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[wolffyluna]

I have recently gone through most of my local library’s How To Write books, and below are some brief reviews of them.(Reading a whole bunch of them may as well be useful to some non-me people, anyway.)

Fight Write! By Carla Hoch
A book about writing fight scenes. It’s much more a reference about how to fight if you are a writer who has never thrown a punch, rather than advice on how to write action scenes. But it does go through some writing advice (eg research relevant styles of fighting, but be careful using terminology that the reader might not know.) Also has some useful questions to ask yourself about your characters’ motivations to fight, and how well they’re trained (are they a social class that was allowed to train to fight in their setting, etc.) I appreciate Hoch going over settings and character attitudes and motivations and “does it actually make sense for this character to get into a physical confrontation?”
Another thing I quite liked– okay, so in my experience, writing advice books tend to either go “women are from Venus, men are from Mars” or “gender affects literally nothing” in ways that I find irritating. Fight Write isn’t perfect about this– it talks about women having more “oxytocin, the love hormone”– but when it talks about factors affecting how a character might fight, it explicitly talks about how a woman is likely smaller and less strong than a male opponent, and unless she’s trained (and in a lot of settings she couldn’t be), this would be a distinct disadvantage… and this might affect her willingness to fight, how a physical confrontation might go, and then explicitly goes over ways weaker characters might bide their time and strike when their opponent is unprepared. (The book suggests poison.) And I appreciate it actually talking about gender without become prescriptive (‘Men will ALWAYS win a fight’), but still talking about it and how it might affect your characters.

Writing deep scenes by Martha Alderson and Jordan Rosenfeld
This claims to be a book about writing scenes, looking separately at the action, emotion and theme. And it’s not not about that. But it’s much more about structure.
And that’s why I love it.
A common problem with both writing and writing advice books is the middle. The middle is twice as long as the beginning or the end, in most structures, and contains Most of the Stuff™. It can get weird and saggy and directionless and a lot of writing advice, even that explicitly about structuring middles, can be a bit “[shrug] don’t let it do that.”
But this book splits novels not into three parts (beginning, middle, end) but four (beginning, emerging middle, deepening middle, and end.) The idea is that each part is definined by an ‘energetic marker’ that it works towards and ends once it reaches. The beginning is defined by reaching for the Point of No Return– the point where the protagonist can no longer Not Try and Reach [Insert Goal Here.] The emerging middle is about introducing the challenges to that goal, and exploring them, before reaching the Rededication. The Rededication is what other structures would call the midpoint, but here the emphasis is on the event being something that drives the protagonist to Try and Reach [Insert Goal] even harder. The deepening middle leads to the Dark Night, the point where everything goes wrong. It doesn’t have to be a downward spiral, but the Worst is going to happen. The end reaches from the Dark Night to the Triumph, where the Goal is Achieved.
And look, in some ways ‘cut the middle in half’ is not complicated advice, but it is so useful. The middle is no longer a giant Bag of Stuff; it’s two parts, the same size as the beginning and middle, with about as much structure.
(Overall I liked this, though I will admit the ‘theme’ section is a bit weaker, and can be mostly summarised as ‘use deliberate imagery’ and ‘you might only find the theme in later revisions.’)

Save the cat! writes a novel by Jessica Brody
It’s not bad, but boy I do not like it. I think writing advice is at it’s best when it’s not prescriptive, and this is. very. prescriptive. It believe there is one functional structure for stories, and 10 genres, and everything else is either mis-analysed or incorrect. It also likes to split things into the A story (“We need to find the buried treasure before the pirates!”) and the B story (“We need to learn the value of friendship!”), but it leads to what I feel are unhelpful analysis? Like, I don’t think thinking of characters as “the one that helps the main character learn the Emotional Lesson” is useful.
But. The discussion of structure is useful. (Though imo I liked it much more as an additive/different perspective to Writing Deep Scenes’ discussion of structure.) The idea of the middle needing to be arc shaped– either things get better up to the midpoint and then get worse up to the dark night, or vice versa– is useful. Going through the structure of different stories in different genres is useful. Though I do judge the author’s taste in books.
The genres– I do think the author is pointing to something real with her genre categories, sometimes. There is a real and important way The Hunger Games and the Martian are similar (‘ordinary’/’innocent’ protagonist that is having to deal with an externally caused conflict). There is a real and important way that romances and buddy cop things are the same. But. There are more than 10 ‘genres’. And they are defined by more than an easy to remember list of three things.
Overall, Save The Cat! Writes a Novel talks big game about being a scaffold, but its so prescriptive it’s restrictive.

Storyworld First by Jill Williamson

Did not finish, and do not recommend. It’s about worldbuilding, and it’s aimed at a teen writer audience. At the beginning, I thought I was bouncing off it because I am No Longer A Teen Writer, but I pushed on in case it contained a nugget of something good.
Then she mentioned that in one of her book series, she made all her place names Hebrew, because [direct quote, hopefully not too changed by the time since I read it] “it sounded like Klingon.”
I don’t recommend the advice of someone who would do that.

Writing with emotion, tension & conflict by Cheryl St. John
This, and the one below it, are some of the things I first read in my quest… which means I don’t remember them all that clearly.
The beginning has some really useful character constructing information. Past the first half, the quality goes downhill a little. It’s not useless, just… much more specific to the author’s process.

Mastering Suspense, Structure and Plot by Jane K Cleland
Has some very useful stuff about pacing. There’s a chart that can be summarised as “every [x] pages, have either an increase in the stakes/twist/reversal in the main plot, or progress a subplot (alternate two subplots, and try to weave them into each other.)” Pacing is controlled by what [x] is. According to the author, 20 pages is a normal pace, 40 is slow but reasonable (for your gentle regency romances, and such like) and 10 is pretty fast (for your thrillers.) Also has some useful information on suspense. My main quibble is that the author has a tendency to categorise things, but not explain the categories well, or explain why their useful.