This little book is a favorite of mine. You can tell by the many sticky notes I have stuck to the pages marking spots I use frequently.  It has short chapters full of specific exercises and advice on how to analyze and improve your writing.  It has huge appeal for an analytic writer like myself.

How It’s Put Together:  This book is a collection of 79 very short chapters on a variety of subjects – character, editing, writing scenes, word choice, creativity, pacing, and dialogue, to name a few.  Each subject is covered in several chapters, but they are laid out randomly.  A chapter on getting published is followed by one on dialogue, for example.  I’ve read other reviews of the book which criticize this particular feature.

For my own use, I rather like how the book is structured.  It allows me to focus on individual snippets of information, say a short vignette on how to avoid writing bad dialogue, rather than being faced with a longer chapter on dialogue that has multiple points that I must then sort through.  The sorting has been pre-done for me and everything is neatly packaged in chapters of 2-4 pages with a single point to make.  The short chapters are easy to consume in a brief sitting.  You might say that the book has been formatted for the busy schedules and short attention span of the newer generations.

Another feature that I adore are the graphs and charts that Smith uses throughout.  I love to analyze things and he provides different methods of analyzing your writing from the pacing in your novel to the intensity of your scenes.  If you’re more of a technical writer, you’ll get a kick out of trying the different analysis techniques.

How It Helped Me: I have used many of the tools and techniques included in this book. One of my favorites and very useful – the 10-Scene Structure. 

You begin the 10-Scene Structure by sketching out five scenes – the Opener, the Point of No Return Complication, a Major Complication, the Closer (also known as the Climax) and the Ending.  These are the major highlights of your book. Once you have those significant events in place, you go back and add in the five other major scenes (more complications) that help you move from the beginning of the story to the end.  At the end, you have a good roadmap for where your story is headed and the high points (or low points) to hit along the way.

Such an easy method for laying out a novel.  I’ve plotted two novels so far using the 10-Scene Structure and it made the process a lot easier.  The best part is that it doesn’t take away your freedom to be spontaneous during the writing process.  You can still throw in an unexpected scene, event or character.  The 10-Scene Structure just helps you keep on the path to the end of the novel. It doesn’t prevent you from taking the scenic route or complete detours off the main path.

One other item from Smith’s book was a huge eye-opener for me - ”Story is what happens to people.”  A light bulb went on over my head when I read that sentence.  In thinking about my own reading habits, I don’t read a book for the events in it.  I read a book to see how characters, how individuals handle things that happen to them.  How does a woman handle a betrayal that tears her marriage apart?  How does a farm boy handle the responsibility of saving his village or his kingdom?  How does a police detective handle a crime wave when he’s dealing with his own personal problems?  I want to know about the people in the stories and how they get through the strange, sad, horrific, or unusual things that happen in their lives.  And that’s what I should focus on when I’m writing my own stories.  Great advice from a terrific little book.

Who Can Benefit From Reading It: This book is probably most useful for the intermediate writer–the one who has written some short stories or a novel and is looking for ways to improve her writing and story. A beginning writer can certainly use the information in this book, but would need to be careful not to get caught up in the techniques and processes to the exclusion of actually writing their own story.

If you’ve completed a few pieces and are looking for something to take your writing to the next level, try The Writer’s Little Helper.  It’ll keep you coming back for a long time to mine all the gems included in it.

 

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