The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)
Jack M. Bickham
Writer's Digest
Nonfiction, Writing
*****
DESCRIPTION: Writing words is as easy as picking up a pencil or sitting down at a keyboard. Writing sentences gets a little harder. And writing stories... stories publishers will want to buy, and other people will want to read... it's downright impossible, isn't it? Only if you think it is. The author, a published writer and teacher, offers a shorthand list of common mistakes made by amateur (and a few professional) writers, and how to stop making them.
REVIEW: Much of this advice is covered in other books on writing that I own, but rarely in the succinct manner Bickham uses. He doesn't wander into "when I wrote my first story" this or "in the history of the English language" that. Not that I mind such anecdotes in writing books, of course, but it was still nice to cut to the chase, or rather the advice, without so much dancing. Naturally, I recognized my own writing efforts more than once. I found this a very helpful book, which will probably be paged through more than once as I pound away at my keyboard stringing words together.
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