept in your writing this book could just help you to fine tune what you’ve got; it might also help this book’s readers go from just editing a manuscript to line-editing it. So, for wanting to help writers, including myself, to improve their passion for writing, I’m giving the author, Jeff Lyons, 5 STARS. show less

Heard the author speak, had to buy the book. He’s written many others, I suspect I’ll be reading those too....