Making Shapely Fiction

It wasn't so much a manual of how to write as it was an encyclopedia of writing terms and conventions, all conveniently laid out in alphabetical order.

Seriously, nothing new is under the sun, and I've known about all of these since high-school, but sometimes it's kinda nice to be reminded of what you might have forgotten in your old, old, old age. You know, kinda like that old saying, "I've forgotten more than you've ever known." It makes me feel a little bit like a curmudgeon and an old fogey.

It's not a bad state to live in, btw. I recall that I wanted to be a curmudgeon when I was 16.

Now that I've read this, I feel like my life-long dream has finally come true.

I have learned a lot from Stern. This is the best book I've read on the various ways longer fictional works can be conceived and structured. I use it in my English 307: Writing the Literary Novel course, and students love it. I highly recommend it for both teachers and students of creative writing.

Practical and straightforward advice. More on the side of definitions, advantages and disadvantages than "this is what is good". Offers lots of ways to play with the 'rules' of writing. If this were a grammar book, it'd be descriptive instead of prescription. In a lot of ways it's covering the same ground as [b:Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel|32095|Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel|Jane Smiley|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1168331509s/32095.jpg|801321], but far less academic and more useful.

I might have liked this book more if I had read it closer to the time when it was written; unfortunately [b:On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft|10569|On Writing A Memoir of the Craft|Stephen King|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1436735207s/10569.jpg|150292] and other writing books more recently published have spoiled me for older works. There was nothing particularly wrong with it, only that it wasn't anything I hadn't heard before.